Re:Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook ...
by ericd on Sunday April 08, 2018 @01:21PM
(#16787107)
I find the speakers to be awful, but I just use headphones most of the time anyway, so nbd. I have the last gen, so may be different.
I'm curious how you tuned the thermal throttling, though!
Re:Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook ...
by blinkingled on Sunday April 08, 2018 @04:24PM
(#16788140)
It might be this - https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/870u0a/t480s_linu...
TL;DR Booting Linux the throttling triggers at much lower temp than on Windows. Fixed by overwriting some MSRs I think.
While I did end up doing that (it wasn't as scary as I thought), turns out just adding `acpi.ec_no_wakeup=1` is sufficient on many distros (I presume ones with recent kernel/systemd versions, older versions seem to require hitting power to wake up).
> I wish it had better speakers though
I find the speakers fairly comparable to my old MBP, fwiw.
> and I still feel like the low power CPU in a thin package might get bogged down when thermally throttled compared to full wattage one in a bigger config.
Yea, kinda mixed feelings on this. I really like how cool/quiet it runs with the default config, but you're right that the throttling is fairly aggressive. I mostly went with the i7 for the L2 cache size rather than max freq so it doesn't bother me too much.
You can override the throttling thresholds a fair bit. The whole machine is fairly hackable (in the good sense). I plan to play around with underclocking at some point to get a few extra hours.