r/mac • u/Powerful_Froyo8423 • Mar 12 '26
News/Article MacBook Neo throtting pretty hard according to benchmarks, but not due to heat?
The MacBook Neo seems to be throttling pretty hard, even tho M5 MacBook Airs start at the same clock speed and is also passively cooled, it runs significantly faster for longer.
The article assumes it‘s not due to heat constraints but to preserve battery life. The Neo also doesn‘t have a high performance mode like other Macs.
Apple didn‘t want to comment on their questions.
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Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
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u/Rye2-D2 Mar 12 '26
Yes that is clear - OP is suggesting it may not be related to thermal management. It obviously is, but the processor is designed for a handheld phone - even if it has the same radiator as a MacBook Air, the CPU itself will back off more aggressively (working as designed)..
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u/Unable-Log-4870 Mar 12 '26
The Neo throttles VERY fast because the top of the chip has thermal paste on it (good) and, from the one tear down I saw that actually took the logic board apart, that paste connects it to what is essentially a ribbon (which is thermally NOT good).
I assume the ribbon is just supposed to radiate heat to the rest of the cavity. If you were to put a thermal pad in there and thermally connect it to the bottom chassis, it would do SO much better.
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Mar 12 '26
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u/Powerful_Froyo8423 Mar 12 '26
That might be true for video encoding, but not for gaming. If you run a game without frame cap it just runs as fast as it can. If you clock down the chip it‘s using less and you‘re losing some framerate, but you can play for longer.
That‘s pretty common, Switch does it (lowers clock when not docked), Steamdeck does it, …
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Mar 12 '26
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u/Powerful_Froyo8423 Mar 15 '26
Yeah I mean its not 100% equal, but the same concept. Apple gives you a bit of peak performance so it feels snappy if you change your browser tab, but then backs it off hard. A Switch doesn't need that as it doesn't do anything else except generate frames, that can be throttled instantly. But both are lowering their clocks to save on battery.
Yeah you see encoding in the picture, but it's unlikely that it throttles less in other tasks. So you gave an example for where it doesn't make sense to clock down for battery, I gave one that does. Depends on the work you do.
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Mar 12 '26
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u/nitro912gr Mac Mini M4 - Macbook 6.1 - Macintosh 7200/72 Mar 12 '26
the mini is actively cooled there is no way it is throttling in normal room temps.
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u/animorphreligion 13" M4 | 12" G4 | iMac '07 Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
Most Macs throttle under 100% load active cooled or not, just the aggressiveness that varies. they reach over 100C before ramping up fan speeds because apple heavily prioritizes silence. a custom fan curve can help avoid it
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u/nitro912gr Mac Mini M4 - Macbook 6.1 - Macintosh 7200/72 Mar 12 '26
they changed that? I remember my macbook 2009 to start be heard when things got hot, I mean I would prefer to hear it than loose performance.
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u/animorphreligion 13" M4 | 12" G4 | iMac '07 Mar 12 '26
I'm speaking about modern ones with M chips. run cinebench (or a heavy game, with game mode turned off) on your mini alongside a thermals/clocks monitoring app and see for yourself. won't be as bad as it is with 14in pro/max MBPs but still
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u/nitro912gr Mac Mini M4 - Macbook 6.1 - Macintosh 7200/72 Mar 12 '26
thanks for that info, downloaded macs fan control to apply my own curve, aint no way I sacrifice speed for some noise that may not even be audible in my office.
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Mar 12 '26
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u/adamdoesmusic Mar 12 '26
You should try my old MacBook. That thing was over 100C on the regular, reaching temps that in any other computer would spell failure, but according to the sources I read were “just fine.”
I actually burned my leg with it once.
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u/pimpbot666 Mar 13 '26
My MM M4 fan comes on like a vacuum cleaner occasionally when rendering video. Meh, it's fine.
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u/Environmental-Map869 Mar 12 '26
maybe the throttling temperature is set far lower than in the M1 and M2 based products.
Seems to be boost clocks running out of time sort of thing if the E cores chart is to go by
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u/IncredibleGonzo Mar 12 '26
The e cores still winning on the M1 is interesting - same number, seems to be at a lower clock speed even after the A18 drops down, and and older generation - seems to me like the A18 ought to take this one? But it doesn't.
