I don't think the parent was saying that a thick laptop is going to be better - but rather that when you are making a device as thin as possible, and that's the metric you index on, cooling performance WILL suffer.

It's not just that they haven't put enough engineering effort in - they consciously made a design tradeoff.

I still think it can be done, whether it's sacrificing performance or rethinking the thermal design to include a smaller battery and a larger heat pipes, or simply using a lower TDP CPU..

But yeah it's all trade-offs.

Servers blades are typically cooled by noisy fans spinning incredibly fast and moving large quantities of air. Not really a good comparison IMHO. A better comparison is simply one with non-Apple laptops.

1U servers are LOUD though.

Only because there's no need for them not to be. it's common to retrofit slower spinning quieter fans into servers for home/office use.

But the same design constraints were used in a mini-itx gaming PC on the linus tech tips channel a few months ago.. I can't seem to find the video now though. The thermal performance was amazing.

My company uses Dell PowerEdge R340s for our onsite server needs, and while they're certainly louder than a modern desktop, they're pretty bearable.

For contrast, I've got a Sun Fire T2000 at home that's louder than the airliners flying overhead (my current and previous apartment both happen to be under airport flight paths, for SFO and RNO, respectively). For obvious reasons (at least until I can figure out how to get a reliable network connection to my garage) that one gets run pretty sparingly, lol