PC fanboys love to complain that Macs are just so much more expensive than a PC.
But as we've demonstrated a handful of times in the past, in many cases it's actually just as
expensive to custom build a PC with the same specs and features as a given Mac. The problem though
is that Macs often don't perform as you would expect given their specifications. So today's video
is a deep dive into what's going on and why. Now as you probably already know Apple designs their
own computers and when I say designs I mean designs. They're slim, they're lightweight, and
they've got specs that make your eyes light up and go ooh. But in the pursuit of sex appeal they often
don't do those sometimes very impressive specs justice. The reason? Thermals. Now this is a little
bit strange, but I'm not going to go into too much detail about that. The reason is that the Macs
are just so much more expensive than a PC, and they're just so much more expensive than a PC.
I'm not going to go into too much detail about that. The reason? Thermals. Now this is a little bit strange
for reasons that we'll get into more later, but watch this. I can fire up quite literally any
stress test. This is prime 95 right here. And within moments I will have temperatures rapidly
approaching a hundred degrees. The point at which most Intel CPUs will throttle back their clock
speeds in order to protect themselves from damage. How can they get away with this? Well Apple's done
a little bit of trickery here and adjusts their clock speed to the clock speed that they're
used to and adjusted the voltage and fan curves in macOS so that they can hit a higher thermal
threshold without throttling too far below Intel's advertised base clock. But even at room
temperature, it's on a knife's edge. And in boot camp, those tweaks get thrown out the Windows,
pun intended, which means the voltages are higher and the threshold for throttling triggers
sooner, making for a sluggish mess of an experience overall.
This actually made waves back when the 2018 MacBook Pro launched, because Apple accidentally
didn't have those tweaks enabled in macOS, meaning that the Core i9 equipped model throttled well
below base clock at 100 degrees. Now they promptly fixed it, but is it fixed, or is it just software
trickery to mask a bad design? To find out, we designed a little test. We compared the MacBook Pro
mini running the blender classroom rendering test,
using their stock cooling solutions at room temperature
against the exact same two machines
inside a custom chill box of our own creation
that we held well below ambient temperatures.
And what's obvious from our test is that
in Apple's pursuit of sex appeal,
they're leaving a significant amount of performance
on the table for their users.
Now the obvious retort might be,
yeah, but that's a totally unrealistic scenario.
Would a laptop PC achieve these results?
And in fairness, the answer in many cases is no.
Most notebooks, PC and Mac alike
with Intel HK series chips thermal throttle,
but many of them to a lesser degree.
Part of the problem boils down to Intel's delays
in getting their 10 nanometer production going.
And this is compounded by their recent pattern
of releasing processors
with TDPs.
So this is the amount of heat
that they're supposed to output
that are spec'd much lower than they actually should be.
They've even done this
with some of their desktop processors.
Essentially what they're doing right now then
is stuffing more and more cores
into the same package size as before,
but with the same transistor size,
meaning that they're generating more heat.
That means that the only way for a manufacturer
to rein in these chips,
is to test them themselves,
then overbuild their cooling solution,
which clearly can actually be done.
It's just that Apple isn't doing it.
And the thing is that even if you don't care
about getting every last drop of performance
out of your computer,
this creates other problems too.
A computer, any computer for a fact
will fail more quickly when subjected
to higher operating temperatures over its lifetime.
And this can come about
in a whole host of different ways.
Just ask Lewis Rossman or for that matter,
anyone who's owned a 2011 or 2012 MacBook Pro
with a dedicated GPU.
Not only is heat bad for the chips themselves,
the ones producing it,
it's actually also unhealthy for the board
that they're attached to.
Hotspots on a PCB can and will cause flexing and warping
as the materials repeatedly expand and contract,
which can in turn lead to BGA components,
breaking away from their solder pads.
And that's to say nothing of the health
of any surface mount components nearby,
like capacitors or resistors.
All of which would require either a time consuming repair,
or if you go the official route,
a costly and wasteful replacement of the entire board.
So then what gives?
Why would Apple do this to their hardware?
Well, when it comes to the performance question,
it seems to be because for a large enough proportion
of their customers,
the looks and the status symbol of owning the machine
are just more important
than whether it's actually quick off the line.
Although on that note,
one innovation in recent CPU designs
that has masked Apple's negligence
is the advent of Turbo Boost,
Intel's name for a technology
that dramatically boosts the clock speed of a CPU temporarily
during short bursts of activity,
like while loading a webpage or launching an application.
Turbo Boost allows machines like their 2015 MacBook
to actually feel pretty snappy in day-to-day use,
but require literal water cooling
to reach peak performance in heavy workloads.
As for the reliability issues,
honestly, my best guess is that they just don't care.
I'm sure like any insurance company,
they've done the analysis of their failure rates over time
to ensure that AppleCare customers
are covered by the policy that they bought.
And then as for the ones who didn't buy AppleCare,
huh.
Guess you should have bought AppleCare.
It's not like you can take your business somewhere else
if you want macOS.
The real head scratcher here for me though,
is that Apple considers it okay
for even their professional grade computers
to throttle like this,
but not for their flagship iPhone.
You can run games or benchmarks all day long on this thing
and never lose any performance to heat.
Compare that to competing Android handsets
and you've got yourself actually a very compelling reason
to buy an iPhone.
So why this difference in philosophy?
Oh, sorry.
Oh, you were waiting for an answer.
I actually don't have one.
But what I will do is I'm gonna put that on my list
of things to ask my good friend, Tim Apple,
if he ever agrees to sit down for an interview with me.
Although I sincerely doubt that's ever going to happen
because I'm going on the record now
saying that my next question then will be,
why do you advertise your products
in ways that you know for a fact are misleading?
The 2018 MacBook Pro's product page
is a great example of this.
So you can see 4.8 gigahertz touted as the CPU speed upfront.
But you probably won't notice that further down,
the base clock that this machine struggles to maintain
by the way, is just 2.9 gigahertz,
a difference of almost 40%.
That performance disparity is gonna take the MacBook Pro
from feeling quick and snappy while surfing the web
to feeling sluggish and unresponsive
the moment that you start a render and it stops boosting.
And that's not even considering the dedicated GPU.
You run both the CPU and the GPU simultaneously,
like in a game or a hardware assisted video export,
and you're in for a pretty bad time.
One of the most frustrating aspects of all of this
is that they're blatantly doing it on purpose.
In our recent video where we used liquid metal
thermal interface material on the MacBook Pro,
we found that even with better cooling,
temperatures were the same.
So Apple took advantage of the extra thermal headroom
by keeping the fans low for as long as possible,
instead of attempting to boost the CPU's performance
for longer.
I mean, I get it.
Nobody wants their fans to ramp up like a jet engine
just because they loaded a big file in Photoshop
that made the CPU work for five seconds.
But if we're running
an all core load, we're hitting 90 plus degrees
for more than that,
the system needs to kick its fans into overdrive
in order to protect itself.
As for why Apple doesn't just equip its machines
with processors that are more suited
to the form factors that they target.
Remember guys, a slower CPU that doesn't throttle
is not slower than a faster one that does.
We're not sure why they don't do that.
The only answer we can come up with is,
is that Apple is targeting the less tech savvy market
with their promises of magical, high performance,
thin design, lightweight and low noise,
all with stellar battery life.
But you simply can't avoid the laws of physics
and there is nothing magical about what they're doing.
So thanks for watching guys.
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We'll see you in the next video.
Bye.
Also consider checking out where to buy the stuff
we featured at the link in the video description.
To be clear, it's not a terrible machine,
just thermal throttles.
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which has cool shirts like this one
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