“Oh yeah and the keyboard won’t work”
It will hilarious how much he had to break the machine to get those coolers in.
The tech is cool though. I don’t think Apple will put active cooling into the Air though. The passive is good enough for what Apple wants with the Air and is one of the few ways they can differentiate between the Air and the base level Pro. As long as the throttling is within reason and only affects more pro workloads, I think the silence is a bigger advantage.
Is there a Linus blocker browser extension? I am tired of seeing his face and his shitty videos.
It’s interesting but tbh the air needs to be purchased for the GOOD reason/profession.
For work I use a macbook M1 pro, I can’t use a fanless device because I compile a lot and sooner or later it will be very hot I fear.
Someone with a lighter workload or doing everything on a cloud or something may truly benefit from the macbook air however.
If you need an active cooling, you purchase a macbook with an active cooling, no need to really change the air, just it’s not for all usages
I can’t use a fanless device because I compile a lot and sooner or later it will be very hot I fear.
The M2 Air will not get hot. The chip simply doesn’t use enough power to generate that kind of heat.
I have a rando Ryzen HP with fans, and my friend’s M1 air does get hotter while gaming / sustained loads lasting 5-15 minutes. And yes the Ryzen does use more power, but it is also less powerful, but not by an insane margin.
I do not want a fan in the MacBook Air. The fact it is fabless is a major selling point for me.
Someone has a vested interest in Apple buying or licensing this tech.
Duh? You think who made this product is going to give it away for free?
The video is clear that this is a Frore Systems/Airjet demo. I feel like both the MacWorld article and LTT on this couldn’t have been clearer on that point. So, yeah, Frore Systems are obviously trying to get Apple to buy/license this tech (or the PC competition), and they aren’t shy about it.
Yep. Frore wouldn’t have gone through this kind of engineering effort for an LTT video. I bet they made this design for an internal demo with Apple and are hoping showing off with it will help convince them.
Obviously not just Apple, everyone, they are trying to make their product replace fans in all computing.
I thought this video was hilarious. It’s the techie version of watching Charles and Shaq talk about the nba. You shouldn’t take it too seriously.
Airjet seems amazing from the information I’ve read on it, hopefully it lives up to the hype and we see it replace fans. Quieter and better performance, Apple would love it.
No, Apple would not love it because it uses way more power. It’s extremely inefficient compared to a regular fan and the battery life would suffer.
If it’s smaller than a fan they can use the extra space to put more battery in. Not my problem to deal with, that’s for Apple engineers.
Not my problem to deal with
You could have just said you didn’t know what you were talking about from the get go…
I forgot, on reddit only apple engineers talk about things like this.
All that clickbait for 7% less throttling? Ugh.
I don’t get the point of the video
Other than…”Hey, you can mod a MacBook Air that uses less power and has fan-less cooling and take some things out of it that are needed and add another fan-less cooling tech that requires more power to get a slight processing power increase and burn your lap while using it. But hey!, it can be done!”
What a waste of time.
And to pose the question that Apple should use this tech? Why would they want the liability, reduced quality and sacrifice the lower power solution they have now?
Why would they want the liability, reduced quality and sacrifice the lower power solution they have now?
Uhh… because their current cooling sucks? You saw that flimsy aluminium heatsink, right? Not even the decency to offer copper + a vapor chamber in a thin and light $1500 device, that is crazy. And this is just at 15W on the newest 3nm chip, 120°C package temperature – it’s insane, Intel was given way more crap for managing similar temps with a higher power budget.
it’s cool to hack shit together
I don’t know why people are dunking on LTT on this one. He clearly says that this is not the product he wants Apple to sell, just that he wants Apple to engineer this into their products, IO and speaker and all. Better cooling could benefit all of us after all.
Just let PCMR do PCMR things and move on with life.
I don’t know why people are dunking on LTT on this one.
Probably because of the click-bait title “We fixed it!” where nothing is to be fixed. A title like “Apple, we have a proposition” would be better.
Because this gets them views. We’ve been down this road before. Nobody at Linus likes these clickbaity titles they have to use for videos, but this is what people click and watch, which is what generates them money.
It gets them views and it also gets them flak from people who are annoyed with it.
Their quest for views doesn’t absolve them from criticism of hyperbolic clickbait titles.
The lack of cooling in the air is definitely something that should be fixed, it’s done like that on purpose so it doesn’t perform as well as the Pro. For the price it’s mad.
The M1 Air is an incredible value. And it’s got no need for a fan. I’d much rather a completely silent machine.
