M2 Air Disappointing Thermal Design

[darngooddesign]

What an increased thermal mass does in a fanless design is regulate the temperature over a period of time. So instead of shooting up to the thermal limit in 30 seconds, it takes much longer. So you might have several minutes of full performance before performance must be reduced. This can have a substantial effect on your work throughout the day if you ever run sustained processes (video/photo/compiling/etc).

So it’s not about just dropping the temp; it’s about smoothing out the temperature curve.

I completely agree that Apple employs top notch engineers. But their thermal designs have not always been up to snuff; and there is nothing wrong with being critical when this happens. That’s how we get them to improve their future products.

If you know that you are running sustained demanding processes and you still bought an MBAir, you have it coming and should stop complaining.

I could get the M1Air to heat up and throttle in Lightroom by doing batch processes and a series of quick edits which stressed the GPU. I didn't go online and complain that a fan-less computer gets hot when pushed; I returned it and picked up a MBP which does not even turn the fans on with a similar load.

Buy the correct computer for your needs.

 

[Apple_Robert]

People around here waste no time in drumming up conspiracy and blame for Apple. It doesn't matter whether the person doing the blaming or creating a logical fallacy (which the OP did) knows what he or she is talking about. What matters is s surfing the internet looking for the latest M2 tripe to sling around. Facts? Sadly not here.

 

[SRQrws]

It amazes me how much people are complaining about MBA M2 thermals. Have you used a Windows laptop lately? I had occasion to set up a new Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 2 last week and just going through the initial Windows update cycle caused it to get quite hot. This past weekend I set up my new MBA M2 (base model). It never got warm to the touch including downloading 30 GB of Music files, updating/installing apps, multiple browser windows open, etc.

 

[darngooddesign]

People around here waste no time in drumming up conspiracy and blame for Apple. It doesn't matter whether the person doing the blaming or creating a logical fallacy (which the OP did) knows what he or she is talking about. What matters is s surfing the internet looking for the latest M2 tripe to sling around. Facts? Sadly not here.

Robert, you should probably return your new Air that you really like because it gets hot while running benchmarks. 🤣

 

[Cryates]

It amazes me how much people are complaining about MBA M2 thermals. Have you used a Windows laptop lately? I had occasion to set up a new Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 2 last week and just going through the initial Windows update cycle caused it to get quite hot. This past weekend I set up my new MBA M2 (base model). It never got warm to the touch including downloading 30 GB of Music files, updating/installing apps, multiple browser windows open, etc.

Tell me about it. I just had to set up two Dell precision laptops (laptops that are specifically designed as workstations) for work on Friday, and they were basically space heaters by the time I was done ... and all I was did was install seven applications on each.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Robert, you should probably return your new Air that you really like because it gets hot while running benchmarks. 🤣

The voice of reason speaks. I think you are right, dg. I shall return it and ask the Apple Genius if they sell any Macs that don't get hot while benching because that is what MR land expects.

 

[MK500]

People around here waste no time in drumming up conspiracy and blame for Apple. It doesn't matter whether the person doing the blaming or creating a logical fallacy (which the OP did) knows what he or she is talking about. What matters is s surfing the internet looking for the latest M2 tripe to sling around. Facts? Sadly not here.

Would you please point out the specific logical fallacy in my post? I appreciate criticism so that I can improve.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Would you please point out the specific logical fallacy in my post? I appreciate criticism so that I can improve.

"To me this is evidence that Apple originally hoped the M2 would ship on a smaller process node with lower wattage, and when it did not they continued with the chassis they had been working on for many years without updating it for the higher thermal needs."

That is your correlation / causation fallacy. The pictures you posted don't show what Apple originally hoped for nor does it show anything other than 2 pictures and your gross assumptions without any facts in evidence ; hence your logical fallacy.

 

[Sammy in SoCal]

Because people just make up stupid garbage so they can moan on the internet. Some people get angry they can’t run Crysis 3 with raytracing on a sub-notebook instead of doing the rational thing and using the correct system for that.

I’m moaning that you’re complaining about people moaning. I’m glad channels like max tech are holding Apple to a high standard. I don’t want Apple to have wiggle room to pull their BULLS*** when it comes to ssd and better thermals in this example, but also overall in general.

 

[richinaus]

I would love to have a thread on forcing certain mac users on M chips, to only use Intel laptops for a month, and hear the whinging then.
In my experience with both PC and Macs [of the current machines] is the Macs spank them into oblivion. I literally have nothing negative to say about the current Macs right now based upon this experience. The Mac studio ultra is magic - I hear no sound whilst on 100% CPU use.

Apple are not miracle workers, but they do a damm fine job. Just buy the right computer for your use.

 

[hagjohn]

I need to stop reading these threads. People's expectations of new machines are so out of control.

 

[CrysisDeu]

They are wasting so much space in a compact laptop.. nonesense.

