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Apple Confirms MacBook Pro Thermal Throttling, Issues Software Fix (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: For a week, we have been seeing reports that the newly released MacBook Pros run hot, which all kicked off after this video by Dave Lee. They run so hot, in fact, that the very fancy 8th Gen Intel Core processors inside them were throttled down to below their base speed. Apple has acknowledged that thermal throttling is a real issue caused by a software bug, and it's issuing a software update today that is designed to address it.
The company also apologized, writing, "We apologize to any customer who has experienced less than optimal performance on their new systems." Apple claims that it discovered the issue after further testing in the wake of Lee's video, which showed results that Apple hasn't seen in its own testing. In a call with The Verge, representatives said that the throttling was only exhibited under fairly specific, highly intense workloads, which is why the company didn't catch the bug before release. The bug affects every new generation of the MacBook Pro, including both the 13-inch and 15-inch sizes and all of the Intel processor configurations. It does not affect previous generations.
The company also apologized, writing, "We apologize to any customer who has experienced less than optimal performance on their new systems." Apple claims that it discovered the issue after further testing in the wake of Lee's video, which showed results that Apple hasn't seen in its own testing. In a call with The Verge, representatives said that the throttling was only exhibited under fairly specific, highly intense workloads, which is why the company didn't catch the bug before release. The bug affects every new generation of the MacBook Pro, including both the 13-inch and 15-inch sizes and all of the Intel processor configurations. It does not affect previous generations.
"It was actually Intel's fault. They didn't change the TDP for the 6-core CPUs."
The i9 SKU was intentionally designed to have the same TDP as the 4-core i7 SKU.
Not changing the TDP isn't a mistake, it's the entire point. None of the MacRumors articles you link to support your implication that not changing the TDP was a fault.
Either way Apple is culpable as well. In fact many of those mac rumor comments support that position. Apple's hands are not clean here.
All hardware ships with buggy software to some degree or another. And this is extremely minor as it exhibits itself under very specific scenarios and in most cases artificial workloads and the end result is a slightly slower CPU and nothing else. We're not talking about a data leak here. This only makes the news because every tech "journalist" is looking for the latest Apple scandal to garner a bunch of clicks / views.
It would have been much, MUCH worse for Apple to miss their hardware release date. No company, when faced with a choice of shipping hardware with a minor software bug that can be patched later, and slipping a hardware release would choose the latter.
Even if it was an error in the Intel data-sheet, didn't Apple actually *test* this machine under load before they released it?
Did they not see for themselves that there was severe thermal throttling going oin and say "that's not right" - before sending it back to the lab for some changes?
It would appear not.