I’d go so far as to say “laptops of late”, thermal throttling isn’t unique to MacBooks.

My XPS15 regularly throttles and sounds like it’s about to take off.

It was Surface that started the trend, then MacBook followed and became a feature.

By the way, “throttling” refers to CPU _slowing down_ despite cooling working at full capacity, so loud fans in itself isn’t one.

e: Another way to explain thermal throttling would be “thermal fading”, like brake fading on a car. Whether brake fading is considered a design fault or a feature that allow bursts of stronger brakes is semantic.

I think the Surface was late to the party, the original Macbook Air had huge problems when it launched in 2008.

https://www.theage.com.au/technology/apple-fans-burned-by-ho...

If we're doing analogies, let's do them right :) Therefore I'd argue it is more like supercharger overheating on a car. As a supercharger gets hotter from prolonged load it gets hot and warms the air entering the engine which reduces cold-air intake thus reducing horse power compared to a cooler supercharger. There is a way to solve this: by fitting a chargecooler - which is basically a cooling system for the supercharger.

Sorry, yes, I realise that’s what throttling is but wasn’t clear. I meant to say in the original comment the fans normally come on followed by throttling.

Gaming laptops are huge for a reason: they need to get rid of a lot of heat.

Thin and light is great for short bursts of activity, but, when you need sustainable heavy usage, you'll need a bigger computer, even if it's just to have a bigger heatsink.

My XPS15's GPU runs at 100C (on benchmark loads), even after I replaced the heat pads and cooling paste. It took me weeks to get used to the idea. I guess that's just the new normal. I don't find mine to be loud though.

I have the 16” MacBook Pro. It doesn’t throttle and will happily run at max boost for tens of minutes.

Mine doesn't throttle when the ambient temperature is below 21°C, but throttles almost immediately if the ambient temperature is above 24°C.

The MBP16 has a problem with overheating VRMs during prolonged high load. A hack with thermal pads helps:

https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/gs6bal/2019_mbp...

Which one? I have the i9 flavor and it sounds like it's taking off if I run a video conf with zoom or Microsoft teams.

Throttling refers to throttling down. Choking up. Going up is boosting.

mine throttles to 30% within a minute of ffmpeg

*Intel Laptop Macs of late are known for heavy throttling

We have no idea what the M1 would look like. Though it's likely. I imagine they wouldn't have taken the fan out of the Air if that was a big concern.

But not anymore. That era is over.

So it’s natural that devices from that era and devices after that era behave differently