Warm up your MacBook (2019)

https://z3ugma.github.io/2019/11/18/warm-up-your-macbook/

by kristianp • 2 months ago

137 125 2 months ago

z3ugma.github.io

Won't work on M processors, (un)fortunately.

therein• 2 months ago

Honestly m1 was very cool no matter what workload you threw at it but at this point m4 max does get pretty hot even with just web browsing.

gpm• 2 months ago

I've definitely had my m1 air get uncomfortably hot to touch - particularly right above the keyboard. (While doing developery things)

mjmas• 2 months ago

https://xkcd.com/1172/

nullbyte• 2 months ago

sanest emacs user

RAZKOM• 2 months ago

There really is an xkcd for everything

lifestyleguru3• 2 months ago

TBH there was a shameful period when producers were "reinventing" QWERTY keyboard and had a better idea whether Ctrl key should be present and where it should be located. Remember when Apple removed the Esc key?

dajonker• 2 months ago

I recently installed an app to manually activate the fans on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro as I've never been able to trigger them over the past 4+ years. Just to check whether the fans even work (they do).

amluto• 2 months ago

You must be using only lame languages like C or Go or Python that aren’t optimized for laptop warming during compilation. Try using a Real Language with a Real Compiler, like C++ or Rust or Swift, and build decent-sized projects using all cores.

(All joking aside, this is why I have a MacBook Pro. Compilation easily hits the Air’s thermal limits and the performance boost on the Pro with its fan is impressive.)

woozlewuzzle• 2 months ago

You could also build Chromium from source. It makes my M1 Max's fans sing.

asdff2• 2 months ago

I get them going full blast in 2 minutes from cities skylines.

tom_• 2 months ago

I left my Mac Studio running at 100% CPU on all cores for 14 hours, and the case ended up noticeably warm to the touch. It is possible!

asdff2• 2 months ago

Try increasing to 10 cores. Works on my m3 pro.

ale• 2 months ago

Honestly i prefer my macbook frosty

selimthegrim• 2 months ago

Sir, this is a Wendy's

jvuygbbkuurx• 2 months ago

I just need to build our monorepo

Onavo• 2 months ago

I think any next.js project will do the trick

amomchilov• 2 months ago

How big is the risk of condensation when you bring a cold laptop inside?

All their spec sheets say they support up to x% _non-condensing_ humidity, which I’m guessing is about the dew point?

ericpauley• 2 months ago

The uncomfortable fact about the mentioned Wisconsin winters is that inside dew point tends to be quite low.

vibcdingenjoyer• 2 months ago

I’ve always been told to let electronics and musical instruments slowly warm up in their case after bringing them inside. Supposedly reduces the chances of condensation forming.

1e1a• 2 months ago

Another (more useful) option is to render an animation in Blender, or run a local LLM.

Scubabear68• 2 months ago

Needs 2019 in title, this is Intel MacBooks not Apple Silicon.

dunham2• 2 months ago

I've found that Baldur's Gate 3 will warm up my apple silicon (everyday tasks do not).

Analemma_• 2 months ago

Is that running on Rosetta 2? Rosetta 2 does (or did, maybe it's removed now) a fine job running x86 code on Apple Silicon, but boy was it cycle-hungry to do it.

reboot81• 2 months ago

Looking forward to the follow up: How to Quickly Cool Down Your MacBook

ge96• 2 months ago

Strap a thermopile and a peltier on that bad boy

sunrunner• 2 months ago

Just do the trick in reverse, surely?

  yes no > /dev/null

why_at• 2 months ago

No you have to get the yesses back out

  cat /dev/null | yes

crote2• 2 months ago

Unironically, yes.

My M3 Macbook Pro's palm rests get uncomfortably warm during regular IDE use. It doesn't get hot enough to spin up a fan, but it is enough to be distracting.

asimovDev4• 2 months ago

interesting. for me only the bottom and the top part above the keyboard gets warm during my work. 16inch model. Is yours the 14inch one?

