Macs are SLOWER than PCs. Here’s why.

The Reliability and Performance Concerns with Apple's MacBooks

When it comes to the reliability and performance of Apple's MacBooks, there are several concerns that have been raised by critics and users alike. One of the main issues is the tendency of these machines to throttle, or slow down, in order to prevent overheating. This can be a significant problem for users who rely on their laptops for heavy workloads or demanding tasks. As one user noted, "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."

This throttling behavior can be caused by a variety of factors, including the design of the machine itself, the type of materials used to build it, and even the software that runs on it. For example, one study found that the 2015 MacBook was prone to flexing and warping due to its lightweight construction, which could lead to flexing and warping as the materials repeatedly expanded and contracted. This can cause bga components to break away from their solder pads, leading to a costly repair or replacement of the entire board.

Another issue with Apple's MacBooks is that they are designed to prioritize aesthetics over performance. For example, the company has been accused of advertising its products in ways that are misleading to consumers. The 2018 MacBook Pro product page is a prime example of this, featuring a cpu speed of 4.8 gigahertz that may not actually reflect the machine's performance capabilities. In reality, the base clock for this machine is just 2.9 gigahertz, which is a difference of almost 40 percent. This can result in a machine that feels quick and snappy while browsing the web, but sluggish and unresponsive when performing demanding tasks.

The use of turbo boost technology has also been cited as a way to mask Apple's negligence on reliability and performance issues. Turbo boost allows machines like the MacBook to temporarily increase their clock speed during short bursts of activity, such as loading a web page or launching an application. While this can make the machine feel more responsive in day-to-day use, it can also lead to overheating and throttling behavior when running heavy workloads.

The company's approach to thermal management is another area where Apple has been criticized. Unlike some competing Android handsets, which can run games or benchmarks all day long without losing performance to heat, the MacBook Pro struggles to maintain a consistent clock speed due to its limited cooling capabilities. This means that users may experience throttling behavior even when running demanding tasks, and may need to resort to using liquid metal thermal interface material to improve the machine's cooling performance.

One possible explanation for Apple's approach to thermal management is that the company is targeting a less tech-savvy market with its promises of magical high performance thin design lightweight and low noise all with stellar battery life. According to this theory, Apple is aware that its machines will throttle due to overheating, but is choosing not to address this issue because it believes that the benefits of its products outweigh the drawbacks.

However, this approach has been widely criticized by experts and users alike. As one critic noted, "there's nothing magical about what they're doing...the laws of physics are still the law, and there's no way to avoid them." In reality, Apple's approach to thermal management is likely driven by a combination of factors, including marketing considerations and a desire to keep costs low.

In recent years, Apple has taken steps to address some of these concerns, such as introducing new cooling technologies like liquid metal thermal interface material. However, more needs to be done to ensure that the company's machines are reliable and performant over time. As one user noted, "if you're going to sell a product that's supposed to be magical and amazing, then it had better be able to deliver on that promise." Until Apple takes steps to address these concerns, users may continue to face issues with reliability and performance.

The company's approach to marketing has also been criticized for being misleading. For example, the 2018 MacBook Pro product page features a range of specs and features that are likely to appeal to tech-savvy consumers. However, a closer look at these specifications reveals some red flags, including a base clock speed of just 2.9 gigahertz. This means that even with turbo boost technology, the machine may not be able to maintain a consistent clock speed when running demanding tasks.

One possible explanation for this approach is that Apple is trying to appeal to a broader audience by marketing its products in ways that are more appealing to non-tech enthusiasts. However, this can come at the expense of accuracy and transparency. As one critic noted, "if you're going to sell a product that's supposed to be magical and amazing, then it had better be able to deliver on that promise." Until Apple takes steps to address these concerns, users may continue to face issues with reliability and performance.

The use of turbo boost technology has also been cited as a way to mask Apple's negligence on reliability and performance issues. While this can make the machine feel more responsive in day-to-day use, it can also lead to overheating and throttling behavior when running heavy workloads. As one user noted, "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."

The Future of Apple's MacBooks

In order to address the concerns surrounding the reliability and performance of its MacBooks, Apple needs to take a more proactive approach. This could involve introducing new cooling technologies, improving the design of the machine itself, and being more transparent about the capabilities and limitations of its products.

One possible solution is to introduce a more robust thermal management system that can handle the demands of demanding tasks. This could involve using advanced materials like liquid metal or carbon fiber to improve heat dissipation, as well as implementing more sophisticated cooling algorithms to manage the machine's temperature.

Another approach could be to prioritize performance over aesthetics in the design of the MacBook. For example, Apple could use a more robust and durable material for the machine's casing, or incorporate more advanced thermal management technologies into the design. However, this would likely require significant investments of time and resources, as well as changes to the company's marketing strategy.

Ultimately, the future of Apple's MacBooks will depend on the company's ability to balance its desire for innovation and style with the needs and expectations of its customers. By taking a more proactive approach to reliability and performance, Apple can ensure that its machines are truly magical and amazing, rather than just a marketing gimmick.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enpc 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 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 for reasons that we'll get into more later but watch this i can fire up quite literally any stress test this is prime95 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 adjusted the voltage and fan curves in mac os 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 mac os 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 2018 and the mac 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 specked 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 over build 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 louis 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 hot spots 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 a 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 web page 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 guess you should have bought applecare it's not like you can take your business somewhere else if you want mac os 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 going to 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 pros product page is a great example of this so you can see 4.8 gigahertz touted as the cpu speed up front 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 percent that performance disparity is going to 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 low marketing but whatever the real reason is the conclusion is clear here apple is specifically 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 if you disliked this video you know what to do but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe 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 also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally joinpc 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 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 for reasons that we'll get into more later but watch this i can fire up quite literally any stress test this is prime95 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 adjusted the voltage and fan curves in mac os 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 mac os 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 2018 and the mac 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 specked 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 over build 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 louis 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 hot spots 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 a 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 web page 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 guess you should have bought applecare it's not like you can take your business somewhere else if you want mac os 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 going to 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 pros product page is a great example of this so you can see 4.8 gigahertz touted as the cpu speed up front 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 percent that performance disparity is going to 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 low marketing but whatever the real reason is the conclusion is clear here apple is specifically 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 if you disliked this video you know what to do but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe 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 also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join\n"

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