apple's design philosophy has been oh let's be generous and say ambitious
lately first we had the much smaller
macbook pro 2016 with its completely
redesigned low profile key switches that
don't take too kindly to dust and debris otherwise pretty nice machine then we
got the imac pro which crammed up to an 18 core processor into a design
this thin with well predictable thermal results
and now in 2018 we are getting the oh
oh shoot hold on
sorry now we get to see what happens
when you cram a core i9 into a chassis
this small and oh hold on a second what's this
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whether you use your macbook pro for coding 3d animation or just for browsing
facebook you've probably been wondering why the heck apple was taking so long to
embrace Intel's 8th gen cpus with their dramatically higher performance and
greater core counts well as it turns out they were cooking
up something that on the surface looks the same
same aluminum chassis same touch bar whether you love or hate
it and same lack of full-sized usb ports
although i'm all equipped with dongles now at this point anyway
but then when you get under the hood is actually really different from the last
generation the machine now responds to hey siri commands
what's the weather like outside
the keyboard got a membrane to keep dirt and debris out of the switches the
display as retina as ever gets true tone
sensors so that it will actually adapt to ambient lighting
personally not a fan but to each their own and those same four Thunderbolt 3
ports are now running Intel's new titan ridge controller which means support for
higher resolution monitors with displayport 1.4
though it should be noted that is only on macbook pros that are equipped with
dedicated graphics cards this is Intel's fault because they still haven't added
displayport 1.4 to their onboard gpus
getting back to performance then let's go even deeper now we opted for a nearly
top spec model with 32 gigs of ddr4 RAM
so it turns out they could do that they just needed to put a slightly bigger
battery in it because upgrading down the line will not be an
option since the memory is soldered directly to the logic board we also went
for a 512gb SSD that again will
hopefully be enough forever because this too is soldered directly to the board
and this is for us anyway where the controversy
actually really starts with this machine
so the 2018 macbook pro includes the same t2 encryption chip that we saw on
the imac pro which in and of itself is not a bad thing we're we're pro
encryption and pro user privacy around here
the problem is the specific way they're doing it so
instead of making the SSD a self-contained swappable module with
encryption hardware built onto that
apple has integrated the whole thing into the motherboard
so the work around for this used to be
that if your motherboard died there was a special data recovery port that was
wired into the SSD portion of the motherboard and you could use that to
pull the data off of an otherwise dead logic board for transfer
but then apple went ahead and they removed that port in this model
so what that means is that as far as we know right now
if any motherboard component causes a
system failure without taking your logic board to
someone like louis rossman for diagnostics and re-soldering something
that apple does not endorse doing and that even assumes that such a fix is
possible you are completely sol on getting any of
your data back from a dead logic board
machine now time machine which thankfully is really
awesome will prevent most catastrophic data loss but
it's just something to be aware of because it's still possible that if
you're on the road a lot something could get lost in the mix if your machine were
to fail for any reason bringing us then to our last component
selection the top of the line core i9 mobile processor so thanks to its higher
core clocks and extra cash not to mention it's six course if you're into
programming editing video or rendering complex 3d
scenes this is the option you would obviously want to choose
except that reports of performance
crippling thermal throttling began to roll in almost as soon as the first
macbook 2018 box was opened and we
actually saw it firsthand in our recent live stream we're at 100 degrees
once the workload started it took only seconds for our processor to be running
well below its base advertised clock
speed and then it only took another day or two
for Intel to remove the tool that we were using to monitor the situation from
their website for some definitely not pr related reason
some folks were even reporting lower performance than the last gen macbook
pro in adobe premiere now
apple has since issued and oops we didn't notice this product was
fundamentally broken firmware update to address the situation so what we figured
we'd do is put that to the test we'll be comparing our macbook pro 2018
against a reference desktop and two other core i9 equipped laptops one with
a similar form factor to the macbook and another with ample cooling to show us
well how you could really expect a core i9 to perform with adequate cooling
as usual we'll kick things off with our gaming results not too many gaming
benchmarks i mean it is a mac actually these results are not too shabby
considering that the ASUS zenbook pro rocks a faster gtx 1050 ti GPU and it
looks like our Radeon pro 560 in here
performs roughly equivalent to our desktop rx 550
in this thermal package which of course raises the question
how much better could it do with a proper cooler
we'll get to that but first let's look at productivity
this is interesting our 2018 macbook pro with the fix
supplied closely matches or even beats our other
core i9 machines in CPU heavy workloads like adobe premiere and blender
but only in macOS
in Windows 10 using bootcamp which
remember is an apple supported solution it falls way behind
so is this a matter of macOS taking better
advantage of Intel's speed shift technology than Windows does
maybe our recorded temperatures will help us paint a clearer picture here
very interesting so for starters calling what they did a
firmware fix is a little disingenuous since firmware is typically os agnostic
and what apple has done clearly only works in macOS at this
time so in Windows the 2018 macbook pro is
idling cooler than ASUS's similarly equipped zenbook pro but then it
immediately drops to its lowest power state when a heavy load is applied
just like before the fix the good news is that on macOS both the
frequency and power curve are much smoother with no throttling whatsoever
making this a much more usable machine i mean it's mostly good news because the
thing to keep in mind then is that all that apple's really done here then
is maybe apply a new fan curve along with TDP and clock speed limiting to the
processor that manages to help it avoid constant performance killing power state
changes they are still allowing the CPU to run
at 97 degrees as measured in an
air-conditioned office the problem though is
that's all they really can do at this point since opening up the device with
an ifixit kit made it immediately obvious that they haven't redesigned the
thermal solution here to handle the new 45 watt core i9 CPU
which isn't to say that they were helpless for the last two years during
the development of this laptop there's clearly things they could have done
but we don't even entirely blame apple for this there is an industry-wide
problem that exists right now where laptop manufacturers are installing high
performance processors in devices that
they are designing to either thermal
throttle and or run at unreasonable
temperatures like i i get it i get the appeal of
marketing top of the line specs in an amazingly thin package
and technically 97 degrees is lower than
the t-junction of a hundred degrees for a modern Intel CPU but i mean if you
were a pc tech back in the Intel prescott days you'll remember
running anything this hot is not cool
pardon the pun and over time will absolutely cause board warping or worse
which as we mentioned before when we talked about this is where the
controversy starts comes with significant data loss implications on
this particular product and this is all something that i
wouldn't consider ideal on a consumer product and i certainly don't consider
ideal on a professional one
so let us know in the comments do you agree
do you disagree has the pro become a meaningless word
for more expensive i want to know your thoughts
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