HDBaseT• 2 months ago

For years at work I've been just using Cinebench as a hand warmer on various Macbooks.

hakkoru• 2 months ago

I always enjoyed using the power brick to warm up

mark242• 2 months ago

npm install

lifestyleguru3• 2 months ago

That's so 2019... Wasn't the JavaScript era the good old times? Nowadays you're not even able to run these glorious LLMs locally...

waterhouse• 2 months ago

Multithreaded:

  seq 1 20 | xargs -Iqq -n1 -P0 yes >/dev/null

kingjimmy• 2 months ago

"This will start 6 threads that each peg your CPU... "

they're doing what to my CPU????

crest• 2 months ago

Bend over for big tech!

imp0cat• 2 months ago

Fully utilize.

Also, pour one for the death of the analog speedo. Peg the needle, no more!

andrewstuart2• 2 months ago

Now that's a fun microcontroller project idea. An analog dashboard for ram/cpu/whatever. I'm sure it's been done.

Edit: https://sasakaranovic.com/projects/diy-analog-resource-monit...

dnnddidiej3• 2 months ago

Warming it up. For the eventual electron app it'll be running.

lobf2• 2 months ago

Guys, it’s a butt secks joke

dnnddidiej3• 2 months ago

For those without spacebar heating?

mrtksn• 2 months ago

They broke that workflow in a recent update. Software these days is horrendous

thehamkercat• 2 months ago

for those wondering: https://xkcd.com/1172/

daneel_w• 2 months ago

  while true; do openssl speed ecdsap384 -multi 2; done

kristianp• 2 months ago

Or you could get a laptop that doesn't have an metal shell, like a thinkpad.

Caracas288• 2 months ago

they often have a magnesium bottom shell

simulator5g2• 2 months ago

Or just leave the machine plugged in and turned on for like 5 minutes while you grab a coffee or have a conversation. It doesn't really take that long to warm up to room temperature. Unless this guy is like biking 15 miles to work in the winter in which case, he is doing Wisconsin wrong, you're supposed to drive to work with a beer to warm you up.

Hobadee• 2 months ago

I'm from California... What is this "cold" you speak of?

int0x29• 2 months ago

The Donner Party begs to differ

isomorphic• 2 months ago

Floridian. I thought "frozen lake" was some sort of Intel CPU reference.

nottorp4• 2 months ago

You don't know how right you are. I don't think Apple ever tests their hardware outside the CA climate.

xgkickt• 2 months ago

“Designed in California, for Californians” was too long.

splittydev• 2 months ago

Alternatively, you could try compiling an Xcode project. That should do the trick as well.

jerlam• 2 months ago

I think my last Macbook was Wisconsin-locale instead of California. Closing the lid and putting it to sleep actually caused it to heat up (until the battery died).

simulator5g2• 2 months ago

It had the soul of a PC

ralphc• 2 months ago

I still use a 2019 MacBook Pro, in 2026 I found the best way to warm it up was to use it daily and not blow the dust out of it for 7 years. After I opened it up and did that it's running a lot cooler.

mcfedr• 2 months ago

yes only writes y, not the whole word yes

fnord77• 2 months ago

unless you type

      yes yes

smarks3• 2 months ago

Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occupy a core with a 100% kernel_task that didn’t do any work but which would serve to prevent actual work from being scheduled onto that core. When four or five out of the six cores were occupied by kernel_task, I knew I was in for a bag of hurt (to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs). Responsiveness went completely to hell. The machine became effectively unusable.

After a while my normal procedure was to run with the thing sitting on top of an ice pack. That would let me run a 60-90 minute video conference without troubles.

The only redeeming feature of these machines is that they could emulate old x86 hardware at speed. That allowed me to run old apps on old OSes without having to keep old hardware running.

recursivecaveat• 2 months ago

My Intel MBP would noticeably raise the whole room's temperature, while the fans ran so loud. We had some corporate security software that would occasionally go haywire and lock up 100% of a core until you rebooted. If you got that at the same time as a video call it would become too physically painful to touch any part of the metal body with bare skin.

alexwwang5• 2 months ago

Maybe the same type. Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise. The temperature in the room is going up noticeably for 1-2 degrees.

embedding-shape2• 2 months ago

Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise

So every time you do HTTP calls? Nothing there should spin up your fans, unless you use an agent with an horribly broken TUI, I've heard there is a few of those out there. But remotely calling LLM APIs really shouldn't be taxing on your local device, something somewhere is wrong/bad if that's what you're seeing.