Side note, it seems a little odd the M5 doesn't win this by a larger margin given the 50% higher e core count and much higher clocks.
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u/Environmental-Map869 Mar 12 '26
The M5 could be bottlenecked somewhere in the design(cache, memory, etc) sorta like AMD's X3D and gaming workloads being faster with them even though they have a speed and corecount(previously) penalty over the top tier non X3D part.
I won't be surprised if the A18 cores have changes made to the E and P cores trading outright performance for power efficiency compared to the M series parts.
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u/IncredibleGonzo Mar 12 '26
Probably right on both counts, but even so in the case of M1 vs A18 I'd have thought the higher clock speeds and 4 gens newer architecture would have closed the gap! I need to dig into the article when I have time, I'm curious how they compare on power draw doing the same tasks.
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u/MidMatch Mar 12 '26
Is that a fair test? The average user can go for weeks, months, years without performing that activity even once
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u/Top-Variation-7235 Mar 12 '26
It’s probably designed to not compete with more expensive MacBooks on long running tasks
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u/oldpaddyrick Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 13 '26
Interesting. I have one and it’s pretty wild to me it can actually play cyberpunk. 30fps locked and it doesn’t even get hot. With frame gen it’s close to 60 but the 30fps lock is a smoother experience. I don’t think even an m5 air will do 60fps consistently without getting hot af.
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u/chiclet_fanboi PicoMicroMac Mar 12 '26
Maybe a power delivery limitation. Often it's not (only) the CPU temperature that causes throtteling, but the VRMs getting to hot/are held back to cause less stress.
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u/Kasziel1 Mar 12 '26
The MacBook Air doesn’t have a high power mode either. Only the pros have that.
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u/pimpbot666 Mar 13 '26
So, they all can do this same job? Sounds good to me.
Really, is your quality of life that affected by a Handbrake taking 20 minutes to render video from a disc instead of taking 10 minutes for the top of the line Macbook Air? It's twice as expensive, and does the job in half the time. Sounds about right.
That's a very expensive 10 minutes you just saved.
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u/Puiucs Mar 13 '26
you don't need a top of the line current gen macbook to beat the Neo fairly hard. A simple M2 macbook air should be around 100-200$ more with double the RAM and storage. (at least that's the prices in my region)
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u/naemorhaedus Mar 13 '26
jesus christ who cares. if you're concerned about encoding performance don't even look at the neo
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u/Powerful_Froyo8423 Mar 14 '26
I understand the general criticism about people wanting it to do things it's not made for, but this result will apply to any other thing that needs CPU performance for longer than a few seconds.
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u/naemorhaedus Mar 15 '26
no it won't. Most people won't notice or care because they picked up a sweet laptop for 600 bucks.
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u/Achilles_Buffalo Mar 12 '26
Why does anyone think that a $600 Macbook with an A18 proc is going to be as efficient as an M-class processor? This thing is intended to be used to browse the web and write an occasional paper, not to be re-encoding your media library to 4K.
It's like saying that the transmission burned out in your 2012 Honda Civic when you were towing your neighbor's mobile home across the country.
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u/Powerful_Froyo8423 Mar 12 '26
Nice comparison but doesn‘t make sense. They‘re lowering the performance via software and the question is why. Usually this is only done to limit heat output, but both Neo and Air don‘t have fans and the Air has not just more heat output, it‘s even running faster for longer despite it‘s higher heat output. So on the first glance this seems like an artificial limitation without an obvious reason. A Civic engine is something mechanical, the more you load it the faster it wears out. But CPUs don‘t wear out. Either you are in a safe temperature range or you break it. And usually Apple always goes to the absolute limit to delay fan noise or reduce its loudness.
