Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occupy a core with a 100% kernel_task that didn’t do any work but which would serve to prevent actual work from being scheduled onto that core. When four or five out of the six cores were occupied by kernel_task, I knew I was in for a bag of hurt (to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs). Responsiveness went completely to hell. The machine became effectively unusable.
After a while my normal procedure was to run with the thing sitting on top of an ice pack. That would let me run a 60-90 minute video conference without troubles.
The only redeeming feature of these machines is that they could emulate old x86 hardware at speed. That allowed me to run old apps on old OSes without having to keep old hardware running.
I still use a 2019 MacBook Pro, in 2026 I found the best way to warm it up was to use it daily and not blow the dust out of it for 7 years. After I opened it up and did that it's running a lot cooler.
My M3 Macbook Pro's palm rests get uncomfortably warm during regular IDE use. It doesn't get hot enough to spin up a fan, but it is enough to be distracting.
I think my last Macbook was Wisconsin-locale instead of California. Closing the lid and putting it to sleep actually caused it to heat up (until the battery died).
Or something useful, save space, compressing some talk or edu video, just 6 fps is usually enough for slides or code, opus audio can go as low as 32k and still be decent compared to source quality, expect 10-15x size reduction
Or just leave the machine plugged in and turned on for like 5 minutes while you grab a coffee or have a conversation. It doesn't really take that long to warm up to room temperature. Unless this guy is like biking 15 miles to work in the winter in which case, he is doing Wisconsin wrong, you're supposed to drive to work with a beer to warm you up.
Is that running on Rosetta 2? Rosetta 2 does (or did, maybe it's removed now) a fine job running x86 code on Apple Silicon, but boy was it cycle-hungry to do it.
Apple Silicon is not really the simultaneously silent and quiet and cool system it was in the M1 days.
If you get a MacBook Air it will get quite toasty at throttling limits. After all, it has no fan.
MacBook Pro models and Apple computers in general tend to favor quiet operation over keeping the laptop surface cool.
Many PC gaming laptops go out of their way to keep warm air off the keyboard deck with a high willingness to use fan noise to accomplish that since the assumption is that you’re resting your hands on the computer for an extended period and you have headphones on for your game anyway.
I recently installed an app to manually activate the fans on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro as I've never been able to trigger them over the past 4+ years. Just to check whether the fans even work (they do).
You must be using only lame languages like C or Go or Python that aren’t optimized for laptop warming during compilation. Try using a Real Language with a Real Compiler, like C++ or Rust or Swift, and build decent-sized projects using all cores.
(All joking aside, this is why I have a MacBook Pro. Compilation easily hits the Air’s thermal limits and the performance boost on the Pro with its fan is impressive.)
Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occupy a core with a 100% kernel_task that didn’t do any work but which would serve to prevent actual work from being scheduled onto that core. When four or five out of the six cores were occupied by kernel_task, I knew I was in for a bag of hurt (to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs). Responsiveness went completely to hell. The machine became effectively unusable.
After a while my normal procedure was to run with the thing sitting on top of an ice pack. That would let me run a 60-90 minute video conference without troubles.
The only redeeming feature of these machines is that they could emulate old x86 hardware at speed. That allowed me to run old apps on old OSes without having to keep old hardware running.
For those without spacebar heating?
They broke that workflow in a recent update. Software these days is horrendous
for those wondering: https://xkcd.com/1172/
"This will start 6 threads that each peg your CPU... "
they're doing what to my CPU????
Fully utilize.
Also, pour one for the death of the analog speedo. Peg the needle, no more!
Bend over for big tech!
I still use a 2019 MacBook Pro, in 2026 I found the best way to warm it up was to use it daily and not blow the dust out of it for 7 years. After I opened it up and did that it's running a lot cooler.
How big is the risk of condensation when you bring a cold laptop inside?
All their spec sheets say they support up to x% _non-condensing_ humidity, which I’m guessing is about the dew point?
The uncomfortable fact about the mentioned Wisconsin winters is that inside dew point tends to be quite low.
Now do the opposite for the summer! Show me a command line that cools down the machine! ;)
Looking forward to the follow up: How to Quickly Cool Down Your MacBook
Unironically, yes.
