Apple MacBook Pro i9

Is your workflow OSX specific ? I switched to MBP and OSX 2 years ago for iOS development but OSX has been getting slower and slower with each update. And I'm running a 15" i9 with 32gb ram and Vega 20 - I see noticeable UI lag on my 5k monitor with native lightweight apps (eg resizing telegram/WhatsApp), Chrome is getting slower and Firefox is no champ either. I recently booted to win 10 bootcamp for some game and was shocked at how much smoother the experience was. Need to do some benchmarking but just running VS code and docker felt noticeably faster on win 10 - same machine - and Macs have terrible windows drivers

I still have the i9 macbook pro and its a dog for sure throttles massively

There is one pretty epic stackoverflow post that AI probably won't find. It turned out a lot of the thermal throttling (kernel_task usage) on the i9 macbook pros went away if you plugged in the power on the right side, instead of the left. Why turned out to be a chip that didn't have enough cooling. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-find... One could also put fans under the i9 to make it draw air away and run markedly faster. That, combined with the keyboard failures, meant I could put a wireless keyboard on top of the laptop keyboard and use it. This is how I took it to the Apple store for warranty repair. I asked them this is a feature of all macbooks when you buy the fastest ones to have to cool it the right way and not use the keyboard in case there might be dust in the air.

Yeah when I got the first gen base model M1 Air, I put it to the test against my maxed out i9 MacBook Pro (basically the last Intel model they released, so it was the “best of the best” they had to offer on the Intel side). I tried out using Handbrake to CPU encode the same video on both devices. Amazingly the M1 Air was slightly faster than the i9, while comparatively sipping power, and staying relatively cool without even having a fan. The i9 on the other hand drained its battery super fast, sounded like a jet plane taking off, and was too hot to sit on my lap. That’s when I knew it was really a massive leap forward.

i had the same issue and my i9 macbook pro was heating within seconds of turning on. some where i found that not using chrome could save a lot of battery.

When resting on a fixed position on a desk, You can also put cabinet fans under the macbook to draw air away. AC Infinity ones are nice for that. Had to do that with an old i9 macbook pro that was completely incapable of cooling itself due to being too thin.

If it works for you... but I had an Intel MacBook Pro (2019, 16", i9) for a work machine and the fans would sound like a jet engine. Installing NPM dependencies was particularly bad, since all the writes would make the corporate file scanning spyware go crazy. It ran like crap. I have an M1 Pro (which is considered old now) and it's like night and day.

2019 16” i9 MacBook Pro. These days it has to be on a laptop cooler when I push it so that it won’t turn itself off due to the heat.

I had an 2019 i9 for a work laptop. It was absolutely awful, especially with the corporate anti-virus / spyware on it that brought it to a crawl. Fans would run constantly. Any sort of Node JS build would make it sound like a jet engine.

The i9's were quite awful. I had one for a work laptop. The fans ran constantly and it still felt like a hot plate. And ran slow due to a combination of throttling and corporate security software that added tons of overhead.

> though the thermals on the i9 aren't great Getting my work laptop upgraded from a 16-inch i9 to a 16-inch M2 Max has been a godsend to my ears. The fan noise was constant with an i9.

I went from the last Intel i9 16" MBP to an M3 Pro in the last month at work. I think it's saving me an hour a day and the fan has never come on, the the laptop has never felt warm, and the battery life is just mind blowing. I run docker & compilers all day. The i9 would run the fan 75% of the time and had to throttle down any time it was on battery power and it was lucky to last 3 hours on battery.

I've got a top spec i9 MBP and my same-price M1 Max blows it out of the water, while being vastly cooler and lasting forever on battery.

Macs were long hindered by Intel processors to have long battery lifes AND/OR good performance. Two examples of MacBooks I had: The 12" MacBook. Great form factor, bad software (graphics driver code was especially poor), poor keyboard, lousy battery life, slow CPU & graphics. Similar size now with the 13" MacBook Air, but much better. The i9 MacBook Pro. Too heavy, not enough cooling, extra GPU chip (in the laptop) with lots of power demand, Thunderbolt chips with lots of power demand, CPU with lots of power demand, fans were often on (for example with anything which uses the extra GPU). Now a 16" MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon is virtually silent AND fast. I currently have a Mac mini with M2 Pro, a MacBook Pro with M2 Pro and the new iPad Pro M4. All are very snappy and virtually silent. They use very little idle power and don't get warm in normal use. The i9 MacBook Pro would produce a lot of heat when attached to an external screen and doing a "simple" video call, due to the power hungry additional GPU needed to drive the external screen.

My 2019 16' MacBook pro does about 2 hours of battery with only 488 battery cycles. i9 processor with AMD Radeon Pro 5500M. I'm just doing the most basic dev stuff. Generally a Chrome instance with ~20 tabs, VSC, and a Next.js process. I can't use it on my lap too long, it's hot. The fan never stops. Sometimes I look in the activity monitor to see why, but it's never something specific. A chrome tab using too much CPU or something. It's been the fastest self-depreciating machine I've used. I recently switched to a M2 Air for personal laptop. Same exact workflow and tools results in zero heat, and the battery can do a few evenings of coding without needing to be charged. It's a gamechanger.

Totally agree. I have an M1 MBP for personal use, and a 16 inch i9 for my work laptop. The M1 is silent and not too bothered by zoom. Last week, in a pinch, I had to use my 16" MBP for a zoom call, and it didn't last much past an hour before it was complaining about needing to be plugged in to power. And it felt like it might melt the desktop. Really drove home how much better the M1 is.

My company gave me a i9 MBP for work, but I use my own personal M1 Macbook Air instead as it's so much better; no fan noise or smell of cooking thermal paste! Also and sites nicely under the 45" 4K QLED screen that I use as a main monitor.

> the App Store will be the one real stain on his legacy Well, and the Apple Car. And the Butterfly Keyboard and that horrible i9 16" MBP. Plus the Airpower, and the Vision Pro, and he cancelled the entire Mac Pro lineup too. Also the $1,000 VESA monitor mount and goofy desktop wheels, and we should probably also mention his meetings with Donald Trump and eventual White House dinner with Bin Salman. Tim also failed to legally deter NSO Group, held a grudge against Nvidia during a $4 trillion ARM/CUDA datacenter boom, greenlit Liquid Glass, proposed Client-Side Scanning and fought dirty against organic and reasonable EU regulations. But besides that , yes, the pitiful state of the App Store will be remembered as his true strategic slip-up.

Apple had the same problem before they launched the M1. Unless your workloads are extremely bursty the i9 MacBook is almost guaranteed to be slower than the base i7.

Dunno about 2024, but 2023 G14 explicitly documents it can't work at full power when powered by USB-C, because it's USB-C PD supports only 100W compared to the >200W draw of the system. So it throttles just like macbooks with i9 (but those throttled always because one of the problems was overheating VRMs)

I've been on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme for almost 2 years (gen 2 with the i9) and never had any noise or throttling issues. I sit next to my partner (also a dev) and their i9 macbook pro regularly spins up then throttles the cpu a ton. We've seen it regularly throttle down by 70-82% (measured with pmset -g thermlog) Just saying, I definitely get the feeling Apple values form over function. His biggest issues happen when he's using Docker (the annoying Docker for Desktop version) but I also use Docker all day and dont have any issues...