Warm up your MacBook (2019)

moralestapia

Won't work on M processors, (un)fortunately.

ale

Honestly i prefer my macbook frosty

jvuygbbkuurx

I just need to build our monorepo

amomchilov

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?

1e1a

Another (more useful) option is to render an animation in Blender, or run a local LLM.

Scubabear68

Needs 2019 in title, this is Intel MacBooks not Apple Silicon.

reboot81

Looking forward to the follow up: How to Quickly Cool Down Your MacBook

HDBaseT

For years at work I've been just using Cinebench as a hand warmer on various Macbooks.

mark242

npm install

waterhouse

Multithreaded: seq 1 20 | xargs -Iqq -n1 -P0 yes >/dev/null

kingjimmy

"This will start 6 threads that each peg your CPU... " they're doing what to my CPU????

dnnddidiej

For those without spacebar heating?

daneel_w

while true; do openssl speed ecdsap384 -multi 2; done

kristianp

Or you could get a laptop that doesn't have an metal shell, like a thinkpad.

Hobadee

I'm from California... What is this "cold" you speak of?

splittydev

Alternatively, you could try compiling an Xcode project. That should do the trick as well.

jerlam

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).

ralphc

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.

mcfedr

yes only writes y, not the whole word yes

smarks

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.