 Apple's design philosophy has been, oh, let's be generous and say ambitious lately. First, we had the much smaller MacBook Pro 2016 with its completely redesigned low profile key switches that don't take too kindly to dust and debris. Otherwise, pretty nice machine. Then we got the iMac Pro, which crammed up to an 18 core processor into a design this thin with, well, predictable thermal results. And now in 2018, we are getting the, oh! Oh, shoot! Hold on. Just, oh! Sorry. Whew. Now we get to see what happens when you cram a core i9 into a chassis this small and, oh, hold on a second, what's this? Don't forget the sponsor spot. Oh, right! Mac Weldon. Mac Weldon makes great underwear, T-shirt, socks, wallets, and more. They believe in simple shopping, and if you use code Tech Tips, you'll get 20% off through the link below. What's up, guys? I'm James, and welcome to the Macbook Pro. I'm here to tell you about the Macbook Pro. I'm gonna show you how to use it. I'm gonna show you how to use it. Whether you use your MacBook Pro for coding, 3D animation, or just for browsing Facebook, you've probably been wondering why the heck Apple was taking so long to embrace Intel's eighth-gen CPUs with their dramatically higher performance and greater core counts. Well, as it turns out, they were cooking up something that on the surface looks the same. Same aluminum chassis, same touch bar, whether you love or hate it, and same lack of full-sized USB ports, although I'm all equipped with dongles now at this point anyway. But then when you get under the hood is actually really different from the last generation. The machine now responds to hey Siri commands. What's the weather like outside? The keyboard got a membrane to keep dirt and debris out of the switches. The display, as retina as ever, gets True Tone sensors so that it will actually adapt to ambient lighting. Personally not a fan, but to each their own. And those same four Thunderbolt 3 ports are now running Intel's new Titan Ridge controller, which means support for higher resolution monitors with DisplayPort 1.4. Though it should be noted that is only on MacBook Pros that are equipped with dedicated graphics cards. This is Intel's fault because they still haven't added DisplayPort 1.4 to their onboard GPUs. Getting back to performance then, let's go even deeper. Now, we opted for a nearly top-spec model with 32 gigs of DDR4 RAM. So it turns out they could do that. They just needed to put a slightly bigger battery in it because upgrading down the line will not be an option since the memory is soldered directly to the logic board. We also went for a 512 gig SSD that again will hopefully be enough forever because this too is soldered directly to the board. And this is for us anyway, where the controversy actually really starts with this machine. So the 2018 MacBook Pro includes the same T2 encryption chip that we saw on the iMac Pro, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. We're pro encryption and pro user privacy around here. The problem is the specific way they're doing it. So instead of making the SSD a self-contained, swappable module with encryption hardware built onto that, Apple has integrated the whole thing into the motherboard. So the workaround for this used to be that if your motherboard died, there was a special data recovery port that was wired into the SSD portion of the motherboard. And you could use that to pull the data off of an otherwise dead logic board for transfer. But then Apple went ahead and they removed that port in this model. So what that means is that as far as we know right now, if any motherboard component causes a system failure without taking your logic board to someone like Lewis Rossman for diagnostics and re-soldering, something that Apple does not endorse doing, and that even assumes that such a fix is possible, you are completely SOL on getting any of your data back from a dead logic board machine. Now, Time Machine, which thankfully is really awesome, will prevent most catastrophic data loss, but it's just something to be aware of because it's still possible that if you're on the road a lot, something could get lost in the mix if your machine were to fail for any reason. Bringing us then to our last component selection, the top of the line Core i9 mobile processor. So thanks to its higher core clocks and extra cash, not to mention its six cores, if you're into programming, editing video, or rendering complex 3D scenes, this is the option you would obviously want to choose. Except that reports of performance crippling thermal throttling began to roll in almost as soon as the first MacBook 2018 box was opened. And we actually saw it firsthand in our recent live stream. We are at 100 degrees. Once the workload started, it took only seconds for our processor to be running well below its base advertised clock speed. And then it only took another day or two for Intel to remove the tool that we were using to monitor the situation from their website for some definitely not PR related