I find it very interesting to see the repeating trend of Apple's (I imagine Steve Jobs' more accurately) obsession with fanless computers over the years. The original Macintosh, the clamshell iBook, slot-load iMac G3, and the G4 Cube being the ones I can recall. When I got my clamshell, I thought it was hilarious that it was fanless, yet the 10GB hard drive in it made more noise than any computer fan I've ever heard in my life. It's got an SSD now, thankfully.
I also tend to believe that many of the issues with solder joints on graphics chipsets in laptops that Apple has dealt with over the years could have been prevented with more aggressive fan control; it certainly seems that Apple prefers (or assumes the average user prefers) quiet operation over better cooling. For example, by default my iBook G4's fan does not turn on unless the CPU hits 75C, the GPU hits 85C, or the northbridge hits 56C (
see this site for details on iBook G4 fan and controlling it). By changing the thresholds to 45C, my fan still rarely spins up when I'm browsing the web on it, and when I play Quake III Arena on it, the sound of the game drowns out the fan anyways. And I should mention, with the fan threshold lowered, it never seems to go over 55C, even for the GPU, and even in Quake III. Makes me feel much less worried about the Radeon 9200m failing, and I suspect similar results (and increased reliability) would be observed with more aggressive fan control on many of Apple's later laptops, namely the various models of Macbook Pro with graphical issues (as a slightly related aside, my friend has had the logic board in his 2013 Retina MBP replaced 3 times now due to failing graphics).
