Apple could have had good thermals with what Intel gave them, they just didn't because they seem to value "as thin and light as possible" as opposed to "pretty thin and light, and with sane thermals". Even then they seem to make straight up poor decisions around cooling a lot even when doing the right thing wouldn't affect size/weight. Do they just not have engineers on staff who are good at this or something?

It's absolutely possible to do high end Intel in a compact laptop with relatively good thermals - look at thin Windows gaming laptops for plenty of examples of this (and these have way beefier GPUs than macbooks too).

It's worth noting the engineers actually seemed to get management to allow the 2019 model to be _thicker_ with more thermal mass than the earlier models. But in a sense, Intel's chips have never been amazing for laptops.

The power draw drains batteries, and the heat is... very annoying at best. I have used a couple ThinkPads and a Dell XPS over the past 5 years too, and all of them had the same issues where they'd constantly be pushing out very hot air, and the battery life was never more than 4-6 hours.

What Intel supplied was the bigger problem, but Apple was definitely not trying to make the chips perform well. They were hitting thermal limits constantly, and more directly toward "sandbagging" the recent macbook airs have a CPU heat sink that isn't connected to anything and has no direct airflow. They could easily have fit a small array of fins that the fan blows over, but chose not to.

I've seen the video that makes that claim but it's just plain wrong, if you look at an Intel Air the whole main board complete with heat sinks lives in a duct formed by the rear section of the chassis.

Some air goes over it but it's not enough with the tiny surface area. A proper block of fins would have done so much more while still being small and light.

If it’s that easy, do you have an example of another vendor doing it? It seems like Intel would love to highlight, say, Lenovo or HP to say Apple was cooling it wrong.

Almost every laptop in the world connects a block of fins to the CPU with a heat pipe.

I went to ifixit and clicked the very first laptop teardown I saw, it has one. https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/gnBU5dVYrIhInIXV.med...

Or, let's see, razer blade stealth, that's a 3 pound laptop. https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/nHPaankElOWQndsv.ful...

What's a light 15 inch laptop, XPS 15 7590? https://i0.wp.com/laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01...

Acer swift 5 SF515, "lightest 15 inch laptop on the market" https://i1.wp.com/laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01...

LG Gram https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/fFlFJB3PKThJs3TA.hug...

Apple is actually just really terrible at thermal design, simple as that. It's surprising, because you'd kinda expect them to at least be slightly competent (like they are in other areas), but they're just not.

They've gotten around it with M1 by building an entirely new chip that's power efficient enough that it practically doesn't need good thermal design to perform near it's peak. It's an impressive technical accomplishment, but it's also hilarious that Apple had to go this far to cool a chip properly.

Yes, we knew that design was common - that’s why that PC fan made the video picking it as a point of criticism – but that doesn’t tell us whether it’s as big a deal as being claimed. That would require some benchmarks running for long enough to see substantially greater thermal throttling, higher CPU core temperatures, etc.