Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occupy a core with a 100% kernel_task that didn’t do any work but which would serve to prevent actual work from being scheduled onto that core. When four or five out of the six cores were occupied by kernel_task, I knew I was in for a bag of hurt (to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs). Responsiveness went completely to hell. The machine became effectively unusable.
After a while my normal procedure was to run with the thing sitting on top of an ice pack. That would let me run a 60-90 minute video conference without troubles.
The only redeeming feature of these machines is that they could emulate old x86 hardware at speed. That allowed me to run old apps on old OSes without having to keep old hardware running.
My Intel MBP would noticeably raise the whole room's temperature, while the fans ran so loud. We had some corporate security software that would occasionally go haywire and lock up 100% of a core until you rebooted. If you got that at the same time as a video call it would become too physically painful to touch any part of the metal body with bare skin.
Maybe the same type. Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise. The temperature in the room is going up noticeably for 1-2 degrees.
Speaking of cold weather and warming up computers... I've had my fair share of long bicycle commutes during cold winters and I always wondered whether booting up the laptop right after arriving has any effect on the long-term reliability? Like, are there any components which suffer from being activated when they're really cold?
I always leave the laptop untouched for at least 10 minutes when coming in from the cold. Don't know if it helps but it makes me feel better.
"This will start 6 threads that each peg your CPU... "
they're doing what to my CPU????
Fully utilize.
Also, pour one for the death of the analog speedo. Peg the needle, no more!
Bend over for big tech!
For those without spacebar heating?
They broke that workflow in a recent update. Software these days is horrendous
How big is the risk of condensation when you bring a cold laptop inside?
All their spec sheets say they support up to x% _non-condensing_ humidity, which I’m guessing is about the dew point?
The uncomfortable fact about the mentioned Wisconsin winters is that inside dew point tends to be quite low.
I still use a 2019 MacBook Pro, in 2026 I found the best way to warm it up was to use it daily and not blow the dust out of it for 7 years. After I opened it up and did that it's running a lot cooler.
Does this work with M series ? M series is much colder and my fingers hurt <sob>
Running an LLM in the background is the contemporary version of this.
Looking forward to the follow up: How to Quickly Cool Down Your MacBook
Just do the trick in reverse, surely?
yes no > /dev/null
No you have to get the yesses back out
cat /dev/null | yes
Unironically, yes.
My M3 Macbook Pro's palm rests get uncomfortably warm during regular IDE use. It doesn't get hot enough to spin up a fan, but it is enough to be distracting.
interesting. for me only the bottom and the top part above the keyboard gets warm during my work. 16inch model. Is yours the 14inch one?
I have the 14 inch and i've never felt it go warm.
I think the real question is what IDE we're talking about.
I am mostly in PHPStorm with several projects open + sometimes I have Xcode and/or Android Studio open as well
Strap a thermopile and a peltier on that bad boy
For years at work I've been just using Cinebench as a hand warmer on various Macbooks.
I always enjoyed using the power brick to warm up
Multithreaded:
seq 1 20 | xargs -Iqq -n1 -P0 yes >/dev/null
I just need to build our monorepo
I think any next.js project will do the trick
I'm from California... What is this "cold" you speak of?
You don't know how right you are. I don't think Apple ever tests their hardware outside the CA climate.
Floridian. I thought "frozen lake" was some sort of Intel CPU reference.
The Donner Party begs to differ
I think my last Macbook was Wisconsin-locale instead of California. Closing the lid and putting it to sleep actually caused it to heat up (until the battery died).
It had the soul of a PC
Alternatively, you could try compiling an Xcode project. That should do the trick as well.
Or you could get a laptop that doesn't have an metal shell, like a thinkpad.
