Power issues with Macbook Pro

mvanorder · January 25, 2020

So, I'm completely new to apple(well technically my parents had a Macintosh ii when I was a kid), and I know this might not be the most mac knowledgable group of people, but since I get so much of my tech info from the LTT videos I figured I'd start here. Hopefully someone has suggestions to improve my power delivery/consumption situation here.

Unfortunately at work they've started buying to the Thinkpad P52s and now P53s as "mobile workstations" in place of the P50 and P51. So after months of debating, when my refresh came due, I went with the Macbook Pro 16" to get the i7-9750H as I need the power. What hadn't crossed my mind until it became a problem yesterday is that unlike the Thinkpad P50 I have to turn in, and my personal Thinkpad P72 which both have 230W power supplies, USB type-c only allows up to 100W, and the apple charger is 96W. This became painfully obvious when I kicked off a task that maxed out my CPU for about 15 minutes while also in a Webex meeting. While plugged in my battery dropped by 25%. I'm glad to see the CPU can run at full speed(even if the fans get quite noisy), but this can become an issue as my work load will be including machine learning and the workloads I'm having to write code for are getting much bigger.

harryk · January 26, 2020

This is not unheard of with the more powerful MacBook Pro's. The best you can do is buy a high quality 100W charger which can provide the most power that can be pushed through USB C. Unfortunately the real solution is throttling the CPU which may be the case if Apple pushes an update to address this.

mvanorder · January 26, 2020

I don't have a problem with throttling the CPU, but only if I can control when it throttles(and preferably, by how much). For example, if I'm at a full charge and I can afford to drain the battery to get a task done faster, then so be it. Maybe have some way to toggle this if it were implemented, as well as set thresholds. Obviously if the task is long enough I don't want it fire it off, walk away and come back to a dead system. What I wouldn't want is this hypothetical update to just blindly cap the CPU all the time, or even when it thinks I might need the battery life. I didn't give up running Linux on a PC to deal with the headache of learning a whole new system just to have a throttled CPU when I could have requested a Thinkpad with an 8th gen ultrabook i7 and had upgradable memory and storage.

Ideally I would like to get more power in. Considering that there's 4 ports that I can plug power into, it would be nice if the circuits were available to handle multiple power supplies. I could then just plug 2 of these 96W power supplies in. However, from what I've read, the laptop would only use the one providing the most power.