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Cool, but why does a new and more power-efficient M1 laptop has it[1], and it's much bigger than this one? Apple is also known for not admitting its design fai

• foldr 5y ago
  The M1 MacBook Air has no fan, so you can’t really compare its cooling design to the previous MacBook Air. Given that it’s fanless, it would hardly be surprising if it had bigger passive cooling devices. The idea that a cooling fan needs to “blow on” the thing that it’s cooling is just dumb. As long as the path from the fan to the CPU is sealed, it makes no difference at all how far away the fan is. (Think of a wing being tested in a wind tunnel. The fan that’s making the ‘wind’ doesn’t need to be placed right up against the wing for this to work!) A heat pipe gives you more layout flexibility because it lets you place the fan somewhere where it can’t generate airflow directly over the CPU. Given that a heat pipe can’t be 100% efficient at transferring heat, a design with a heat pipe is actually less efficient, all else being equal.