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points by saturn8601 1 day ago | 0 comments

I heard that was a result of them designing for certain thermal envelopes ahead of time and Intel then delivering chips that didn't meet the specs they were promised. Not sure is this is what happened though so take with a grain of salt.

If this was the case, one the one hand they should be criticized for releasing such bad laptops on the market but if they had already decided on developing their own silicon then maybe it made sense to just accept that some generations of Macbook were going to have thermal issues and focus all efforts on the future.

[–] rowanG077 1 day ago

That would be excusable for a generation of macbooks. Not over multiple generations.

[–] saturn8601 1 day ago

Correct me if I am wrong but the heat problems were essentially Intel chips in the mid to late 2010s right? They are all essentially the same chip design with small window dressing added each year. The underlying problem is the same. Old design that suffered from Intel's issues in their fabs.

[–] rowanG077 1 day ago

Yes, but there was ample time for Apple to re-design the thermal system of their macbooks. Instead they kept releasing extremely thermally limited devices year after year.

[–] saturn8601 1 day ago

This was addressed in my second comment. I am agreeing with you there. Jony Ive lost his job partially because of this I suspect.

[–] twoodfin 1 day ago

By that time they had clearly made the decision to invest in their own CPUs and platform architecture.

[–] rowanG077 1 day ago

So what you're telling me is that Apple is willing to put multiple generations of devices out to pasture because in the future they intend fix it with a new platform. That does not inspire confidence that they now care about thermals, the opposite actually. What you're saying is that they again might have slipped up and we need to wait for the next redesign for it to improve.

[–] twoodfin 19 hours ago

More: Apple makes long-term investments and big technology bets.

They placed a large bet for the MacBook on Intel’s roadmap at exactly the wrong time, and it screwed up multiple product planning and execution generations as a result.

Apple has finely tuned their organization to be great at long-term plans. That has come at the cost of being able to adjust “quickly” when those plans end up being flawed. The fiasco with the butterfly keyboard is maybe the best example.