Macbook Pro 2018 overheating, and other strange problems

I had the exact same issue when I replaced the new 15" unit. High Sierra ran fine. Upgraded to Mojave thinking that the first one may have had a problem. No luck. Hot and battery drain again. Rolling back from Mojave to High Sierra is not so simple. Especially if you want to start with a 'new' out of the box unit that originally came with High Sierra. I decided to let Apple do it for me. Arrived at the store when they opened (no appointment) and was taken 45 minutes later. Completed the roll back and walked out with my unit as new. Set up again. High Sierra is running fine. My applications and photo editing programs running fine. Battery is 'normal' and heat is normal.

I need the processing power of the MBPro, otherwise I would return for a refund and wait until they solve the problem. However, I am still convinced that Apple will fix the hardware issues caused by Mojave. My short time with Dark Mode was nice. Looking forward to being able to use that again. In the meantime....

Same here,

My first time that i bought a mac. I was convinced by friends with Mac, but this is really unpleasant!

The irritating thing is that service of the apple distributer in Israel is so bad that it wouldn't help complaining...

Really disappointing

I second that. gladly I just paid 2200€ which is still a joke for this machine.

Don´t expect any help from anyone in power from appple to help here. won´t happen. and apple will not say anything about all those problems at all. but let´s face it. they took it way to far. poeple are more and more getting ****** all over the internet.

Same problem here. Macbook pro overheats only using CHROME and browsing GMAIL. Battery life y poor.

with a few task CPU es 70 celsius degrees of more... Just having a 10 minutes meeting through google hangouts and it burns

I have been a windows user, This is my first Macbook laptop.;...and honestly Apple is abusing. Mine is a 2,100 dollars. My wife has a Lenovo $800 machine that works better: it doesn't heat like this.... My final conclusion this macbook pro cost doesn't worth

Macbook Book pro has serious issues... totally disappointed

2018 MBP TB 13" /w i7 here, and the battery is empty in 3 hrs if the CPUs are boosted. And anything, really, a breeze, a movie, a bigger network transfer, will surely trigger the boost. It is like a rogue Formula 1, and it does cost 4k, perhaps the most expensive notebook series ever. Any decent manufacturer would do a recall.

Deeply disappointed also to see that Apple is incapable of issuing an OS in keep with the hardware, and fails to meet the longterm legacy of congruent hardware-software development. Apple, wake up, you can do much better then that!

I had to replace my first MBP 13' 2018 in January '19 because it couldn't download Mojave. They gave me a new laptop in return.. This second one I have has the worst battery life ever, too!! It barely overheats too, and my CPU% isn't even above 80% for any apps running. I've used it for one hour, just having my email tab open to do notes on something, and I'm at 84% like that, and my laptop is pretty hot.

My first one never had this problem and was excellent. I take care of my equipment, and I am very disappointed. Unfortunately as a college student, I do not have much time to go to an apple store an hour away from here (freshman w/o a car too!).

My old 2012 MPB was almost better with battery life than this!

Sounds very much like Spotlight is indexing the system. On a new Mac it could take up to 48 hours. I have a 2018 MBP and the battery life is the full 10 hours quoted by Apple. I would also recommend to stay away from Chrome unless you really need it. Chrome is a big resource hog.

This is definetely a apple bad design. I sent my macbook pro to support. They spent 2 days testing it and the conclusion was everything is OK. But it's not.... $2,000 dollars for a machine that burns can't be normal.

My final conclusion is that this machines heat easely and quickly when CPU has to work. just opening lightroom for example and seeing pics makes the CPU temperature goes to 100 celsius degree.... just having a GoToMeeting o seeing a YOUTUBE video makes this machine get tempeturatures of 80 - 85 celsius degree.

Apple considers this normal. But again for me it is not. It's a design problem

"It's a design problem"

Just because you feel the temperatures aren't acceptable doesn't make something a design problem. Everybody has different tolerances in terms of what they feel is considered to be overheating. Maybe this just isn't the right machine for you. Try a different version of Macbook or try a Dell or Lenovo laptop. I hear they don't have design problems.

That's was exactly my conclusion. my next machine will be Dell o Lenovo. Currently my Lenovo laptop at work heats too much less than MacBookPro. Screen has less resolution but it doesn't burn me and performance is ok.

It is true that's everybody has different tolerances in terms of what they feel as heat or not... But... a machine burning your fingers when you touch the touchbar I don't think is acceptable for anybody... more than 70 or 80 celsius degrees is a serious problem that can have health implications.... Something that can burn you can have legal implications for apple... Unfortunately I don't have time for going deeper with this case, but it is defenitely something unacceptable...