Or just leave the machine plugged in and turned on for like 5 minutes while you grab a coffee or have a conversation. It doesn't really take that long to warm up to room temperature. Unless this guy is like biking 15 miles to work in the winter in which case, he is doing Wisconsin wrong, you're supposed to drive to work with a beer to warm you up.
they often have a magnesium bottom shell
while true; do openssl speed ecdsap384 -multi 2; done
Now do the opposite for the summer! Show me a command line that cools down the machine! ;)
yes only writes y, not the whole word yes
unless you type
yes yes
In homeoffice I always work in the nude and the cold metal of my macbook pro hurts my thighs…
Or something useful, save space, compressing some talk or edu video, just 6 fps is usually enough for slides or code, opus audio can go as low as 32k and still be decent compared to source quality, expect 10-15x size reduction
Needs 2019 in title, this is Intel MacBooks not Apple Silicon.
I've found that Baldur's Gate 3 will warm up my apple silicon (everyday tasks do not).
Is that running on Rosetta 2? Rosetta 2 does (or did, maybe it's removed now) a fine job running x86 code on Apple Silicon, but boy was it cycle-hungry to do it.
BG3 is a native game, they dropped x86 support shortly after launch on macOS (or maybe even in beta)
Apple Silicon is not really the simultaneously silent and quiet and cool system it was in the M1 days.
If you get a MacBook Air it will get quite toasty at throttling limits. After all, it has no fan.
MacBook Pro models and Apple computers in general tend to favor quiet operation over keeping the laptop surface cool.
Many PC gaming laptops go out of their way to keep warm air off the keyboard deck with a high willingness to use fan noise to accomplish that since the assumption is that you’re resting your hands on the computer for an extended period and you have headphones on for your game anyway.
[flagged]
The target market of the "Neo crap" doesn't care and/or isn't pushing workloads that come anywhere near saturating it. It's a laptop that doesn't bend, has a decent screen, has a decent battery, and isn't full of adware.
The article was about warming up a laptop. Neo can do it too.
And your comment was calling it crap for some reason. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if you’d left that apparently superfluous word out of your comment.
How does the Neo getting to 100°C make it crap? By that logic, aren't all older Intel/x86 chips crap? If anything, I find it impressive that a small laptop CPU can do 100°C without a problem...my i7-7700T M710qs hit 75°C and throttle within a minute if I use a tool like y-cruncher or stress-ng. To be fair, totally different purpose.
For a very long time now, it has been the case that in the short term most processors will boost high enough for the die to reach around 100°C. When you see a reading substantially lower than that like your example of 75°C, either the system has throttled for a reason other than processor die temperature (eg. throttling to limit the temperature of the outer case of the machine) or the temperature reading you're seeing does not correspond to the hottest part of the chip and the throttling is based on the presumption that a different part of the chip that is not directly monitored will be much hotter.
In the specific case of the i7-7700T, the "T" suffix for Intel CPUs usually means you have mainstream desktop silicon with arbitrarily reduced long-term turbo limits, intended to be used in small form factor PCs with limited cooling capacity. Its limitation to 35W sustained and official Tj max of 80°C are artificial and essentially fiction, and the same silicon will readily do 91W sustained with a Tj max of 100°C as seen on the i7-7700K.
Processor temperature under load tells you almost nothing about the power draw or efficiency of the chip, because the temperature can be controlled to almost any value desired through a combination of varying cooling effort and varying clock speeds.
Won't work on M processors, (un)fortunately.
I recently installed an app to manually activate the fans on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro as I've never been able to trigger them over the past 4+ years. Just to check whether the fans even work (they do).
You must be using only lame languages like C or Go or Python that aren’t optimized for laptop warming during compilation. Try using a Real Language with a Real Compiler, like C++ or Rust or Swift, and build decent-sized projects using all cores.
(All joking aside, this is why I have a MacBook Pro. Compilation easily hits the Air’s thermal limits and the performance boost on the Pro with its fan is impressive.)
[deleted]
I get them going full blast in 2 minutes from cities skylines.
You could also build Chromium from source. It makes my M1 Max's fans sing.
I left my Mac Studio running at 100% CPU on all cores for 14 hours, and the case ended up noticeably warm to the touch. It is possible!
Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occupy a core with a 100% kernel_task that didn’t do any work but which would serve to prevent actual work from being scheduled onto that core. When four or five out of the six cores were occupied by kernel_task, I knew I was in for a bag of hurt (to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs). Responsiveness went completely to hell. The machine became effectively unusable.