My M3 Macbook Pro's palm rests get uncomfortably warm during regular IDE use. It doesn't get hot enough to spin up a fan, but it is enough to be distracting.
interesting. for me only the bottom and the top part above the keyboard gets warm during my work. 16inch model. Is yours the 14inch one?
Just do the trick in reverse, surely?
No you have to get the yesses back out
Strap a thermopile and a peltier on that bad boy
For years at work I've been just using Cinebench as a hand warmer on various Macbooks.
I always enjoyed using the power brick to warm up
Multithreaded:
I just need to build our monorepo
I think any next.js project will do the trick
I'm from California... What is this "cold" you speak of?
Floridian. I thought "frozen lake" was some sort of Intel CPU reference.
The Donner Party begs to differ
I think my last Macbook was Wisconsin-locale instead of California. Closing the lid and putting it to sleep actually caused it to heat up (until the battery died).
It had the soul of a PC
In homeoffice I always work in the nude and the cold metal of my macbook pro hurts my thighs…
Alternatively, you could try compiling an Xcode project. That should do the trick as well.
Or something useful, save space, compressing some talk or edu video, just 6 fps is usually enough for slides or code, opus audio can go as low as 32k and still be decent compared to source quality, expect 10-15x size reduction
can go more crazy with this soupyes only writes y, not the whole word yes
unless you type
Or you could get a laptop that doesn't have an metal shell, like a thinkpad.
Or just leave the machine plugged in and turned on for like 5 minutes while you grab a coffee or have a conversation. It doesn't really take that long to warm up to room temperature. Unless this guy is like biking 15 miles to work in the winter in which case, he is doing Wisconsin wrong, you're supposed to drive to work with a beer to warm you up.
they often have a magnesium bottom shell
npm install
Needs 2019 in title, this is Intel MacBooks not Apple Silicon.
I've found that Baldur's Gate 3 will warm up my apple silicon (everyday tasks do not).
Is that running on Rosetta 2? Rosetta 2 does (or did, maybe it's removed now) a fine job running x86 code on Apple Silicon, but boy was it cycle-hungry to do it.
BG3 is a native game, they dropped x86 support shortly after launch on macOS (or maybe even in beta)
Apple Silicon is not really the simultaneously silent and quiet and cool system it was in the M1 days.
If you get a MacBook Air it will get quite toasty at throttling limits. After all, it has no fan.
MacBook Pro models and Apple computers in general tend to favor quiet operation over keeping the laptop surface cool.
Many PC gaming laptops go out of their way to keep warm air off the keyboard deck with a high willingness to use fan noise to accomplish that since the assumption is that you’re resting your hands on the computer for an extended period and you have headphones on for your game anyway.
Won't work on M processors, (un)fortunately.
I recently installed an app to manually activate the fans on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro as I've never been able to trigger them over the past 4+ years. Just to check whether the fans even work (they do).
You must be using only lame languages like C or Go or Python that aren’t optimized for laptop warming during compilation. Try using a Real Language with a Real Compiler, like C++ or Rust or Swift, and build decent-sized projects using all cores.
(All joking aside, this is why I have a MacBook Pro. Compilation easily hits the Air’s thermal limits and the performance boost on the Pro with its fan is impressive.)
I get them going full blast in 2 minutes from cities skylines.
You could also build Chromium from source. It makes my M1 Max's fans sing.
I left my Mac Studio running at 100% CPU on all cores for 14 hours, and the case ended up noticeably warm to the touch. It is possible!
Try increasing to 10 cores. Works on my m3 pro.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
sanest emacs user
There really is an xkcd for everything
Honestly m1 was very cool no matter what workload you threw at it but at this point m4 max does get pretty hot even with just web browsing.
I've definitely had my m1 air get uncomfortably hot to touch - particularly right above the keyboard. (While doing developery things)
Can't say I've ever thought of a word like "developery", but now that I've seen it I like it a lot :-)
This is now running Cyberpunk or an LLM locally
Another (more useful) option is to render an animation in Blender, or run a local LLM.
Honestly i prefer my macbook frosty