Macs are SLOWER than PCs. Here’s why.

PC fanboys love to complain that Mac's are just so much more expensive than a PC but as we've demonstrated a handful of times in the past in many cases it's actually just as expensive to custom build a PC with the same specs and features as a given Mac the problem though is that Mac's often don't perform as you would expect given their specifications so today's video is a deep dive into what's going on and why powerful yet small computer upgrade King gaming desktops feature exceptional cooling for near limitless specs like 32 core thread ripper or 18 core Extreme Edition CPUs with RT X xx atti graphics check them out at the link below [Music] now as you probably already know Apple designs their own computers and when I say designs I mean designs they're slim they're lightweight and they've got specs that make your eyes light up and go ooh but in the pursuit of sex appeal they often don't do those sometimes very impressive specs justice the reason thermals now this is a little bit strange for reasons that we'll get into more later but watch this I can fire up quite literally any stress test this is prime95 right here and within moments I will have temperatures rapidly approaching a hundred degrees the point at which most Intel CPUs will throttle back their clock speeds in order to protect themselves from damage how can they get away with this well apples done a little bit of trickery here and adjusted the voltage and fan curves in Mac OS so that they can hit a higher thermal threshold without throttling too far below intel's advertised base clock but even at room temperature it's on a knife set and in boot camp those tweaks gets thrown out the windows pun intended which means the voltages are higher and the threshold for throttling triggers sooner making for a sluggish mess of an experience overall this actually made waves back when the 2018 MacBook Pro launched because Apple accidentally didn't have those tweaks enabled in Mac OS meaning that the core i9 equipped model throttled well below base clock at a hundred degrees now they promptly fixed it but is it fixed or is it just software trickery to mask a bad design to find out we designed a little test we compared the MacBook Pro 2018 and the Mac Mini running the blender classroom rendering test using their stock cooling solutions at room temperature against the exact same two machines inside a custom chill box of our own creation that we held well below ambient temperatures and what's obvious from our test is that in Apple's pursuit of sex appeal they're leaving a significant amount of performance on the table for their users now the obvious retort might be yeah but that's a totally unrealistic scenario would a laptop PC achieved these results and in fairness the answer in many cases is no most notebooks PC and Mac alike with Intel age K series chips thermal throttle but many of them to a lesser degree part of the problem boils down to intel's delays in getting their 10 nanometer production going and this is compounded by their recent pattern of releasing processors with TDP s so this is the amount of heat that they're supposed to output that are SPECT much lower than they actually should be they've even done this with some of their desktop processors essentially what they're doing right now then is stuffing more and more cores into the same package size as before but with the same transistor size meaning that they're generating more heat that means that the only way for a manufacturer to rein in these chips is to test them themselves then over build their cooling solution which clearly can actually be done it's just that Apple isn't doing it and the thing is that even if you don't care about getting every last drop of performance out of your computer this creates all their problems to a computer any computer for a fact will fail more quickly when subjected to higher operating temperatures over its lifetime and this can come about in a whole host of different ways just ask Louis Rossman or for that matter anyone who's owned a 2011 or 2012 MacBook Pro with a dedicated GPU not only is heat bad for the chips themselves the ones producing it it's actually also unhealthy for the board that they're attached to hot spots on a PCB can and will cause flexing and warping as the materials repeatedly expand and contract which can turn lead to BGA components breaking away from their solder pads and that's to say nothing of the health of any surface mount components nearby like capacitors or resistors all of which would require either a time-consuming repair or if you go the official route a costly and wasteful replacement of the entire board so then what gives why would Apple do this to their hardware well when it comes to the performance question it seems to be because for a large enough of proportion of their customers the looks and the status symbol of owning the machine are just more important than whether it's actually quick off the line although on that note one innovation in recent CPU designs that has masked apples negligence is the advent of turbo boost Intel's name for a technology that dramatically boosts the clock speed of a CPU temporarily during short bursts of activity like while loading a webpage or launching an application turbo boost allows machines like their 2015 MacBook to actually feel pretty snappy in day to day use but require literal water cooling to reach peak performance in heavy workloads