Filligree3• 2 months ago

Is it a local LLM? Sibling seems to be assuming remote, but I have trouble imagining a TUI that inefficient.

reitzensteinm• 2 months ago

I had Windows and Mac laptops back then, and the HN snobbishness around the superiority of the Mac was genuinely baffling.

My i9 2019 MBP with discrete graphics was probably the worst laptop purchase I ever made. Docking it to an external monitor would enable the GPU, so even when idling it would run the fans and drain the battery.

I’d read cautionary tales about Windows laptops being pulled out of backpacks scorching hot as they failed to shut down. But that happened to my Mac all the time, too.

The M series though is incredible. I can’t imagine buying a Windows laptop now.

pja2• 2 months ago

The i9 was notorious. Would thermally throttle almost instantly & for any sizeable build job would end up slower than the i7 IIRC.

Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period.

carlosjobim• 2 months ago

Apple hardware quality on the laptops was bottom tier during the 2016-2019 "butterfly" era. There's no denying.

mfro• 2 months ago

It was a truly ridiculous idea to put an i9 in any laptop. That generation of i9 is difficult to cool even with liquid cooler systems in big ATX cases.

smarks3• 2 months ago

Oh yeah, I forgot about the graphics.

I had (and still have) a 4k external monitor. Naturally I wanted the MBP to drive the monitor with a resolution that took advantage of all the pixels. Unfortunately with most monitor settings the GPU power consumption would produce enough heat to run the fans even if the rest of the system was completely idle! If I set the output to full HD the GPU would cool down and the fans would turn off. But full HD on a 4k monitor is a waste.

It was very strange. I could drive the monitor at 4k but with the image upside down, and the power consumption would be low. But flip the image right side up and it would run hot and turn on the fans.

It took a couple weeks of fiddling, but I finally found a combination of refresh rate, resolution, image orientation (right side up!), and cabling that let me drive the monitor at high resolution without running the fans. What a pain.

(I used iStat menus to monitor GPU power consumption. At “good” settings it consumed about 5w. At “bad” settings it would consume 17w. At a bad setting you could immediately see the various temperatures go up and the fans spinning up to compensate.)

blackoil• 2 months ago

Those were John Ive era laptops where form ruled function. Poor thermal, less ports, less keys were all features.

philistine• 2 months ago

Form always ruled function with Jony Ive, but he always had a good eye for the way compromises shook out. During that era, Ive was creatively checked out but Cook kept him on to maintain the stock price.

jorgeleo4• 2 months ago

i decided to do an experiment and try to run an LLM in my old 2013 MBP. i7, 16 gb mem, 1 tb hd.

Installed Linux mint Xfce Edition for lightness, installed ollama, start to test different models. Gemma4 e4b runs perfectly fine, exposed it to the network, connected to it with my current notebook and use vs code codex to start to run inference.

For about 30 minutes of bliss, this setup work at a reasonable speed... then the MBP shut it self down. It was so hot that it trigger the safety mechanism, the fans sounded like the laptop was about to take off.

I though on leaving it on inside the fridge, but then the WIFI wouldn't reach.

On the other hand, my wife saw all this and offer to buy me an M5... the experiment didn't work as intended, but it did work.

tacomagick• 2 months ago

Could be in need of a thermal paste refresh etc.?

bartread2• 2 months ago

On a laptop that old it might be worth opening it up to blow all the dust out with a compressor or air duster. I’ve often found that to work wonders on old MacBook Pros.

The other issue is that unless the battery has been replaced relatively recently its charging efficiency may not be that great and the high load being placed on it might be causing it to get hotter than it would have done when new.

gitpusher• 2 months ago

On the other hand, my wife saw all this and offer to buy me an M5...

