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That's also what I think, Apple won't hit that wall again and mess up with this after iPhone affair. So I am considering Power Supply failure or charging board failure or software issue... But can't get clear.

Yeah, I also heard about the stuff about M1 Macs that having extreme high hard drive read and write volume. It is already obvious that Apple would change device characteristics using software updates to lower performance of older machines.

I checked the Intel page about this CPU and it shows the TDP is 28 Watts and adjustable to 23 Watts, still, it's far more than what I can get with my 5257U. Also, the review article I mentioned in my post above, under Energy Management - Power Consumption, the author had up to 32 Watts of CPU power consumption and up to 63 Watts of system total power consumption. So I don't think Apple tweaked the TDP, at least not when this machine came out in 2015. So I think, maybe, Apple adjusted the TDP with their Firmware Updates for older Macs.

Hi, I am pretty new here, because of some strange performance issues of my Mac I decided to write here asking for some help. I already posted this on Apple Community but it seems no-one saw my post. i want to have a try here. The CPU on my MacBook Pro 12,1 (i5-5257U) would only use up to 18 Watts of power and the system total power usage is well below 35 Watts with a 60 Watt PSU connected and CPU Core temperature under 85 Degrees C (fan speed 80%) while running Cinebench R23. Therefore I believe there is something limiting the CPU performance. As I didn't recorded the CPU power draw before, and I noticed this issue recently, I wonder if Apple is lowering the CPU performance of older Macs? An early review article on Internet (https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-Retina-13-Early-2015-Notebook-Review.139621.0.html) even said that the CPU is limited to 32 Watts, which is higher than the Intel rate. This performance drop occurred back to the time I upgraded my OS from High Sierra to Mojave. Sometime it is really frustrating because I can't use the full potential of my Mac. It could even get laggy if I play Netflix or Prime-Video on full screen. Firstly I thought it was the Mojave System which could be not well optimized or something like that so I upgraded to Big Sur, but nothing changed. Recently because of the lagging and throttle issues I get my System back to High Sierra, with a clean install (format the SSD and co.), I still experiencing the issues as I described before. Boot-Rom of my MBP is 426.0.0.0.0, SMC Firmware is 2.28f7. I ran Apple Diagnostics, nothing found. I reset SMC, PRAM and NVRAM. I also disconnected the battery and power from the MBP for about 30 min, to reset any possible chips. I cleaned the internal and reapplied thermal paste (MX-4) of the CPU, didn't help. I have upgraded my SSD from the original 128G one from Apple to a WD SN550 using adapters, runs well and R/W speed normal. The battery in this MBP was replaced by Apple in Winter 2019 which is in pretty good shape, coconutBattery shows 99% battery health. The CPU gets about 1820 points in Cinebench R23, the CPU temperature during that marking, stays at, as described before, around 80 Degrees C with fan speed at about 4k RPM (full speed is 6.2k RPM), so the temperature is definitely ok and well below the limit which could lead to thermal throttle. The power draw of the whole system, include full brightness screen, is around 35 Watts. The frequency of the CPU often reach 3GHz with only about 8 Watts power consumed. Pretty weird. The frequency of the Iris GPU stays low always, no matter if I will watch a Movie, YouTube or anything, the frequency of the GPU won't go above 600 MHz, most of the time it stays at 400MHz. I also discovered that the Mac doesn't have any performance differences if the AC is disconnected. (same power draw and same Cinebench Score with battery). It seems that the power supply does nothing than charge the battery and the Mac still uses power from the battery although it is connected to AC. Could that be a faulty or failing Power Supply which caused those issues? Or internal cable connections? Or it is on software Level? .kext or SpeedStep? Or is Apple using firmware updates to limit performance of older Macs? I did what I could trying to fix my Mac, it should not run that slow even it is 6 years old. I maintained the machine pretty well with cleaning every 6 Months. It is my first laptop I bought with my own money back in 2015, and it is my only laptop too. Is there any possibility that I could fix it? Greetings Chipei

Last week a friend of mine gave me her Lenovo Laptop for cleaning. So I got this Lenovo V2000 Laptop from 2014 with following specifications: - Lenovo Lancer 5A5 Motherboard (Bios Ver. 9BCN29WW from 20th October 2014) [Northbridge: Intel Haswell-ULT IMC, Southbridge: Intel Lynx Point-LP] - Intel i7-4510U (2.0 to 3.1 Ghz, 15W TDP) - Nvidia GeForce 840M, 4GB Graphics - 1 TB WD HDD 5400RPM - Samsung DDR3 1600 8GB Ram - Windows 10 Home, Version 2004 which are quite ok for Zoom meeting and working purposes. So I opened the Laptop, cleaned all the dust, re-paste the CPU and GPU with Arctic MX-4 and changed the thermal pads on the VRAM. After all the cleaning I ran some benchmark (Cinebench R20 and XTU Stresstest) to test the machine, but I noticed the Laptop is working strange. The CPU temperature under load never go above 70 °C, and power usage stuck at max. 25 Watts, frequency keeps at 2.5-2.6 Ghz, never reached the maximum turbo boost frequency of 3.1 Ghz. So I downloaded Intel XTU and found out I can not raise the Turbo Boost Power Max above 25 Watts, the adjust bar maxed out at 25 Watts. So the CPU is always Power Throttling. I tried to look into the BIOS (InsydeH20 Rev 3.7) but I could find nothing which could relate to CPU performance, there's also no "ADVANCED" Tab. In ThrottleStop I could not change the maximum power settings also. Is there any method to solve this problem that could apply a higher maximum power to the CPU? Some friends told me I could use a 90w power adapter (65W now) or upgrade the HDD to a SSD which demand less power, but I don't think these are relevant to CPU settings.