After a while my normal procedure was to run with the thing sitting on top of an ice pack. That would let me run a 60-90 minute video conference without troubles.
The only redeeming feature of these machines is that they could emulate old x86 hardware at speed. That allowed me to run old apps on old OSes without having to keep old hardware running.
My Intel MBP would noticeably raise the whole room's temperature, while the fans ran so loud. We had some corporate security software that would occasionally go haywire and lock up 100% of a core until you rebooted. If you got that at the same time as a video call it would become too physically painful to touch any part of the metal body with bare skin.
Maybe the same type. Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise. The temperature in the room is going up noticeably for 1-2 degrees.
Speaking of cold weather and warming up computers... I've had my fair share of long bicycle commutes during cold winters and I always wondered whether booting up the laptop right after arriving has any effect on the long-term reliability? Like, are there any components which suffer from being activated when they're really cold?
I always leave the laptop untouched for at least 10 minutes when coming in from the cold. Don't know if it helps but it makes me feel better.
"This will start 6 threads that each peg your CPU... "
they're doing what to my CPU????
Fully utilize.
Also, pour one for the death of the analog speedo. Peg the needle, no more!
Bend over for big tech!
For those without spacebar heating?
They broke that workflow in a recent update. Software these days is horrendous
for those wondering: https://xkcd.com/1172/
How big is the risk of condensation when you bring a cold laptop inside?
All their spec sheets say they support up to x% _non-condensing_ humidity, which I’m guessing is about the dew point?
The uncomfortable fact about the mentioned Wisconsin winters is that inside dew point tends to be quite low.
I still use a 2019 MacBook Pro, in 2026 I found the best way to warm it up was to use it daily and not blow the dust out of it for 7 years. After I opened it up and did that it's running a lot cooler.
Does this work with M series ? M series is much colder and my fingers hurt <sob>
Running an LLM in the background is the contemporary version of this.
Looking forward to the follow up: How to Quickly Cool Down Your MacBook
Just do the trick in reverse, surely?
No you have to get the yesses back out
Unironically, yes.
My M3 Macbook Pro's palm rests get uncomfortably warm during regular IDE use. It doesn't get hot enough to spin up a fan, but it is enough to be distracting.
interesting. for me only the bottom and the top part above the keyboard gets warm during my work. 16inch model. Is yours the 14inch one?
I have the 14 inch and i've never felt it go warm.
I think the real question is what IDE we're talking about.
I am mostly in PHPStorm with several projects open + sometimes I have Xcode and/or Android Studio open as well
Strap a thermopile and a peltier on that bad boy
For years at work I've been just using Cinebench as a hand warmer on various Macbooks.
I always enjoyed using the power brick to warm up
Multithreaded:
I just need to build our monorepo
I think any next.js project will do the trick
I'm from California... What is this "cold" you speak of?
You don't know how right you are. I don't think Apple ever tests their hardware outside the CA climate.
Floridian. I thought "frozen lake" was some sort of Intel CPU reference.
The Donner Party begs to differ
I think my last Macbook was Wisconsin-locale instead of California. Closing the lid and putting it to sleep actually caused it to heat up (until the battery died).
It had the soul of a PC
Alternatively, you could try compiling an Xcode project. That should do the trick as well.
Or you could get a laptop that doesn't have an metal shell, like a thinkpad.
Or just leave the machine plugged in and turned on for like 5 minutes while you grab a coffee or have a conversation. It doesn't really take that long to warm up to room temperature. Unless this guy is like biking 15 miles to work in the winter in which case, he is doing Wisconsin wrong, you're supposed to drive to work with a beer to warm you up.
they often have a magnesium bottom shell
Now do the opposite for the summer! Show me a command line that cools down the machine! ;)
yes only writes y, not the whole word yes
unless you type
In homeoffice I always work in the nude and the cold metal of my macbook pro hurts my thighs…
Or something useful, save space, compressing some talk or edu video, just 6 fps is usually enough for slides or code, opus audio can go as low as 32k and still be decent compared to source quality, expect 10-15x size reduction
can go more crazy with this soupnpm install
Needs 2019 in title, this is Intel MacBooks not Apple Silicon.
