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Comment by Pulcinella | Hacker News Reader

Why does he take the back cover off and complain that the air flow and cooling don’t work properly?

Because it helps gets more views on YouTube which is the only thing he is after. Him patronizing the thermal design of Apple computers that way is pretty funny, ngl.

It's really funny because he is correct, that fan does nothing. There is no heat pipe connecting CPU and fan.

Idk, I am no expert but I tend to believe that a design that is shipped to millions of customers and only a handful report problems is probably designed better than what the average youtuber or forum commenter can assess. Apple is known to remove elements from their design in order to optimize. That big and heavy heat pipe seems like a perfect element to remove.

And maybe it is a mistake. That happened before and they iterated over it and turned the design into an advantage most of the times.

Judging and say "does nothing" is very naive in my opinion and I am pretty confident that everything in that designed is planned pretty accurately.

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 failures.

1: https://www.zdnet.com/a/hub/i/2020/11/20/ab77bd9b-edc0-419f-...

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.

They also shipped millions of faulty butterfly keyboards for years. So history tells me your confidence is misplaced.

> I am pretty confident that everything in that designed is planned pretty accurately.

Only if the input and the output of the fan are piped together.

Apple was designing stuff that considered the airflow THROUGH THE CASE back with the first Macintosh, the 128K. You could even get a silly looking chimney that used convection to pull even more air through the case with no other modifications.

All Macs with air cooling, not just the laptops, are designed with internal airflow in mind and always have been. You do not have a little fan blowing directly on the CPU (from where? to where?) and expect it to do anything.

I don't know who this fellow is, but next he can take the top off his cylinder head and then be upset the engine doesn't work. From first appearances he is an absolute bozo.

> From first appearances he is an absolute bozo.

He's pretty much the main figurehead of the right to repair movement from the consumer electronics side of things. He has run his own independent repair shop doing board level repairs for years in NYC.

https://www.fighttorepair.org/ is him.

Then from second appearances he has other things to recommend him. As far as laptop cooling, if he isn't joking or trolling about expecting the laptop cooling to work with half the ducting removed, he's a bozo about that.

There should be a cooper pipe between the CPU and cooler like this one[1].

Seriously, WTF? Where is it?

1: https://i0.wp.com/lemmymorgan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01...

Here's an example teardown: https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/iUejB4OfKlPD4Fex.hug...

The heat pipe is the part just above and to the left of the fan.

That's a different model, there is no heat pipe in the video see https://youtu.be/iiCBYAP_Sgg?t=57

The model in the video is this one I think — https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Retina+2...

(Video mentions 2019 model, which is a minor revision based on this)

In a way it's possibly more efficient without the heat pipe - the cooler is directly over the CPU in this design, and can be quite large due to the way it's packaged (though it has to be thin).

The downside is it's harder to get decent airflow over the fins. The casing is probably designed to direct the airflow, but I'd have to see all parts together to figure out how this works.

EDIT: the lower case appears to have some ducting on it, see this example: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/324259489798

That's a very questionable system. It needs to be completely sealed except for intake to work properly.

Correct. It needs to be completely sealed. You can't take the back off the laptop and have the cooling system function, the case is part of the cooling ducts.

Provides for heat dissipation over broader surfaces. This is normal.

He's not understanding that in the normal operating environment for Macs, there's an additional fan he's not seeing.

The person who bought it.

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