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Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

This is a severe problem for me with my 15" MBP. Long meetings (heck, even short) with colleagues make it extremely hot to the touch (keyboard and frame) and destroy the battery. Same with streaming netflix or youtube videos. Microphone seems fine but not great quality.

It wasn't my decision to purchase this computer, it was my company's, but I'm very disappointed in its performance at simple two way audio video communication via hangouts and skype.

I'll add that it can also get extremely hot just from running a simple local node.js server and mongo database. Not sure how normal that is but they seem like they should be fine considering i have no incoming or outgoing traffic, it's just keeping the port open.

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I'm relatively new to Macs, but it seems like it's partially a cultural thing. When I first got a macbook for work, I found my fingertips got really uncomfortable from how hot the keyboard and mousepad got, and assumed there was a problem to be solved, but several Mac-centric colleagues said they just got used to it.

I wound up downloading some random app that lets you control when the fans turn on - and voila, a cool(ish) keyboard. As near as I can tell, by default OSX intentionally just leaves the fans off until well after things get uncomfortable.

"You're holding it wrong!" Apple can do no wrong! /s

I've gotten first degree burns from an old MBP that overheated. It's like they didn't test it..

They do test it, it's just that Apple values form over function. Because of this, they run their gear with a much slimmer thermal margin.

I sometimes wonder if this form over function is a bad idea? Wouldn't the average consumer like a product that was easily serviceable? I have an old Toshiba Satellite Pro s25-S607. It big(17" and I don't care about the weight), but it has been basically running 5 hrs/day for more than a decade. It does gave three fans, but they are quiet. I can work on it!

I think the first company that builds a laptop that's easy to work on, and can guarantee supply parts for, at least 7 years, might be able to win over guys like me--who want consistancy? I want to turn it on, and do work. I don't need the fastest chip. I do want to be able to work on the devise myself. I am older, but never understood this weight thing--make it out of metal(Aluminum is fine. Use the case to disperse the heat--great! I don't care, as long as I can take out the screws, and put them back in, and they don't strip.) I have seen so many products start out great, but get too fancy. So fancy, they don't work? And can't be repaired, reasonable priced, because of the Fancyness? (Don't get me wrong, I'm still a fanboy, but they are loosing me with every new upgrade, and model.)

> Wouldn't the average consumer like a product that was easily serviceable?

The answer to this is a resounding "no".

Not only that, but when Apple sells a computer to users who would like an easily serviceable product, they do quite a good job of it. Older Mac Pros are a joy to work in compared to many Windows PCs I've had to deal with. No thumbscrews, parts slide in and out easily, etc. The newer Mac Pros are fairly serviceable too, though there's not nearly as much reason to need to.

That's one of the things I like about the ThinkPad line (at least the ones where Lenovo kept most of IBM's design ideas). The service manuals are available online if you want to look through them, and they are meant to be field serviceable (at least the X and T series are, I don't have experience with the other ones). That is, you can easily disassemble them following the service manuals, without having to worry about breaking tabs off or prying apart glued-together plastic components.

This has been an issue ever since they went unibody. A single, solid block of aluminum in direct contact with heat generating components. It's hard to believe they didn't intend the unibodies to act as heatsinks. Hasn't hurt their popularity at all, though.

It's been an issue since they switched from the G4, TBH.

I had a first generation MBP Intel back in 2006 , Core Duo, before the unibodies came out. Now THAT one was hot - I had to keep the fans cranked through software all the time or it would randomly shutdown from overheating. Apparently it was a misapplication of thermal paste in the manufacturing process.

Other unibodies have been okay, the retina MBP being the best so far I find at even heat dissipation.

I also had a pre-unibody core duo. Mine was a 17 inch, though. Guess mine had all its thermal paste in the right place. :) It got hot enough to be uncomfortable, but not hot enough to burn.

You gotta hand it to them, their factories in China & their designers in California make a damn fine machine.

For those interested, it's likely smcFanControl - https://github.com/hholtmann/smcFanControl

Doesn't turn the fan off but I found Temperature Gauge App to be very helpful in terms of monitoring what is going on with the fan and temperature.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/temperature-gauge/id46783052...

