I find it interesting that such a simple fix would have much of an impact on the thermals of a modern computer. I didn’t think to measure the battery life impact, but it stands to reason that also should have improved given the reduced cooling needs. The SMC is responsible for power distribution and thermal fan controls, so I can only conclude that it was giving either the processor or some other controller too much juice that just turned into waste heat. There’s little good documentation available on what the System Management Controller does and how it works. I haven’t had any issues with my MacBook running excessively hot after resetting the SMC. This is an easy enough process and Apple Support provides detailed instructions for resetting the SMC on a variety of Mac models.Īfter resetting the SMC, the CPU temperature dropped from 70℃ when idling to just shy of 40℃, and normalized around 45–65℃ with normal use. I then stumbled upon an Apple Support document that suggested resetting the System Management Controller ( SMC), which is responsible for “thermal management”. As it turned out, there were no rouge crypto-miners or apps experiencing unexpected resource demands with the MacOS beta. I wasted quite some time trying to catch an app using a lot of resources in bursts with the Energy usage view in Activity Monitor beveling there was a specific program causing the my issues. However, this model MacBook Pro has received a meager iFixit repairability score of 1 out of 10 and I didn’t even want to attempt to take it apart if I could avoid it. The machine would get hot mere minutes after boot, and it sounded like the fans operated normally. I thought that the internals fans or air passages might be blocked by dust and debris. The high base temperature makes the machine hot to the touch, and also causes thermal throttling of the processor when you want to get something done. The processor temperature, measured with the Intel Power Gadget, when the computer was under no load and idling (processor utilization under 5 %) was stuck at around 70℃. ![]() Or maybe it was a pre-release bug? However, as the fourth beta release came and went I started to look into the issue in more detail. ![]() I initially ignored the problem and attributed it to either the higher ambient temperature caused by the heatwave currently sweeping across Northern Europe. The software, and fans and ventilation seemed fine but what about the power management firmware? My MacBook Pro (a late-2013, 39 cm model, MacBookPro11,2) have been running hot after I installed the first developer preview release of MacOS 10.14 “Mojave”.
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