The cooling system of your MacBook kicks in to move that heat away from the CPU and out of your system. When you ask the CPU to do something that requires most or all of its processing power, heat starts building up rapidly.

The exact numbers vary from one CPU model to the next, but every CPU has a limit. The manufacturer specifies a temperature range that should never be exceeded if you want your CPU to last for its full natural lifespan. This is a bad thing because there’s a temperature range within which the circuitry works properly and, of course, very high temperatures where the materials that make up the CPU itself could be damaged. Some portion of the electricity your CPU uses to do all those calculations is wasted and heats everything up. What causes a MacBook to thermal throttle?Įnergy in the form of electricity is the magic that makes a computer work, but the byproduct of doing work with that energy is heat. This may very well be one of the main reasons Apple is strongly moving towards using its own cool-running ARM processors instead. In this case, however, it wasn’t throttling, but a lowered voltage from the factory, which indicates that the core problem of limited thermal headroom is still stalking the MacBook Pro line. Unfortunately, the 2019 15-inch MacBook Pro showed that Apple still had to take aggressive measures to keep the temperatures down. The results were in favor of a chunkier MacBook with more thermal headroom.

We ran a poll, asking our readers whether Apple should make a thicker MacBook to solve thermal issues in future models. In the case of the 2018 MacBook Pro 15-inch and 13-inch (with Touch Bar) models, a now-fixed firmware bug was the culprit. Most recently, MacBooks Pro models from both 20 have shown severe throttling issues. However, some models have been particularly likely to exhibit a case of heatstroke. In principle, any MacBook (or really any high-performance laptop) can be affected by thermal throttling under the “right” circumstances.

Macbook pro 2018 overheating