The amount of fur that manages to squeeze everywhere is insane.
The WORST thing, though, is that all her fur makes its way into all my musical instruments, including underneath each individual key of my upright piano (now effectively a felt piano).
Foolish me is considering buying a new macbook this year. I have no choice because Apple and Microsoft will do everything in their power to ship the shittiest personal computing products every year.
1. Have you considered adding historical tracking/graphing? Being able to see throttling patterns over time would be super valuable for understanding workload impacts and diagnosing thermal issues.
2. What metrics are you pulling to detect throttling? CPU frequency scaling, temperature sensors via IOKit, or something else? Would be interested in the technical details.
3. Integration with menu bar apps like iStat Menus or Stats could be useful - or even just exporting metrics to a format they can consume.
4. For M-series chips, have you noticed different throttling behavior compared to Intel Macs? The efficiency/performance core split makes this more complex.
5. Any plans to add alerts/notifications when throttling occurs? Or maybe even automated actions (like pausing backup processes when thermal throttling is detected)?
One use case: this would be great for developers running heavy builds or ML training. Knowing when your machine is throttling helps decide whether to optimize code, get better cooling, or just wait it out.
Neywiny•2h ago
amelius•1h ago
nottorp•1h ago
Remember to put your coat and hat on!
angristan•1h ago
On Macbooks with fans, I started tuning my fan curve with iStat Menus (https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-curve) because I noticed the default curve was lagging behind and thermal throttling kicked in before the fan even reach max speed.
For Apple Silicon specifically, I recently discovered that there is a "high power mode" (https://support.apple.com/en-us/101613) that allows the fans to run at higher speed. So I don't use the custom fan curves anymore, it helped me a lot (but it does get quite noisy on a 14" M4 Max)
For a Macbook Air, not much you can do besides closing stuff, or elevating the macbook and pointing a fan at it or things like that... but yeah it's a bit desperate!
somat•54m ago
Environment: I am currently playing with a pid control function for my gpu fan, that is instead of saying "map temp x to fanspeed y"(fan curve) say "set fan to speed needed for temp z"(pid control)
Question: is there a reason pid type control is never a thermal option? Or put another way, is there something about the desired thermal characteristics of a computer that make pid control undesirable?
As a final thought, I have halfway convinced myself that in a predictable thermal system a map would match a set of pid parameters anyway.
embedding-shape•39m ago
Why though? I generally don't care about the specific temperatures of my CPU and GPU, just that they don't get too warm, so for the CPU (AIO) I basically have "0% up until 45C, then increment up to 100% when it hits 90C" and the same for the GPU except it's always at 10%.
I guess I could figure out target temperatures, and do it the other way, but I'm not sure what the added complexity is for? The end results (I need at least) remains the same, cool down the hardware when it gets hotter, and for me, the simpler the better.
I also have two ambient temperature sensors in the chassi itself, right at the intake and the outtake. The intake one is just for monitoring if my room gets too warm so the computer won't be effective at cooling (as the summers here get really warm) and the outtake one is to check overall temperature and control the intake fans. In reality, I don't think I need to do even this, just the CPU+GPU temperature + set fan speed based on that feels simple enough to solve 99% of the things you'd like to be able to do here.
jtbayly•1h ago
I sometimes face thermal throttling because a process has gone wacko, and all I have to do is kill it. But first I have to notice it.
I rarely notice until half my battery is gone!
Neywiny•1h ago
jtbayly•1h ago
angristan•34m ago
nicoburns•43m ago
Quit some apps probably. I often have a bunch of stuff running in the background that I haven't bothered to close yet. It also sounds like it'd be good for detecting software that's gotten stuck in a busy loop or similar.
And/or possibly take a tea break while it chills out.
embedding-shape•41m ago
Depends on the environment, back when I had a MacBook, they still had fans, but the new ones are all passive, I think. So then the surface (or lack of it) below it would matter the most. If you keep it in your lap, on top of a hairy blanket, it'll be a lot effective at getting rid of the heat compared to if you have it sitting on a stone table, as just one example.
saagarjha•27m ago
hu3•17m ago
vunderba•41m ago
I adjusted it to ramp the fans up at more conservative values because otherwise during intense usage periods it would hit 90C+.
https://github.com/crystalidea/macs-fan-control
giancarlostoro•13m ago