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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Assuming these results are legit (as they seem to be), did Apple just not do this because it cuts the performance differential between the M2 MBA and the M1 MBPs too much?

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Many of these Macbook thermal mods use the case more aggressively as a heatsink, and can end up making the enclosure hot enough to burn you if used as a laptop.

They probably could add some case temperature sensors and throttle once the case gets hot enough.

Would still gain a lot of performance; outside of benchmarks most people don’t run their computers hard enough to need full boost for minutes at a time.

Then you'd just get another mod disconnecting the sensor, because of course apple is hiding performance from you /s

To be fair the macbook already gets too hot to handle under load as it is

Running the case this hot will degrade the battery significantly faster, hot battery reduces short term capacity and hot battery reduces lifetime capacity. MacBook(2015) has similar issues.

They probably didn't want the aluminium case to get too hot.

FWIW, the default scaling settings have no problem letting the M2 Macbook Air hit 80-90 Celsius by default, it will just heavily start throttling the performance cores to prevent overheating, which better cooling helps mitigate.

The CPU heating 80-90C is very different from the laptop shell hitting 80C. "Better cooling" on a fanless computer means moving the heat out into your lap.

It has a non-negligable impact on surface temperature. Even on actively-cooled Macs I've owned in the past, the MacOS governor is way too lenient with letting the CPU clock up. Having an 80c+ internal temp made the palmrests too warm to comfortably use, for me at least. I don't really see how removing the fans is going to help reduce the surface temperature, especially with a material as thermally conductive as aluminum.

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