A video surfaced on the web just last week by a YouTuber known as Dave Lee, in which it appears that the all-new MacBook Pro gets hot pretty easily. Not just your ordinary hot, by so hot that, MacBook themselves throttled their processors to even the base-level Clock Speed. The 8th Generation Intel processors were expected to remain rather cool with their relatively low power consumption, yet it appears, the ones in the MacBook tend to get hot.
Though if you just purchased a MacBook Pro, and are worried about it, you don’t have to since it is a known issue now and Apple itself has admitted to this. According to them, it is just a software issue and thankfully not a hardware one, and a fix in the form of a software update is expected by today. The company formally apologized for this mishap, and wrote that “We apologize to any customer who has experienced less than optimal performance on their new systems.”
Disappointingly Apple wouldn’t ever have come to know about the issue if it hadn’t been for Dave Lee’s video. This means that Apple hadn’t really tested its new MacBooks the way they ought to. Though, they do have a plausible explanation for this: The throttling doesn’t affect everyone but only those in very special circumstances, for instance when the processor is over-burdened with excessive load. These are extreme circumstances, so it is very possible that Apple could have over-looked the issue – Something you don’t really expect from Apple though.
The software bug surprisingly doesn’t affect the earlier versions of the MacBook line up, but rather the new ones. Every MacBook model, the 13-inches, and 15-inches both with any of the processor configurations, get affected by the glitch.
Here is Apple’s complete statement on the issue:
Following extensive performance testing under numerous workloads, we’ve identified that there is a missing digital key in the firmware that impacts the thermal management system and could drive clock speeds down under heavy thermal loads on the new MacBook Pro. A bug fix is included in today’s macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 Supplemental Update and is recommended. We apologize to any customer who has experienced less than optimal performance on their new systems. Customers can expect the new 15-inch MacBook Pro to be up to 70% faster, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar to be up to 2X faster, as shown in the performance results on our website.
As of now, it isn’t rather known what exactly is the “missing digital key”, Apple was talking about since Apple hasn’t provided further detail about it. What can only be gathered is that this certain digital key is what causes the MacBook’s temperatures to rise above than normal. We might have expected Apple to curtail down their performance claims regarding the new machines, but surprisingly, Apple is still sticking to their claims.
To prove this, they are going to put up one more benchmark claim on their official Website.