Looks like they have another app which does have fan control:

http://www.tunabellysoftware.com/temperature_gauge/

Also, iStats Menus: http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

I feel I can't live without it.

That's not the one I had, but it looks better - thanks!

If you turn off turbo boost, the fan pretty much never turns on, a lot less heat and you get a couple more hours of battery life. Here is a switcher app to turn it on and off:

http://www.rugarciap.com/turbo-boost-switcher-for-os-x/

I get extremely uncomfortable with any keyboard that's hotter than my fingers. Why do people put up with this? ThinkPads aren't great either, though a Broadwell CPU is fast enough that I can leave it throttled to 700MHz and day to day Visual Studio (except compiling) and Firefox usage is fine. This way it stays under skin temp.

It's possible that a lot of Mac users are simply not objecting to something they should. I have been using aluminum Apple laptops since they had a PowerPC G4 and were called PowerBooks, and there have been some models with known heat issues. It doesn't surprise me to hear this about the new 12", I think what they're going for is doable, but perhaps ambitious at this stage. There was a 12" G4 which wasn't fanless, but still crammed too much into too small a package.

I have a Unibody 15" MBP from 20011 or so that has absolutely no heat problems, have used several generations of 11" and 13" Air and both 13" and 15" Retina MBP and I don't have any substantial heat problems.

One thing a lot of people don't understand is the thermal design expects to be on a flat surface so that there is some air under the machine, in the small gap created by the rubber feet. If you use any of these machines on a bed, a couch, on top of a pillow, or on your lap, they'll get hotter. I keep a piece of cardboard handy for when I want to use my machine in bed.

I had the original rMBP, now the 2014 one, and don't see the same problem. A lot of it is in the persistent services that are running on the machine; I'd take a good look at Activity Monitor's "energy" pane. One thing I noticed: if you're using Chrome and have persistent pages open (cough, GMail, cough), this is probably a big part of your general heat issues. It made me go back to Firefox for a while, but Firefox's habit of occasionally just locking up because something crunchy is happening in a page was even worse.

Safari handles those cases like a pro.

It does! Safari is much better at battery life. But, for my use cases, it's an unusably poor browser outside of its rendering engine. My extensions don't work within it, I can't easily find equivalents, and there's no easy, good way to sync between Safari and browsers on Windows (Xmarks hosed my bookmarks so badly that I haven't yet even fixed all of them).

Overwhelmingly, I find FireFox with AdBlock and click-to-enable Flash much better than Safari without them.

Firefox has the bad habit of jumping off into space and not coming back for a while, which makes it a non-starter for me.

Open a video hangout in Safari. My early 2013 rMBP would go to 200 degrees per iStat and stay there for the duration of the call. Skype would keep it around 160.

My 15" Retina MBP gets extremely hot after just a few mins of waking up.

I've checked the activity monitor and the CPU is barely active when this occurs. I just opened it a few minutes before writing this comment, and touching between the top of the keyboard and the screen is almost too hot to touch.

There's a handful of people in this thread reporting this experience.

I'm on a late '13 15" rMBP and I don't run into these heat issues until I introduce video. Youtube, vimeo, gaming, basically anything video related and things start warming up quickly... but when I'm just browsing, no fans, no heat.

(Ambient temp currently is 75f - MBP sitting on a table top, been using it for a few hours now, with a vagrant instances up. Almost zero heat from any piece of the body. But if I fire up a video... that will change to hand melting heat very quickly.)

The inconsistency of the reports of heat issues makes me very wary of buying a new MBP, purely on the 'lottery' chance of getting the issues so commonly reported that I don't seem to run into. (I also don't have Wi-Fi issues that most mention, or issues running external displays and coming out of sleep.)

I guess it's what you get when all your customer focuses on your 'wireless battery duration' benchmark

macbook temperature envelop has been optimized for idleness way to long, even on MBPs. Mine (2015 first retina) gets unbelievably hot, especially since we got steam on mac it's running floored most of the time, but so far hasn't died.

That's the main reason I ended up buying a Zbook G2. During summer, the 2013 rMBP was unusable, basically.

Don't know about that, have a late 2013 rMBP and never had any problems.

What exactly do you people do? Put the laptop on your bare (maybe even oiled) legs, while sunbathing?

No need to be condescending.

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