Linus Tech Tips
8 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2020–2021
16:56 · 3M views · Jun 21, 2020
Linus Tech Tips water-cools a 2020 MacBook Air, tearing it down and showing the cooling design along the way. The video shows the gap between the CPU lid and die and how little the stock heatsink does.
Cited in Apple thermal-design debates as evidence the Intel-era MacBook cooling was poor.
8 comments from Hacker News
Not really, Apple's CPU/GPU teams are very good, hey chaps and chapesses, but their primary advantage comes from the fact that Apple is looking at revenue for the entire device, the SOC is not the product. They can afford a little more cache etc. It's also right to point out that the margin is pretty narrow in A13 and Snapdragon 865 guise. So saying they are year(s) ahead is hyperbole, perhaps 6 months! In anycase the relatively close performance of the current SOCs makes me eager to see what they do with Apple Silicon in order to bridge the gap to Desktop/Laptop class performance? I do wonder whether the current cooling solutions in Apple's laptops are more about delivering the best product to the consumer or creating a favourable comparison to their own silicon. I found this LTT, this video , intriguing and wonder if this is deliberate or a manufacturing defect. Note the gap between the CPU lid and the die. It's a fairly entertaining video, the things they try but that gap, the entire cooling solution actually, are a little hard to understand.
Everything you said is echoed in this LTT video from yesterday[0]. It does appear to be a very poor thermal design, but you can see that most of the issues appear to be from trying to make the user not feel the heat. It feels a bit icky to leave performance on the table like that; since you paid for a CPU and are getting a marginal performance from it. But I remember Jobs giving a talk before about how "Computers are tools, and people don't care if their tools give them all it can, they care if they can get their work done with them well" That's not a defense of a shitty cooling solution, but it is a defence of why they power limit the chips. When I got my first (and only) Macbook in 2011, it had more than twice the real battery life of any machine on the market. That meant that I was _actually_ untethered. That's what I cared about at the time much more than how much CPU I was getting. [0]: this video
The newer ones might, but the older ones seem to have the worst thermal solution of just about any modern laptop if that Linus Tech Tips video is to be believed. If I opened my computer that was thermal throttling and found that I would demand a refund. An undersized heatsink that wasn't making proper contact to the die. With a fan that 1. Isn't sucking air in from anywhere. And 2. Isn't blowing anything over the heat sink. "Think different" as in "be dumb". Or smart; Because that makes their new computers that are properly amazing look even better in comparison. Edit: paste mistake. the video link is here. Can't edit the original commet. this video
How it compares to normal i9 device. Linus took apart a macbook air and the cooling was so bad that it may be the reason the i9 cooling so badly designed. It may be badly designed on purpose to show that the performance of arm chips in macbooks is comparable to an i9 without cooling this video
this video This is a video from Linus Tech Tips that demonstrates that no matter how much you cool it, they've physically prevented the chip from taking advantage of it. And if it could be fixed with software, they would have worked out how, they're into that kinda tweaking.