reason. Some folks were even reporting lower performance than the last gen MacBook Pro in Adobe Premiere. Now, Apple has since issued an oops, we didn't notice this product was fundamentally broken firmware update to address the situation. So what we figured we'd do is put that to the test. We'll be comparing our MacBook Pro 2018 against a reference desktop and two other Core i9 equipped laptops. One with a similar form factor to the MacBook and another with ample cooling to show us, well, how you could really expect a Core i9 to perform with adequate cooling. As usual, we'll kick things off with our gaming results. I mean, not too many gaming benchmarks. I mean, it is a Mac. Actually, these results are not too shabby considering that the ASUS ZenBook Pro rocks a faster GTX 1050 Ti GPU. And it looks like our Radeon Pro 560 in here performs roughly equivalent to our desktop RX 550 in this thermal package, which of course raises the question, how much better could it do with a proper cooler? We'll get to that, but first let's look at productivity. This is interesting. Our 2018 MacBook Pro with the fix applied closely matches or even beats our other Core i9 machines in CPU heavy workloads like Adobe Premiere and Blender. But only in Mac OS, in Windows 10 using Boot Camp, which remember is an Apple supported solution, it falls way behind. So is this a matter of Mac OS taking better advantage of Intel's speed shift technology than Windows does? Maybe our recorded temperatures will help us paint a clearer picture here. Very interesting. So for starters, calling what they did a firmware fix is a little disingenuous since firmware is typically OS agnostic and what Apple has done clearly only works in Mac OS at this time. So in Windows, the 2018 MacBook Pro is idling cooler than ASUS's similarly equipped ZenBook Pro, but then it immediately drops to its lowest power state when a heavy load is applied, just like before the fix. The good news is that on Mac OS, both the frequency and power curve are much smoother with no throttling whatsoever, making this a much more usable machine. I mean, it's mostly good news because the thing to keep in mind then is that all that Apple's really done here then is maybe apply a new fan curve along with TDP and clock speed limiting to the processor that manages to help it avoid constant performance killing power state changes. They are still allowing the CPU to run at 97 degrees as measured in an air conditioned office. The problem though is that's all they really can do at this point since opening up the device with an iFixit kit made it immediately obvious that they haven't redesigned the thermal solution here to handle the new 45 watt Core i9 CPU, which isn't to say that they were helpless for the last two years during the development of this laptop. There's clearly things they could have done, but we don't even entirely blame Apple for this. There is an industry wide problem that exists right now where laptop manufacturers are installing high performance processors in devices that they are designing to either thermal throttle and or run at unreasonable temperatures. Like I get it. I get the appeal of marketing top of the line specs in an amazingly thin package. And technically 97 degrees is lower than the T junction of a hundred degrees for a modern Intel CPU. But I mean, if you were a PC tech back in the Intel Prescott days, you'll remember running anything this hot is not cool. Pardon the pun. And over time will absolutely cause board warping or worse, which as we mentioned before, when we talked about this is where the controversy starts, comes with significant data loss implications on this particular product. And this is all something that I wouldn't consider ideal on a consumer product. And I certainly don't consider ideal on a professional one. So let us know in the comments, do you agree? Do you disagree? Has the pro become a meaningless word for more expensive? I wanna know your thoughts. And I also wanna know if you guys have ever heard of dbrand. dbrand is your source for awesome vinyl skins. They're available for laptops, phones, tablets, consoles, controllers and more. They use high quality, authentic true textured 3M vinyl on every product. They are cut with unrivaled precision. They measure many times to ensure they get a factory fit for your product. And not only do they look great, dbrand skins also help protect against incidental scratches and scuffs during everyday wear and tear. Their customer service robots are easy to work with and wonderful and their products are affordable and shipped worldwide. So don't take my word for it. Check out dbrand at the link in the video description and get a skin for yourself. Or a friend, dbrand makes a great gift. So thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked in the description is our merch storage has cool shirts like, what the heck? We'll have a Mack Weldon store link down there too. Like the shirts I normally wear and our community forum, which you should totally join.