 

[darngooddesign]

To me this is evidence that Apple originally hoped the M2 would ship on a smaller process node with lower wattage, and when it did not they continued with the chassis they had been working on for many years without updating it for the higher thermal needs.

To me its evidence that you don't understand the video you watched. An easy we to tell if something is the SoCs heatsink is by seeing if it touches the SoC, and that bit that looks like a spacer doesn't touch the SoC or any part of the motherboard for that matter. Additionally, M2 in the 13" MBP has an almost identical motherboard and heatsink to the M1 13" MBP which means that Apple never planned on the M2 being 3nm.


Additionally, the very idea that Apple is so unaware of what their main chip supplier is doing that they could finalize the internal design of the Air without knowing if the chip is 5nm or 3nm is ludicrous.

I know that the M2Air is the new trendy thing to hate on, but you're grasping at straws here.

 

[darngooddesign]

One more thing...

You know that part which you said was the M2 Air's inferior heatsink, MT didn't put any thermal pads on it because as they said in the video which you posted, it doesn't actually touch the mother board because it's not the heatsink.

 

[MK500]

To me its evidence that you don't understand the video you watched. An easy we to tell if something is the SoCs heatsink is by seeing if it touches the SoC, and that bit that looks like a spacer doesn't touch any part of the motherboard. Additionally, M2 in the 13" MBP has an almost identical motherboard and heatsink to the M1 13" MBP which means that Apple never planned on the M2 being 3nm.

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Additionally, the very idea that Apple is so unaware of what their main chip supplier is doing that they could finalize the internal design of the Air without knowing if the chip is 5nm or 3nm is ludicrous.

I know that the M2Air is the new trendy thing to hate on, but you're grasping at straws here.

If you watch the video, you will notice that metal shield hanging off the side is what is thermally “connected” to the SoC via paste on the underside as pictured. What you see in the picture serves the exact same purpose as the thicker rectangular heatsink I showed in the picture of the M1 Air. It’s just that in the M2 the “heatsink” is so thin it is basically what we would usually call a shield.

I was doing my best to show the two functionally identical components without having the machines disassembled in front of me.

 

[Shevlin]

What an increased thermal mass does in a fanless design is regulate the temperature over a period of time. So instead of shooting up to the thermal limit in 30 seconds, it takes much longer. So you might have several minutes of full performance before performance must be reduced. This can have a substantial effect on your work throughout the day if you ever run sustained processes (video/photo/compiling/etc).

So it’s not about just dropping the temp; it’s about smoothing out the temperature curve.

I completely agree that Apple employs top notch engineers. But their thermal designs have not always been up to snuff; and there is nothing wrong with being critical when this happens. That’s how we get them to improve their future products.

MacBook Air wasn’t designed for people who run those kind of workloads. The MacBook Pro is.

Most people rarely if at all do those kind of sustained workloads. Apple recognizes this and made a laptop that fits their needs very well. All while having zero fan noise.

While I agree that it’s good to be critical of Apple when they screw up, it doesn’t really make sense to criticize the Air for being bad at things it wasn’t designed for.

 

[MK500]

One more thing...

You know that part which you said was the M2 Air's inferior heatsink, MT didn't put any thermal pads on it because as they said in the video which you posted, it doesn't actually touch the mother board because it's not the heatsink.

He was re-using the thermal pads he had available from a previous project and said he would have covered the entire surface if the new pads had arrived in time.

 

[darngooddesign]

If you watch the video, you will notice that metal shield hanging off the side is what is thermally “connected” to the SoC via paste on the underside as pictured. What you see in the picture serves the exact same purpose as the thicker rectangular heatsink I showed in the picture of the M1 Air. It’s just that in the M2 the “heatsink” is so thin it is basically what we would usually call a shield.

I was doing my best to show the two functionally identical components without having the machines disassembled in front of me.

That is not what the heatsink looks like because that doesn't touch the motherboard.

What you did show was one M1 heatsink, and one M2 spacer that is not the heatsink. If you don't have images which accurately support your claim, there is no reason to show them.

The two laptops use a different system to passively cool the laptop, the M2 uses a much larger chamber to spread the heat out, but you have provided zero evidence to prove that the M2 is inferior to the M1 or that Apple originally thought the M2 would be 3nm.

 

[defferoo]

If you watch the video, you will notice that metal shield hanging off the side is what is thermally “connected” to the SoC via paste on the underside as pictured. What you see in the picture serves the exact same purpose as the thicker rectangular heatsink I showed in the picture of the M1 Air. It’s just that in the M2 the “heatsink” is so thin it is basically what we would usually call a shield.

