Just received a 2020 13" MBP and the fans seem to run top-speed about 50% of the time, even with very little load…as in simply watching some YouTube videos. It sounds like it’s about to take off!
Of course Apple hasn’t released sensor info to 3rd parties yet, so I can’t tell what’s happening with iStat Menus.
Anyone else experience this?
Thanks!
Dave
You say “just received,” how long have you been using this machine? I ask because when setting up a Mac fresh there’s going to be a lot of extra activity for the first few days to a week as it does things like download iCloud and Dropbox data, does facial recognition of your photos library, indexes all your data in Spotlight, etc.
Yes, as Chris said.
Maybe Activity Monitor would provide some info?
The title of this post makes it sound like the MacBook Pro just hit a home run to win the game. (“The fans go crazy!”)
Do you have any Adobe apps installed?
I have found that the fans in my 2019 MacBook Air also run a lot more than expected. Webex is one big reason for this, but I was surprised when I tried an Apple Arcade game (mini motorways) and this seems to make the fans run continually with nothing else going on.
I guess the arcade app is a catalyst app? Doesn’t bode well for Big Sur and other iOS apps ported to Mac like messages.
I agree with the other advice given above.
You can also reset the SMC per these instructions (pay attention to the build year of this Mac!)
Catalina is buggy. Look for the app/service that is eating up your CPU power and kill it. Mine has been pkd service, which runs Safari plugins, which is interesting because I do not have any third party plugins installed.
Once I kill the pkd service, fans stop and the beach ball of death disappears. The only downside is that killing pkd sometimes crashes my RoamResearch database so I make sure RR is synced to the server and backed up on my local machine before I kill pkd. Same problem and same solution on my 16” MacBook Pro and 27” iMac.
Just wondering how others are getting on with fan noise.
I have narrowed down the problem on my MacBook Air 2019 to being when I run any catalyst app. Could be as simple as opening the ‘Stocks’ app and suddenly my fan is on at full speed. Is this just me?