Seems like good work. From what I've heard developing on MacOS has not gotten easier over the years. I do question the point, though. I suppose there's merit in knowing if your configuration causes thermal throttling, but what are you able to do about it? There's no fan profile to tweak or anything. Can you undervolt them?
On Macbooks with fans, I started tuning my fan curve with iStat Menus (https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-curve) because I noticed the default curve was lagging behind and thermal throttling kicked in before the fan even reach max speed.
For Apple Silicon specifically, I recently discovered that there is a "high power mode" (https://support.apple.com/en-us/101613) that allows the fans to run at higher speed. So I don't use the custom fan curves anymore, it helped me a lot (but it does get quite noisy on a 14" M4 Max)
For a Macbook Air, not much you can do besides closing stuff, or elevating the macbook and pointing a fan at it or things like that... but yeah it's a bit desperate!
You know what, fair point. I know because my fans go haywire (except that one time my fans decided to just not work until I ran some incantations. The joys of Linux). If you're passively cooled, you get no feedback on CPU load. Makes sense.
You can just ping your CPU usage to the menu bar and monitor that. I have CPU and total system wattage up there so I always know if something weird is going on.
Yeah! That's how I initially suspected that it was thermal throttling because I saw in iStat Menus that my wattage was going down for a constantly high CPU usage
Ah! Yeah I did notice that using `ProcessInfo.processInfo.thermalState`, the state didn't update unless I restarted the process (reproducible even with a swift script). But this issue doesn't happen with the technique I use right now (the thermald notification)
Why would you take an LED over something on the screen? The notification is only really relevant while the laptop is open, and the screen is going to be on anyways.
Seems like good work. From what I've heard developing on MacOS has not gotten easier over the years. I do question the point, though. I suppose there's merit in knowing if your configuration causes thermal throttling, but what are you able to do about it? There's no fan profile to tweak or anything. Can you undervolt them?
> but what are you able to do about it?
On Macbooks with fans, I started tuning my fan curve with iStat Menus (https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-curve) because I noticed the default curve was lagging behind and thermal throttling kicked in before the fan even reach max speed.
For Apple Silicon specifically, I recently discovered that there is a "high power mode" (https://support.apple.com/en-us/101613) that allows the fans to run at higher speed. So I don't use the custom fan curves anymore, it helped me a lot (but it does get quite noisy on a 14" M4 Max)
For a Macbook Air, not much you can do besides closing stuff, or elevating the macbook and pointing a fan at it or things like that... but yeah it's a bit desperate!
I wanted this app to exist. Now it does!
I sometimes face thermal throttling because a process has gone wacko, and all I have to do is kill it. But first I have to notice it.
I rarely notice until half my battery is gone!
You know what, fair point. I know because my fans go haywire (except that one time my fans decided to just not work until I ran some incantations. The joys of Linux). If you're passively cooled, you get no feedback on CPU load. Makes sense.
Yeah I’m on a MacBook Air, so no fans.
You can move to a colder place or turn the room temperature down.
In the northern hemisphere you can just open a window at this time of the year.
Remember to put your coat and hat on!
You can just ping your CPU usage to the menu bar and monitor that. I have CPU and total system wattage up there so I always know if something weird is going on.
https://github.com/exelban/stats
Yeah! That's how I initially suspected that it was thermal throttling because I saw in iStat Menus that my wattage was going down for a constantly high CPU usage
There is a problem/bug with thermal pressure notifications. Did you stumbled upon such issue with your app? https://github.com/macmade/Hot/issues/73
Ah! Yeah I did notice that using `ProcessInfo.processInfo.thermalState`, the state didn't update unless I restarted the process (reproducible even with a swift script). But this issue doesn't happen with the technique I use right now (the thermald notification)
Thanks, I will check your approach. And your app as well, looks beautiful and useful.
This would be a really useful thing to indicate via an unobtrusive LED on the chassis somewhere.
Why would you take an LED over something on the screen? The notification is only really relevant while the laptop is open, and the screen is going to be on anyways.
brew install stats