I was doing my best to show the two functionally identical components without having the machines disassembled in front of me.

it is connected, but I'm pretty certain it isn't functioning as a heat sink. just because it's touching doesn't mean it's supposed to be a thermal mass. if you watch the video, that part is also thinner than the rest of the cover (which I presume is the actual heatsink).

you mention your wife using an Air with hundreds of tabs + Office + Mail open and use that as an example of hardcore work. I think you misunderstand what hardcore work is. All of those tabs sitting there are just using up memory for the most part. Office and mail are both very light. that is exactly what the Air is built to handle. hardcore work that shows the throttling behavior is more along the lines of rendering 3D scenes in Blender or Cinema4D, or other highly threaded sustained workload that takes > 10 minutes like training a machine learning model or running a server with hundreds of concurrent connections.

now that that's been addressed, there has been a lot of noise about how the M2 Air throttles, what I think most people don't understand is that the M1 Air also throttled quite a bit. The question that hasn't quite been answered is the relative degree of throttling. If they both throttle at similar rates, that means the product hasn't regressed in thermal performance. Someone needs to do a stress test over time of the two systems to look at the frequency curve of the two systems and see if they're comparable. People loved the performance of the M1 Air, so unless the M2 Air is significantly worse when it comes to sustained performance, I don't see why people shouldn't also love the M2 Air.

 

[MoreAwesomeDanU]

Thank you for letting everyone know you don't own one.

I bought mine fully expecting to return it for a pro instead but this machine surprised the heck out of me. I have been hammering it hard since I got it on Friday and it is significantly more powerful than people peg it for.

I have ran Houdini simulations, worked with 4k video in Final Cut, made songs in Logic with 20 tracks (I didn't go higher because I got bored testing it), played video games on it, animated and rendered in Blender, worked on Xcode projects on it and more and it handled all of it like a champ and barely, and I mean barely got warm, even when doing renders.

These tech YouTubers are borderline click bait with their claims as of late.

If anyone is curious the specs on my machine are: M2 MacBook Air, 8 core CPU, 10 core GPU, 16 gigs ram, 1TB hard drive.

Again, I fully expected to return this for a MBP but am keeping it instead. It performs incredibly well.

This is great. I think what the YouTube reviewers fail to answer a lot of times is how benchmark dips transfer to real world result differences. And even then, bringing it back to real life, does a few extra seconds or even minute of rendering time matter to your average content creator (already skipping the college laptop use case as the air should be more than enough)

If those seconds or minutes really matters to you, you should really NOT be considering the MacBook Air at all.

 

[darngooddesign]

it is connected, but I'm pretty certain it isn't functioning as a heat sink. just because it's touching doesn't mean it's supposed to be a thermal mass. if you watch the video, that part is also thinner than the rest of the cover (which I presume is the actual heatsink)...

Yeah... If touching is all that's required to be the heatsink, then why not talk about the motherboard being a heatsink.

 

[defferoo]

Yeah... If touching is all that's required to be the heatsink, then why not talk about the motherboard being a heatsink.

after rewatching the video, it seems that shield is actually quite thin throughout, in the case of the M2 Air it almost looks like the shield doesn't act as a thermal mass like the M1 heatsink and its function might actually be to increase the surface area that can dissipate heat like a heat spreader.

 

[flapflapflap]

Thank you for letting everyone know you don't own one.

I bought mine fully expecting to return it for a pro instead but this machine surprised the heck out of me. I have been hammering it hard since I got it on Friday and it is significantly more powerful than people peg it for.

I have ran Houdini simulations, worked with 4k video in Final Cut, made songs in Logic with 20 tracks (I didn't go higher because I got bored testing it), played video games on it, animated and rendered in Blender, worked on Xcode projects on it and more and it handled all of it like a champ and barely, and I mean barely got warm, even when doing renders.

These tech YouTubers are borderline click bait with their claims as of late.

If anyone is curious the specs on my machine are: M2 MacBook Air, 8 core CPU, 10 core GPU, 16 gigs ram, 1TB hard drive.

Again, I fully expected to return this for a MBP but am keeping it instead. It performs incredibly well.

I don't own it, I have the M1 Pro. I need support for multiple external displays and higher scaled resolutions / HiDPI on certain 5K2K ultra-wides.

 

[canadianpj]

Considering 90% of all my computing needs can be handled by an iPad (M1 or not) I'm thinking that my M2 which is on the way between August 3rd to 10th (not the base model) is going to do everything. Pretty sure this is likely to be my last computer as by the time I would replace it, there wont be any point, for me.

 

[darngooddesign]

after rewatching the video, it seems that shield is actually quite thin throughout, in the case of the M2 Air it almost looks like the shield doesn't act as a thermal mass like the M1 heatsink and its function might actually be to increase the surface area that can dissipate heat like a heat spreader.

Yeah. it looks like the M1 uses a thicker but smaller metal chamber while the M2 uses a thinner but much larger metal chamber. Neither is inherently superior, they are just different because the computers are physically different; the wedge shape meant that you couldn't have a large chamber.