 PC fanboys love to complain that Macs 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 Macs 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 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 whoo 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 prime 95 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 Apple's 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's edge and in boot camp those tweaks get 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 macOS 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 achieve these results and in fairness the answer in many cases is No most notebooks PC and Mac alike with Intel HK series chips thermal throttle But many of them to a lesser degree Part of the problem boils down to Intel's delays and getting their 10 nanometer production going and this is Compounded by their recent pattern of releasing processors with TDPs So this is the amount of heat that they're supposed to output that are spec'd 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 overbuild 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 other 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 Lewis 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 in 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 Apple's 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 web page 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 f***ing care I'm sure like any insurance company they've done the analysis of their failure rates over time To ensure that AppleCare customers are covered by the policy that they bought and then as for the ones who didn't buy AppleCare Guess you should have bought AppleCare. It's not like you can take your business somewhere else if you want macOS 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 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 GHz touted as the CPU speed up front But you probably won't notice that first of all the CPU speed is a little bit higher than the previous one 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 GHz A difference of almost 40% That performance disparity is going to 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 CPU's 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 5 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 So thanks for watching guys, if you disliked this video you know what to do 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 is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join