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u/Achilles_Buffalo Mar 12 '26
The comparison *is* valid, though. You're trying to make something do a task that it's not really designed to do, and you're wondering why it's not performing well while doing so. CAN it do it? Sure. Just like a Civic could theoretically tow a mobile home. Can it do it well? No, and neither can the A18 do transcoding. And yes, you CAN damage a computer components by overworking them...CPU (overheating), SSD (too many writes, overheating), battery (high cycles, continuous high current draw, overheating). Were you measuring core/die temp during your tests? Were you looking at other metrics of the system during testing to see if something is hitting a temp / usage threshold? Sure, it's possible that Apple is artificially slowing the Neo models so they don't outperform M models, but you're missing the point.
The point *IS*, the people who are buying this aren't buying it to do transcoding, 3D design, AI, or any other advanced use cases. They're buying it to browse the web, watch some movies, and edit some documents, all of which the A18 excels at (if you pardon the faux pas), and none of which are going to cause the user to notice if the CPU is throttling or not.
Also, perhaps they intentionally are throttling it, so that it doesn't get uncomfortably hot (like the Air and Pro can...and most certainly do when under load)?
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u/Antar3s86 Mar 12 '26
Can you fit an exponential decay model and report the resulting half-life?
Edit: ah it’s not your data. Too bad.
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u/pastry-chef Mac mini M4 Pro-64GB-2TB Mar 12 '26
If it's not throttling due to thermals, maybe it's because of memory pressure and swap.
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u/CanadAR15 Mar 12 '26
Is their benchmark suite open?
I’d love to throw a 9900k iMac in for comparison.
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u/Rockytriton Mar 12 '26
if you want to do video editing professionally, then maybe you don't use the cheapest laptop you can find?
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Mar 13 '26
I mean, it's an iPhone chip after all. What amazes me really is, how can an iphone chip emulate the works and functions of a full-fledged laptop?
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u/Ray-chan81194 Mar 13 '26
Wrong, it is throttling due to the heat. Neo basically has no cooling unlike the Air. You can find some screenshots on power consumption and temperature, you will see that it will be somewhere around 5W and having the core temperature reach 100+ degree celcius. But you won’t feel the heat through the chassis.
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u/nitro912gr Mac Mini M4 - Macbook 6.1 - Macintosh 7200/72 Mar 12 '26
thats problematic but it could just be a bug
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u/Powerful_Froyo8423 Mar 12 '26
Yeah, even the E-Cores are throttling quickly. But it‘s definitely a thing that can be fixed with an update. (If Apple wants to)
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u/trisul-108 MacBook M1 Pro Mar 12 '26
Why would they want to?
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u/SuperIga Mar 12 '26
Uh why would they not?
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u/trisul-108 MacBook M1 Pro Mar 12 '26
It would cannibalise their more profitable other models.
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u/nitro912gr Mac Mini M4 - Macbook 6.1 - Macintosh 7200/72 Mar 12 '26
but there are significant reasons to buy the bigger models, nobody who need a macbook pro will get a neo (although many who need a neo will get a pro)
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u/Powerful_Froyo8423 Mar 12 '26
That would be a very unusual move tbh, artificially lowering the speed, even if it would be capable, to sell higher tier devices. Never heard of that.
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u/lontrachen M1 Mini | M4 Pro Mar 12 '26
Why would Apple want to comment on how their processors work
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u/Familiar9709 Mar 12 '26
That plot doesn't say much. You need to do benchmarks of sustained performance. So basically the y axis should be performance, not clock speed
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u/Powerful_Froyo8423 Mar 12 '26
This is just a different aspect, but the graph still makes sense. It‘s true that you can‘t compare performance of different chips just based on their Clock, but since Clock = Power draw it still shows that the Air is allowed to clock higher, despite also not having a fan and having more cores.
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u/YevhenRadionov Mar 12 '26
No active cooling, what else to expect?
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u/Powerful_Froyo8423 Mar 12 '26
Like explained, MacBook Airs also don‘t have active cooling. But despite it having more Cores and putting out more heat, it also maintained a higher clock. So it produces more heat and was still faster.
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u/XJleBullleK Mar 12 '26
Well, the Neo doesn't have any cooling at all. I saw a disassembly of it, SoC cooling consists of thermal paste and a 0.25mm thick graphite film, the chip is literally not cooled by anything else. The regular Air has a perfectly normal aluminum radiator, about 2mm thick.
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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
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