Feb 18, 2014 - A few weeks back I dropped my MacBook Pro Retina. What, I'll make a Genius Bar appointment just to see how much it really is. I was checked in, and waiting when a Genius (I don't know if I should give names. I don't think anything will change the entitlement of a 14 year dipshit, unfortunately.

DO NOT TURN OFF OR RESTART your computer during this time!

I am having the same issues. Its made things a bit better with regards to what the intel power gadget is reporting but its still quite erratic on the frequency chart and I am regularly dropping down well below the base clock speed. Is this normal? Snipping tool on a mac. Do these machines underclock themselves when the processing power isn't needed? I am also finding that the fans are going a lot of the time when I am not doing anything remotely close to pushing the machine. Watching a youtube video will spin up the fans heavily and they are pretty much always audible. Not sure if I have a 15' with a dud cooling system or this is normal for these new, hotter laptops.

I briefly had a new 2018 13 inch model which i needed to return due to other issues (). Indexing, iCloud downloads etc. Where completely done, there was no background activity. Surfing with Safari and using the laptop on my lap for several hours, it did also get very hot on the bottom. Not warm, not boiling, but just uncomfortably hot/very warm.

I don't know if other people just exclusively use the mbp on a desk, it probably has less issues then. But the one I had (maybe it was defective either way, even after the anti throttleing update.) did heat up basically doing nothing and used on the lap. I tried not to cover the air intakes/exhausts (which is hard when on the lap) but that didn't really change the behavior. My theory is that a quad core CPU with multi threading is (similarly to the 6 core) is just to much for the 13 inch model.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, the current design was constructed with the thermals of 2 cores (for the 13 inch) and 4 cores (for the 15 inch) in mind. They didn't really improve the cooling system and more powerfull CPUs(and the faulty VRMs) just produce a lot of heat.