Warm up your MacBook (2019)
46 points by kristianp 6 hours ago | 46 comments

dnnddidiej 3 hours ago
For those without spacebar heating?
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mrtksn 2 hours ago
They broke that workflow in a recent update. Software these days is horrendous
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kingjimmy 4 hours ago
"This will start 6 threads that each peg your CPU... "

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

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crest 3 hours ago
Bend over for big tech!
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amomchilov 5 hours 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?

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ericpauley 3 hours ago
The uncomfortable fact about the mentioned Wisconsin winters is that inside dew point tends to be quite low.
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HDBaseT 4 hours ago
For years at work I've been just using Cinebench as a hand warmer on various Macbooks.
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hakkoru 2 hours ago
I always enjoyed using the power brick to warm up
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waterhouse 4 hours ago
Multithreaded:

  seq 1 20 | xargs -Iqq -n1 -P0 yes >/dev/null
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jerlam 2 hours 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).
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jvuygbbkuurx 5 hours ago
I just need to build our monorepo
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Onavo 5 hours ago
I think any next.js project will do the trick
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reboot81 5 hours ago
Looking forward to the follow up: How to Quickly Cool Down Your MacBook
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sunrunner 5 hours ago
Just do the trick in reverse, surely?

  yes no > /dev/null
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why_at 4 hours ago
No you have to get the yesses back out

  cat /dev/null | yes
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ge96 5 hours ago
Strap a thermopile and a peltier on that bad boy
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splittydev 2 hours ago
Alternatively, you could try compiling an Xcode project. That should do the trick as well.
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Hobadee 2 hours ago
I'm from California... What is this "cold" you speak of?
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int0x29 2 hours ago
The Donner Party begs to differ
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kristianp 3 hours ago
Or you could get a laptop that doesn't have an metal shell, like a thinkpad.
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Cassell 3 hours ago
[dead]
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daneel_w 3 hours ago

  while true; do openssl speed ecdsap384 -multi 2; done
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mark242 4 hours ago
npm install
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Scubabear68 5 hours ago
Needs 2019 in title, this is Intel MacBooks not Apple Silicon.
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dunham 4 hours ago
I've found that Baldur's Gate 3 will warm up my apple silicon (everyday tasks do not).
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Analemma_ 3 hours 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.
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dangus 3 hours ago
Apple Silicon is not really the simultaneously silent and quiet and cool system it was in the M1 days.

If you get a MacBook Air it will get quite toasty at throttling limits. After all, it has no fan.

MacBook Pro models and Apple computers in general tend to favor quiet operation over keeping the laptop surface cool.

Many PC gaming laptops go out of their way to keep warm air off the keyboard deck with a high willingness to use fan noise to accomplish that since the assumption is that you’re resting your hands on the computer for an extended period and you have headphones on for your game anyway.

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ciupicri 4 hours ago
From what I've seen in a couple of videos the newest Neo crap can get to 100 degrees Celsius.
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rogerrogerr 4 hours ago
The target market of the "Neo crap" doesn't care and/or isn't pushing workloads that come anywhere near saturating it. It's a laptop that doesn't bend, has a decent screen, has a decent battery, and isn't full of adware.
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ciupicri 3 hours ago
The article was about warming up a laptop. Neo can do it too.
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rogerrogerr 3 hours ago
And your comment was calling it crap for some reason. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if you’d left that apparently superfluous word out of your comment.
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inventor7777 2 hours ago
How does the Neo getting to 100°C make it crap? By that logic, aren't all older Intel/x86 chips crap? If anything, I find it impressive that a small laptop CPU can do 100°C without a problem...my i7-7700T M710qs hit 75°C and throttle within a minute if I use a tool like y-cruncher or stress-ng. To be fair, totally different purpose.
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moralestapia 6 hours ago
Won't work on M processors, (un)fortunately.
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tom_ 2 hours 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!
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dajonker 5 hours 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).
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asdff 2 hours ago
I get them going full blast in 2 minutes from cities skylines.
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amluto 4 hours 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.)

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woozlewuzzle 3 hours ago
You could also build Chromium from source. It makes my M1 Max's fans sing.
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asdff 2 hours ago
Try increasing to 10 cores. Works on my m3 pro.
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mjmas 5 hours ago
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nullbyte 5 hours ago
sanest emacs user
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RAZKOM 5 hours ago
There really is an xkcd for everything
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therein 5 hours 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.
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gpm 5 hours ago
I've definitely had my m1 air get uncomfortably hot to touch - particularly right above the keyboard. (While doing developery things)
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inventor7777 2 hours ago
Can't say I've ever thought of a word like "developery", but now that I've seen it I like it a lot :-)
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1e1a 5 hours ago
Another (more useful) option is to render an animation in Blender, or run a local LLM.
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ale 6 hours ago
Honestly i prefer my macbook frosty
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tithos 3 hours ago
[dead]
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