While I won't necessarily discount your concerns I'm not exactly buying your post about your fingers getting burned. To each his own. I was actually being facetious about the Dell and Lenovo having no" design problems". Every model of Lenovo (including the new X1E) has issues and Dell's own forum is filled with complaints on the XPS line. Grass won't be greener. Good luck.

"try a Dell or Lenovo laptop. I hear they don't have design problems."

That's not true. I see similar complaints about heat on forums for similarly thin Windows PC laptops that use similar CPUs, including Dell and Razer. Any laptop this thin is going to get hot if the CPU is used in a high performance mode. There's no way around it given the limited potential for cooling.

Someone above mentioned Lightroom heating up. That's expected because Lightroom is going to build and cache as many previews of raw files as it can in the background when idle. That is a performance behavior so that you don't have to wait as long when moving from image to image. There is a preference to turn it off if you would like to wait a little longer so that the machine can be a little cooler. But ANY raw processing application will heat up a laptop when editing an image, due to the CPU intensive nature of that operation.

Heat during video conferencing can occur because the laptop is encoding/decoding video and audio in two directions, incoming and outgoing.

80 degrees Celsius is not uncommon for these thin laptops. A desktop Mac or PC might idle at 30-40 degrees and max out at 55-60C due to the superior space for cooling with large fans, but it's not uncommon for laptops today to idle at 60C and max out at 100C. They won't exceed 100C because that is the thermal limit for many current Intel mobile CPUs.

Looking at the screen shots in the first post in this thread, Chrome is a prime suspect in that case. I never liked how much CPU, GPU, and battery Chrome consumes.

Just do a search on "Dell XPS heat" "Lenovo heat" "Razer Blade heat" and you'll see that you might not solve your problems by trying a PC. People complain about the same thing! But if one of those runs cooler for you, then that's the right laptop for you.

I just looked at the Windows Central review for the Razer Blade laptop which says "Total CPU usage doesn't seem to reach ridiculous levels, but the temperature will rise quite quickly." The headline is "Razer Blade 15 review: Hot in every sense of the word." The Verge's headline for the same laptop review is "Razer Blade 15 review: Hot under pressure." The grass isn't always greener over there.

I think part of the problem is, industry-wide, that Intel has been so late with its 10nm processors that laptop makers thought they would be working with cooler, more efficient CPUs but they got these instead.

The only time I'm really concerned with high temp is if the laptop should not be busy for reason, or if it's shutting itself down. What should happen during high temp is it spins fans up and throttles back to stay within thermal limits. But it should continue operating indefinitely. If heat causes it to shut down, even when it's properly ventilated, that is a real hardware issue that Apple should look at.

Mojave may be part of the problem. My 2018 MacBook Pro runs High Sierra and it's only hot when I expect it to be, due to the load. Uptime is 9 days since last restart, so it isn't shutting down unexpectedly. Battery life is 6-10 hours depending on load (sometimes I edit video).

I guess you missed this part of my post before you posted.

" I was actually being facetious about the Dell and Lenovo having no" design problems". Every model of Lenovo (including the new X1E) has issues and Dell's own forum is filled with complaints on the XPS line. "

Agreed, and that's exactly what I was trying to tell the earlier poster. People always think Apple is the only company that makes computers with issues. It's only because of Apple's high popularity and YouTubers who say negative things to get clicks. Grass isn't always greener. The Lenovo X1 Extreme was something many Windows users were waiting for. Lenovo quotes it as 15 hours battery life, but with the 4K screen the battery life gets cut down to a max of 6 hours with simple use. It's not much more with the standard 1080 HD screen. It gets very hot and drains the battery. Noisy fans on this machine is another big complaint.

One question for all. I have been able to deal with constant over heating using the MacFanControlApp. An app that let you monitor temperature and let set the rpm for the fans. I set manual rpm only when temeperature is unbearable. But I wonder if this can reduce fans life.... if I set rpm about 2500 or 3000 temperature is not an issue, but I am aware of damaging fans...

and by the way, this is one of the reasons I consider this an bad design. It’s ok that cpu heats when is working, but why apple let temperatures goes so high and don’t increase the rpm of fans? This is something that can be solved by software. Sometimes as th original post describes fans don’t start until temp is 60 or 70 Celsius degrees. Exactly what this video shows

thanks

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