as for the reliability issues honestly my best guess is that they just don't care I'm sure like any insurance company they've done the analysis of their failure rates over time to ensure that Apple Care customers are covered by the policy that they bought and then as for the ones who didn't buy Apple Care but guess you should have bought Apple Care it's not like you can take your business somewhere else if you want Mac OS the real head-scratcher here for me though is that Apple considers it okay for even their professional-grade computers to throttle like this but not for their flagship iPhone you can run games or benchmarks all day long on this thing and never lose any performance to heat compare that to competing Android handsets and you've got yourself actually a very compelling reason to buy an iPhone so why this difference in philosophy oh sorry oh you were waiting for an answer I actually don't have one but what I will do is I'm gonna put that on my list of things to ask my good friend Tim Apple if he ever agrees to sit down for an interview with me although I sincerely doubt that's ever going to happen because I'm going on the record now saying that my next question then will be why do you advertise your products in ways that you know for a fact are misleading the 2018 MacBook Pros product page is a great example of this so you can see 4.8 gigahertz touted as the cpu speed up front but you probably won't notice that further down the base clock that this machine struggles to maintain by the way is just 2.9 gigahertz a difference of almost 40% that performance disparity is gonna take the MacBook Pro from feeling quick and snappy while surfing the web to feeling sluggish and unresponsive the moment that you start a render and it stops boosting and that's not even considering the dedicated GPU you run both the CPU and the GPU simultaneously like in a game or a hardware assisted video export and you're in for a pretty bad time one of the most frustrating aspects of all of this is that they're blatantly doing it on purpose in our recent video where we used liquid metal thermal interface material on the MacBook Pro we found that even with better cooling temperatures were the same so Apple took advantage of the extra thermal Headroom by keeping the fans low for as long as possible instead of attempting to boost the CPUs performance for longer I mean I get it nobody wants their fans to ramp up like a jet engine just because they loaded a big file in Photoshop that made the CPU work for five seconds but if we're running an all core load we're hitting 90 plus degrees for more than that the system needs to kick its fans into overdrive in order to protect itself as for why Apple doesn't just equip its machines with processors that are more suited to the form factors that they target remember guys a slower CPU that doesn't throttle is not slower than a faster one that does we're not sure why they don't do that the only answer we can come up with is low marketing but whatever the real reason is the conclusion is clear here Apple is specifically targeting the less tech-savvy market with their promises of magical high performance thin design lightweight and low noise all with stellar battery life but you simply can't avoid the laws of physics and there is nothing magical about what they're doing hide your true IP address with private Internet access P ia allows you to bypass your restrictions and censorship by making you appear as though you are connecting from somewhere else you can connect up to five devices at once it's got an internet kill switch if your VPN gets disconnected accidentally it prevents DNS leaks and it includes Mase P IAS built-in malware blocker P ia offers various levels of encryption that can be customized and they've got apps for Windows Mac Android iOS and a Chrome extension so check it out at LM GGG / p IA linus - we're gonna have that linked below so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you know what to do but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description to be clear it's not a terrible machine just thermal throttles also down there's our merge door which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 4,171,209

Rating: 4.8830371 out of 5

Keywords: apple, mac, mac mini, macbook, computers, performance, benchmark, investigation, slow, throttling, chiller, fridge, macbook pro, cooling, turbo boost

Id: 947op8yKJRY

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Woolgun]

I really do not understand the dumb argument over semantics that is happening here.

Macs do not perform as well as they could and as well as some of their windows counterparts do. That's the point of the video, not what counts as throttling, jfc.

[u/Mndless]

What's really fucked up is that there is room, even in those existing chassis, to put additional cooling fin area to better deal with the heat. apple just didn't bother, which is disappointing. It also wouldn't be too much for them to increase the amount of ventilation on their laptops to improve the efficiency of their existing fan setup. Larger cooling vents on the outer edge of the laptop would let it better intake cool air.

[u/WinterCharm]

A good LTT discussion about Apple and its desktops/laptops throttling... and how its bad for everyone (including apple).

[u/moofunk]

A Mac is neither fast nor slow. It finishes precisely when it means to.

[u/SacredGeometry25]

115 comments? There's not even a dozen?