I've found that Baldur's Gate 3 will warm up my apple silicon (everyday tasks do not).
Is that running on Rosetta 2? Rosetta 2 does (or did, maybe it's removed now) a fine job running x86 code on Apple Silicon, but boy was it cycle-hungry to do it.
BG3 is a native game, they dropped x86 support shortly after launch on macOS (or maybe even in beta)
Apple Silicon is not really the simultaneously silent and quiet and cool system it was in the M1 days.
If you get a MacBook Air it will get quite toasty at throttling limits. After all, it has no fan.
MacBook Pro models and Apple computers in general tend to favor quiet operation over keeping the laptop surface cool.
Many PC gaming laptops go out of their way to keep warm air off the keyboard deck with a high willingness to use fan noise to accomplish that since the assumption is that you’re resting your hands on the computer for an extended period and you have headphones on for your game anyway.
[flagged]
The target market of the "Neo crap" doesn't care and/or isn't pushing workloads that come anywhere near saturating it. It's a laptop that doesn't bend, has a decent screen, has a decent battery, and isn't full of adware.
The article was about warming up a laptop. Neo can do it too.
And your comment was calling it crap for some reason. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if you’d left that apparently superfluous word out of your comment.
How does the Neo getting to 100°C make it crap? By that logic, aren't all older Intel/x86 chips crap? If anything, I find it impressive that a small laptop CPU can do 100°C without a problem...my i7-7700T M710qs hit 75°C and throttle within a minute if I use a tool like y-cruncher or stress-ng. To be fair, totally different purpose.
For a very long time now, it has been the case that in the short term most processors will boost high enough for the die to reach around 100°C. When you see a reading substantially lower than that like your example of 75°C, either the system has throttled for a reason other than processor die temperature (eg. throttling to limit the temperature of the outer case of the machine) or the temperature reading you're seeing does not correspond to the hottest part of the chip and the throttling is based on the presumption that a different part of the chip that is not directly monitored will be much hotter.
In the specific case of the i7-7700T, the "T" suffix for Intel CPUs usually means you have mainstream desktop silicon with arbitrarily reduced long-term turbo limits, intended to be used in small form factor PCs with limited cooling capacity. Its limitation to 35W sustained and official Tj max of 80°C are artificial and essentially fiction, and the same silicon will readily do 91W sustained with a Tj max of 100°C as seen on the i7-7700K.
Processor temperature under load tells you almost nothing about the power draw or efficiency of the chip, because the temperature can be controlled to almost any value desired through a combination of varying cooling effort and varying clock speeds.
Won't work on M processors, (un)fortunately.
I recently installed an app to manually activate the fans on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro as I've never been able to trigger them over the past 4+ years. Just to check whether the fans even work (they do).
You must be using only lame languages like C or Go or Python that aren’t optimized for laptop warming during compilation. Try using a Real Language with a Real Compiler, like C++ or Rust or Swift, and build decent-sized projects using all cores.
(All joking aside, this is why I have a MacBook Pro. Compilation easily hits the Air’s thermal limits and the performance boost on the Pro with its fan is impressive.)
I get them going full blast in 2 minutes from cities skylines.
You could also build Chromium from source. It makes my M1 Max's fans sing.
I left my Mac Studio running at 100% CPU on all cores for 14 hours, and the case ended up noticeably warm to the touch. It is possible!
Try increasing to 10 cores. Works on my m3 pro.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
sanest emacs user
There really is an xkcd for everything
Honestly m1 was very cool no matter what workload you threw at it but at this point m4 max does get pretty hot even with just web browsing.
I've definitely had my m1 air get uncomfortably hot to touch - particularly right above the keyboard. (While doing developery things)
Can't say I've ever thought of a word like "developery", but now that I've seen it I like it a lot :-)
Another (more useful) option is to render an animation in Blender, or run a local LLM.
Honestly i prefer my macbook frosty
This is now running Cyberpunk or an LLM locally
[dead]