Louis Rossmann
8 HN mentions · mentioned in 7 months, 2019–2025
4:46 · 3.2M views · Oct 3, 2019
Louis Rossmann opens a new MacBook Air and reacts to its cooling design, where the fan does not appear to be thermally connected to the CPU heatsink. He calls it placebo cooling.
Cited mostly critically in Apple thermal design threads, with some commenters disputing his claim.
8 comments from Hacker News
>Apple's product design and manufacturing is insanely good Apple might be qualitatively better than most, but I wouldn't call it quantitatively "insanely good". The product design often has major "bugs", like "you are holding it wrong" iPhone 4 or the macbook pro keyboards that stopped working a lot. I myself had a screen replacement once on a mbp 2015 model because the "protective coating" peeled off... a known problem and Apple replaced it for free even tho I was a few months outside of my warranty. And the power cable had a tendency to shed off the outer isolation layer and/or "fray", which is by no means a problem only I had given the many "how to fix" DIY youtube videos. Same thing with other cables, like the Lightning ones, I am told. Cooling in the Intel macbook pros and airs also was a constant problem, and the engineering seems ridiculous at times[0]. That was the product design side... the manufacturing... not really what Apple does itself. The same manufacturers who work for Apple usually work for a lot of other companies as well. It might be that Apple insists on better quality (and maybe even pays a premium). But the iPhones I saw do not look like they had a lot better manufacturing quality than the phones I was using (I am not talking about better/more expensive components, that's a design decision). [0] this video
You forgot: - inadequate cooling - fried NAND chips - screens spontaneously cracking - flexgate (not to be confused with bendgate) And that’s only a subset of the engineering failures with MacBooks. You even bring it up in your post: the only reason they have “dead silence” is because Apple is literally baking your laptop and leaving you to pay the bill. I’ll give Apple that their custom chips are pretty great for power and efficiency, but their actual product design is bad. I mean, who designs a laptop with the fan pointing the wrong way?[0] Or a power bus alongside a data bus?[1] These are literally basic errors that go into production for a company that is far too big for this to be happening. [0] - this video [1] - [LINK]
I think you are writing about some past entity which has morphed into something different which has only the brand in common with that past. Or how else do you explain: 4min,45sec youtube video 'Louis opens new Macbook Air, immediately loses mind.' [1] this video where said Louis discovers placebo cooling. This is broken by design. They should apply quality control to their minds, because no amount of that elsewhere can fix that.
> and for a while now, the response from Intel has been a chip that thermal-throttles so hard in that form-factor that the performance has bombed it down to a lower class of computer. Are we talking about the same computer, where the fan is not even thermally connected with the CPU heatsink[1]? That's Apple's fsckup, not Intels. [1] this video
The idea of changing my 2015 MBP for something else is a tough one to accept, my biggest beef with the recent Air being the heat issues: the fan on the previous Air is so useless it's laughable[1] and they completely removed it on the new one, I remain skeptical. [1] this video