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It would be cool if the bottoms of MacBooks weren’t flat and instead wavy or rippling to increase surface area. There are probably a lot of cool designs (ayyyyy) you could machine in.

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There are laptops like that (e.g. the fanless Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14). No idea if it was actually engineered like that for thermal reasons.

Is there a value to increasing surface area on the top or bottom case of a MacBook? I'd imagine most of the thermal management is achieved by fan-directed airflow through the internal heatsinks and convection through the keyboard.

Well the MacBook Air has no fans so it’s a different beast from a design perspective. If I recall, at least with an earlier m series MacBook, notably improved performance could be gained by inserting a thermal pad between the chassis’ bottom panel and the compute module. Apple probably didn’t do this in an effort to avoid uncomfortably hot temperatures contacting people’s thighs.

Oh, I saw that video too!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnllZYEhvDQ

It's really cool that performance cores are the same between base, Pro, Max (, Ultra) chips of a generation. That really feels like Apple did it right.

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