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Fixing Apple's Engineering in an Hour

Linus Tech Tips · 3M views · 2020-06-21 · 16:56

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Overview

Linus Tech Tips water-cools a 2020 MacBook Air, tearing it down and showing the cooling design along the way. The video shows the gap between the CPU lid and die and how little the stock heatsink does.

On Hacker News

Cited in Apple thermal-design debates as evidence the Intel-era MacBook cooling was poor.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2020–2021

Topics

Repair, teardowns & right to repairConsumer devices & gadgetsComputer architecture & CPUs
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macbook airwater coolingthermal throttlingappleteardown

What people said

tentacleuno · 2021-10 · Reference

> Preference of thin&light vs upgradeability/cooling. I recently watched something[0] about the Macbook cooling (Intel, at least) and you seem to be right. [0]: [VIDEO]

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bjoli · 2020-12 · Criticism

The newer ones might, but the older ones seem to have the worst thermal solution of just about any modern laptop if that Linus Tech Tips video is to be believed. If I opened my computer that was thermal throttling and found that I would demand a refund. An undersized heatsink that wasn't making proper contact to the die. With a fan that 1. Isn't sucking air in from anywhere. And 2. Isn't blowing anything over the heat sink. "Think different" as in "be dumb". Or smart; Because that makes their new computers that are properly amazing look even better in comparison. Edit: paste mistake. the video link is here. Can't edit the original commet. [VIDEO]

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Dkuku · 2020-11 · Criticism

How it compares to normal i9 device. Linus took apart a macbook air and the cooling was so bad that it may be the reason the i9 cooling so badly designed. It may be badly designed on purpose to show that the performance of arm chips in macbooks is comparable to an i9 without cooling [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Linus Tech Tips, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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