No it isn’t, it’s done like that because it’s not meant to be used that way and it’s meant to be lighter and slimmer. His solution didn’t work, and while it probably could, why would Apple add this when it adds points of failure to a device that doesn’t need it
The lack of cooling in the air is definitely something that should be fixed
That’s not really the point of the MacBook Air. The Air lineup has always been about doing quick, bursty tasks effectively (email, web browsing, word documents etc). Apple Silicon chips have gotten to the point where fans are not necessary to achieve this objective, so Apple skips a fan in the Air models to help better differentiate the various MacBook models.
The 14in MacBook Pro with M3 chip is essentially just a high-end MacBook Air, as it carries most of the same limitations minus cooling.
The title is not “we fixed it”
LTT changes the title multiple times after uploading to see what gets them the most views.
Yeah, and he notes why pretty shortly into the video: the PC realm copies apple. The video seemed to be complimenting apple if anything, and the level of engineering seems pretty commendable.
Regarding the tech itself, I was looking into it for my personal pc a while earlier and it seems like each module has a max of 10W as it needs to act as a heatsink along with a fan. Performs better than passive of course, but (as evident by the video) still falls short to a conventional fan in a larger chassis.
Would have been useful to compare noise levels between this and the traditional blower.
Check out the frore air jet on YouTube, it’s almost noiseless
It is not the same metric these things are much higher pressure, this has been mentioned ad nauseum In the comparisons and documentations.
Here is a proper working example
Because of what came out about ltt
No, it’s because every tech subreddit has a hate boner for whoever is biased against their brand, especially if clickbait titles and cringe grins are involved. This sub hated Linus even before those allegations.
Honestly, as someone that’s just swapped over into the Apple ecosystem, some of the reactions here are extremely off-putting. LTT has its clear biases here. In general, they’re a big fan of Apple’s hardware capabilities, especially surrounding the M-series CPUs. They aren’t a big fan of their misleading marketing, pricing, product segmentation, or locked down ecosystem. I feel like that is a very fair stance. Linus used to daily drive Airpods and wear an Apple watch, despite being staunchly an Android user ffs.
Fanboyism in the apple world is just nuts. No wonder they are called sheeple.
The thing is belonging to the blindly hate Apple fan club is equally annoying
blindly? Are you not reading the same thread I am. Yeah it’s totally blind though.
Probably because LTT has been in multiple controversies lately, one that they themselves initiated. The clickbait-y title here ain’t helping their case either, even though the video itself has some merits, more or less lol.
TLDW: This video shows this device called the “Frore AirJet”, which is an active cooler that uses piezoelectrics rather than fans to push air through at 1700 pascals.
The Verge article on them: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/27/23975368/frore-airjet-apple-macbook-air-fanless-mems
The LTT team had to do a lot of modifications (remove the speakers to use the speaker vents for airflow, and remove the MagSafe port, one USB-C port, the keyboard’s input cables, and the Wi-Fi antenna), but they were able to get the following results:
Cinebench score Power usage Normal 15" M2 Air 8200 Around 14.5W Modded 15" M2 Air 8600 Around 19W M2 Pro 8700 Around 19.5W All that for a relatively tiny bump? I thought it would be a lot more drastic
It’s extra dumb because
-
you are pulling significantly more power for a tiny performance bump, so less “power on time” for the same device
-
that computer he’s trying to make exists and called MacBook Pro m2. Now MacBook Pro m3
Why would they degrade the user experience for MacBook Air while increasing performance on LONG and intense applications, a case NOT expected by the MacBook Air customer and also step on the toes of MacBook Pro.
This product is dumb and good thing it doesn’t exist lol.
You actually don’t know what you’re talking about, why are Apple fanatics so confidently ignorant. It’s performing BETTER because it has a higher thermal headroom and still runs cooler. You’re literally complimenting Apple for have poor thermals with your roundabout logic. Astonishing the mental gymnastics you’re pulling off.
It’s performing 5-7% better for 30% less battery life while a similarly priced, slightly more expensive 14 inch MacBook has much better cooling and better features with even more battery life. This doesn’t solve a problem it makes the air a worse product by lowering battery. The air is for nothing more than light work. I can’t imagine anyone who wants one of those would say “yes I’d rather have 30% less battery life for 5% more performance and 1 C cooler on the chassis”.
-
the 13" macbook pro is no longer being made, so you can’t get this sustained performance in M3 and newer
The MacBook Pro now has the base M3 available.
I don’t get it. Based on the results wouldn’t using more Watts be worse?
Why Linus hates Apple so much, of course he would not like to disappoint his PC friends on his channel but at least be logical.
Each with their own but this guy lost all integrity to me. And judging by how poorly his stuff is met lately at least here on Reddit tech channels I’m probably not the only one. Will of course be sure to avoid his posts here altogether from now on.
So brave! Thank you for your service 🫡
My M2 air never even gets hot. What’s the point?