![]() ![]() Disable it, and the laptop only gets moderately warm, not hot, and hands stay comfortably dry. Turbo Boost lets laptops get too hot to comfortably hold in your lap, and so much heat radiates out that it can make hands sweaty. Disable it, and it’s almost impossible to get them to be audible. When Turbo Boost is enabled, the fans annoyingly spin up every time the system is under a heavy sustained load. With Turbo Boost disabled, peak CPU power consumption drops by 62%, with a correspondingly huge reduction in temperature. Here’s some thermal testing from my 8-core 16-inch MacBook Pro:ġ6-inch MacBook Pro (Late 2019, 2.4 GHz 8-core i9) Recently, as Intel has crammed more cores and higher clocks into smaller form factors and pushed thermal limits to new extremes, the gains have become even more significant. ![]() In 2018, I first argued for Low Power Mode on macOS with a list of possible tweaks, concluding that disabling Turbo Boost was still the best bang-for-the-buck tweak to improve battery life without a noticeable performance cost in most tasks. I’ve been disabling Intel Turbo Boost on my laptops with Turbo Boost Switcher Pro most of the time since 2015. I believe so strongly in its potential because I’ve been using it on my laptops (in a way) for years, and it’s fantastic. ![]() The sole exception, Low Power Mode on iOS, seems to be a huge hit: by offering a single toggle that chooses a different balance, people are able to greatly extend their battery life when they know they’ll need it. Software also plays a role, trying to keep everything background-updated, content-indexed, and photo-analyzed so it’s ready for us when we want it, but not so aggressively that we notice any cost to performance or battery life.Īpple’s customers don’t usually have control over these balances, and they’re usually fixed at design time with little opportunity to adapt to changing circumstances or customer priorities. Modern hardware constantly pushes thermal and power limits, trying to strike a balance that minimizes noise and heat while maximizing performance and battery life. In light of today’s rumor that a Pro Mode may be coming that seems to offer benefits in the opposite direction, 1 I wanted to re-make the case for a Low Power Mode on macOS - and explain why now is the time. A programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.Ībout Low Power Mode for Mac laptops: making the case again ![]()
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