Hold my beer. I'm going to run Qwen on this 3rd-generation iPod... somewhere my partner can see

villgax• 2 months ago

This is now running Cyberpunk or an LLM locally

diimdeep• 2 months ago

Or something useful, save space, compressing some talk or edu video, just 6 fps is usually enough for slides or code, opus audio can go as low as 32k and still be decent compared to source quality, expect 10-15x size reduction

  ffmpeg -hide_banner -y -i in.mp4 \
    -vf "fps=6,format=yuv420p,scale=960:-2:flags=lanczos" \
    -c:v libx265 -tag:v hvc1 -crf 32 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset fast \
    -c:a libopus -b:a 82K -application 2048 \
    -c:s mov_text \
    out.mp4

can go more crazy with this soup

  -x265-params "keyint=800:min-keyint=24:scenecut=20:ref=8:bframes=16:b-adapt=2:rc-lookahead=80:rd=4:subme=5:deblock=1,1:aq-mode=3:aq-strength=0.4:psy-rd=0.4:psy-rdoq=1.0:qcomp=0.7:qg-size=64:rect=1:amp=1:strong-intra-smoothing=1:limit-modes=1:limit-tu=4:rdpenalty=2:tu-intra-depth=4:tu-inter-depth=4:me=star:no-allow-non-conformance=1" \

Traubenfuchs• 2 months ago

In homeoffice I always work in the nude and the cold metal of my macbook pro hurts my thighs…

lifestyleguru3• 2 months ago

Me the same... sometimes I "accidently" switch on the camera during calls and ask people why they're confused.

fastjack42• 2 months ago

Now do the opposite for the summer! Show me a command line that cools down the machine! ;)

p0w3n3d• 2 months ago

Does this work with M series ? M series is much colder and my fingers hurt <sob>

gizajob• 2 months ago

Running an LLM in the background is the contemporary version of this.

paul_knox• 2 months ago

Just run Intel (x86) apps via Rosetta 2 in the background. You’ll feel that classic Intel warmth coming right back.

dasKrokodil• 2 months ago

Speaking of cold weather and warming up computers... I've had my fair share of long bicycle commutes during cold winters and I always wondered whether booting up the laptop right after arriving has any effect on the long-term reliability? Like, are there any components which suffer from being activated when they're really cold?

nottorp4• 2 months ago

I always leave the laptop untouched for at least 10 minutes when coming in from the cold. Don't know if it helps but it makes me feel better.

lebuin• 2 months ago

I try to leave my laptop untouched for as much as I possibly can. Definitely makes me feel better too.

ivanjermakov• 2 months ago

At the first half of your comment I thought you would suggest using laptop as a back heater during cold weather rides!

Tade0• 2 months ago

The battery might need warmup, but it would have to be significantly below freezing outside to affect it.

Electrolytic capacitors can freeze up but again, you'd need a Yakutia-like environment for it to actually pose a concern.

Lastly I've heard of circuit boards warping from going from really cold to really hot, but those were power components.

Filligree3• 2 months ago

It increases the chance of solder cracks, which is one major cause of failure. Thermal cycles in general will do that, however, and home computers are designed to survive a lot of them.

So overall it’s not something I’d worry about.

Cthulhu_• 2 months ago

Modern Macbooks have this issue, the other day I realised I had never heard the fans of it run, so I was wondering if they actually worked.

Found a web based benchmark tool that will run your CPU and GPU at 100% each. While temperatures went up to 90 degrees science... still no fans. Ended up installing a different utility to manually set the fan speed to confirm they worked.

I don't know what they did but it's good.

nickdothutton• 2 months ago

May I introduce you to local LLMs?

crefiz• 2 months ago

Care to share the name of both tools? Cheers

niklasbuschmann• 2 months ago

openssl speed

traceroute66• 2 months ago

To be fair, the fundamental problem here is the author's resting of wrists to type.

This applies to any computer, Apple, Windows or Linux. Desktop or laptop.

If your typing on any computer is dependent on you resting your wrists whilst typing then it is indicative of poor typing technique and/or posture.

And ironically the very thing you think you're trying to prevent by resting your wrists (carpel tunnel and/or strain) is likely to be aggravated by over-reliance on wrist wrests due to the added pressure on the wrist.

mexicocitinluez• 2 months ago

Slightly quicker way to do this is opening Microsoft Teams.

whalesalad• 2 months ago

This is like setting the high idle in winter to get your air pressure up lol

mproud• 2 months ago

Or just add an ampersand at the end and execute the command 8 times or so:

    yes > /dev/null&

Warm up your MacBook (2019)

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