Is the MacBook Pro 2018 REALLY Bad?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,840 words · ~9 min read
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apple's design philosophy has been oh let's be generous and say ambitious
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lately first we had the much smaller
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macbook pro 2016 with its completely
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redesigned low profile key switches that
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don't take too kindly to dust and debris otherwise pretty nice machine then we
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got the imac pro which crammed up to an 18 core processor into a design
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this thin with well predictable thermal results
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and now in 2018 we are getting the oh
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oh shoot hold on
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sorry now we get to see what happens
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when you cram a core i9 into a chassis
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this small and oh hold on a second what's this
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don't forget the sponsor spot Colton oh right mack weldon
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through the link below
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whether you use your macbook pro for coding 3d animation or just for browsing
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facebook you've probably been wondering why the heck apple was taking so long to
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embrace Intel's 8th gen cpus with their dramatically higher performance and
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greater core counts well as it turns out they were cooking
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up something that on the surface looks the same
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same aluminum chassis same touch bar whether you love or hate
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it and same lack of full-sized usb ports
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although i'm all equipped with dongles now at this point anyway
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but then when you get under the hood is actually really different from the last
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generation the machine now responds to hey siri commands
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what's the weather like outside
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the keyboard got a membrane to keep dirt and debris out of the switches the
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display as retina as ever gets true tone
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sensors so that it will actually adapt to ambient lighting
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personally not a fan but to each their own and those same four Thunderbolt 3
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ports are now running Intel's new titan ridge controller which means support for
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higher resolution monitors with displayport 1.4
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though it should be noted that is only on macbook pros that are equipped with
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dedicated graphics cards this is Intel's fault because they still haven't added
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displayport 1.4 to their onboard gpus
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getting back to performance then let's go even deeper now we opted for a nearly
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top spec model with 32 gigs of ddr4 RAM
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so it turns out they could do that they just needed to put a slightly bigger
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battery in it because upgrading down the line will not be an
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option since the memory is soldered directly to the logic board we also went
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for a 512gb SSD that again will
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hopefully be enough forever because this too is soldered directly to the board
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and this is for us anyway where the controversy
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actually really starts with this machine
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so the 2018 macbook pro includes the same t2 encryption chip that we saw on
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the imac pro which in and of itself is not a bad thing we're we're pro
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encryption and pro user privacy around here
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the problem is the specific way they're doing it so
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instead of making the SSD a self-contained swappable module with
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encryption hardware built onto that
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apple has integrated the whole thing into the motherboard
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so the work around for this used to be
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that if your motherboard died there was a special data recovery port that was
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wired into the SSD portion of the motherboard and you could use that to
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pull the data off of an otherwise dead logic board for transfer
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but then apple went ahead and they removed that port in this model
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so what that means is that as far as we know right now
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if any motherboard component causes a
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system failure without taking your logic board to
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someone like louis rossman for diagnostics and re-soldering something
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that apple does not endorse doing and that even assumes that such a fix is
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possible you are completely sol on getting any of
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your data back from a dead logic board
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machine now time machine which thankfully is really
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awesome will prevent most catastrophic data loss but
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it's just something to be aware of because it's still possible that if
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you're on the road a lot something could get lost in the mix if your machine were
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to fail for any reason bringing us then to our last component
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selection the top of the line core i9 mobile processor so thanks to its higher
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core clocks and extra cash not to mention it's six course if you're into
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programming editing video or rendering complex 3d
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scenes this is the option you would obviously want to choose
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except that reports of performance
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crippling thermal throttling began to roll in almost as soon as the first
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macbook 2018 box was opened and we
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actually saw it firsthand in our recent live stream we're at 100 degrees
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once the workload started it took only seconds for our processor to be running
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well below its base advertised clock
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speed and then it only took another day or two
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for Intel to remove the tool that we were using to monitor the situation from
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their website for some definitely not pr related reason
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some folks were even reporting lower performance than the last gen macbook
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pro in adobe premiere now
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apple has since issued and oops we didn't notice this product was
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fundamentally broken firmware update to address the situation so what we figured
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we'd do is put that to the test we'll be comparing our macbook pro 2018
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against a reference desktop and two other core i9 equipped laptops one with
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a similar form factor to the macbook and another with ample cooling to show us
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well how you could really expect a core i9 to perform with adequate cooling
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as usual we'll kick things off with our gaming results not too many gaming
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benchmarks i mean it is a mac actually these results are not too shabby
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considering that the ASUS zenbook pro rocks a faster gtx 1050 ti GPU and it
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looks like our Radeon pro 560 in here
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performs roughly equivalent to our desktop rx 550
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in this thermal package which of course raises the question
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how much better could it do with a proper cooler
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we'll get to that but first let's look at productivity
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this is interesting our 2018 macbook pro with the fix
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supplied closely matches or even beats our other
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core i9 machines in CPU heavy workloads like adobe premiere and blender
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but only in macOS
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in Windows 10 using bootcamp which
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remember is an apple supported solution it falls way behind
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so is this a matter of macOS taking better
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advantage of Intel's speed shift technology than Windows does
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maybe our recorded temperatures will help us paint a clearer picture here
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very interesting so for starters calling what they did a
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firmware fix is a little disingenuous since firmware is typically os agnostic
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and what apple has done clearly only works in macOS at this
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time so in Windows the 2018 macbook pro is
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idling cooler than ASUS's similarly equipped zenbook pro but then it
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immediately drops to its lowest power state when a heavy load is applied
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just like before the fix the good news is that on macOS both the
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frequency and power curve are much smoother with no throttling whatsoever
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making this a much more usable machine i mean it's mostly good news because the
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thing to keep in mind then is that all that apple's really done here then
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is maybe apply a new fan curve along with TDP and clock speed limiting to the
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processor that manages to help it avoid constant performance killing power state
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changes they are still allowing the CPU to run
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at 97 degrees as measured in an
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air-conditioned office the problem though is
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that's all they really can do at this point since opening up the device with
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an ifixit kit made it immediately obvious that they haven't redesigned the
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thermal solution here to handle the new 45 watt core i9 CPU
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which isn't to say that they were helpless for the last two years during
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the development of this laptop there's clearly things they could have done
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but we don't even entirely blame apple for this there is an industry-wide
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problem that exists right now where laptop manufacturers are installing high
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performance processors in devices that
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they are designing to either thermal
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throttle and or run at unreasonable
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temperatures like i i get it i get the appeal of
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marketing top of the line specs in an amazingly thin package
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and technically 97 degrees is lower than
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the t-junction of a hundred degrees for a modern Intel CPU but i mean if you
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were a pc tech back in the Intel prescott days you'll remember
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running anything this hot is not cool
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pardon the pun and over time will absolutely cause board warping or worse
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which as we mentioned before when we talked about this is where the
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controversy starts comes with significant data loss implications on
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this particular product and this is all something that i
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wouldn't consider ideal on a consumer product and i certainly don't consider
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ideal on a professional one
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so let us know in the comments do you agree
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do you disagree has the pro become a meaningless word
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so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the
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like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also linked in the
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join