Thermal Throttling Has Been Allegedly Confirmed On New 2018 MacBook Pro With Core i9

Apple recently made their fans incredibly happy with the rollout of newly refreshed 2018 MacBook Pros, but after just a few days of use, one tech YouTuber is making claims of excessive thermal throttling.

PC Mag defines thermal throttling as the adjustment of the CPU’s clock speed based on the amount of heat it is currently being generated. Thermal throttling helps to cool the chip when it gets too hot by lowering its speed — effectively slowing down your computer. BGR reports, according to YouTuber Dave Lee, that the latest design of Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro with its 6-core 2.9GHz Intel Core i9 processor does not provide sufficient cooling for the processor which causes the chip to throttle down its performance speed in order to prevent overheating and damage to the machine.

Lee posted a video on his YouTube channel where he attempted to further explain this issue. The video shows that the i9 chip had a difficult time maintaining its base clock speed while running at full utilization — in Lee’s case while he was attempting to render a video in Adobe Premiere. Lee even went as far as to say the newly released 2018 version of the MacBook Pro is actually clocking slower speeds than last year’s version with the i7 chip.

“This CPU is an unlocked, overclockable chip but all of that CPU potential is wasted inside this chassis — or more so the thermal solution that’s inside here,” Lee says.

The video revealed that it took 39 minutes for the new 2018 MacBook Pro to complete the rendering job while the older model was able to do the same task in 35 minutes.

Lee does point out that thermal throttling is not unusual for powerful machines and mobile devices made by manufacturers across the board, but he says the level of thermal throttling happening in Apple’s latest and greatest laptop is “unacceptable.”

“This kind of thermal throttling really affects the end user. It doesn’t matter what you’re using it for, like if you’re a Final Cut user, or an Adobe Premiere user, or if you’re using it for software development or calculations like fluid dynamics — it doesn’t matter what you’re doing with your device. If you have any kind of extended computational work that uses the CPU — that’s probably why you’re looking at these devices in the first place — it’s going to throttle. And that’s unacceptable to me,” he said.

It would be easy to assume that something might just be wrong with Lee’s MacBook Pro, but other users have also reported having similar issues with their own devices. There are now numerous Reddit threads of users documenting their grievances with the new i9 chip.

Apple has yet to comment on the issue.