LTT just released their video doing their own mod... coincidence? :)
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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It's not the greatest example, putting those things into a Macbook Air. They had to remove so many components just to get it in there, then solder in the connectors onto the USB port, then mill out the case in order to add an air gap. It would have been much better to create a small Framework module and show how they can cool a product that Linus actually has a stake in.
In LTT they use a somewhat large copper plate. I want to see the results with only the copper plate.
Relevant quote:
Frore had to painstakingly mill 0.3mm out of the laptop’s lid to give the AirJets a big enough air gap to do their thing, and the company wound up removing the speakers, Wi-Fi antenna, and even the Mac’s internal keyboard connector along the way.
They are stuffing it into a device that was never designed for it.
Absolutely, and it’s super impressive that they were able to. Certainly it can only be improved from here. I just wanted to taper people’s expectations that this was a miracle pill. It’s one step towards proving that these can be used in production, not yet a solution for zero thermal throttling.
They're showing that it's easily doable with a engineering effort to use them from the start. Those things can be moved around and lose none of that functionality.
Its not intended to be a product, it's inteded to be a PoC that shows how it could be theoretically used
the company wound up removing the speakers, Wi-Fi antenna, and even the Mac’s internal keyboard connector along the way.
They only did this to make room for the demonstration unit, to show how it would affect noise/cooling. A real application would not need such compromise.
This exactly, if Apple was using this tech to cool the air, it would be engineered to fit.
Unfortunately, the Air line I think has been advertised as fanless since the first 11" using super low powered Intel laptop CPU's right? Also they're segmenting their performance tiers by cooling capacity!
The M1 MBA was the first iteration to go fanless, they used ULV Intel CPUs but even those need fans.
I wonder if they would have had an easier time just sanding and polishing 0.3mm away instead of milling
Milling a slot out of a piece of aluminum is not that difficult. It also has a lot lower chance of fucking up a perfectly good notebook part.
I'm a fan of this product.
so... air cooling is more effective than passive cooling. neat.
this is why i unsubbed from ltt. this is blatantly an ad.
Nice to see their solution evolve. Hope they will make it a proper product that can be mass-produced for cheap.
The problem with these solutions is that this still doesn't solve the heat problem itself. The amount of heat we produce as a civilization is immense, and moving the problem away from the product is not really fixing the issue of it still being a hot item that costs a lot of energy. If these items get put into products, it will still heat the room a lot and make other things hot that perhaps shouldn't be. Or simply waste a lot of energy on heat. Something that might not be so bad during the winter, but in the summer it really adds up. You will kinda need to have air conditioning even if its not yet that hot outside.
Don't worry, these air movers won't really change the amount of heat a laptop puts out. Besides, I don't think you have a strong handle on the relative heat outputs. A Macbook Air tops out at like 30 watts. You put out like 80 watts minimum, and can easily go over 1kw if you're exercising. And of course the sun itself is doing like 1kw/m over the entire earth throughout the day.
If you cool it, it seems to run faster for longer and it draws more power. So more power = more heat.
And I'm not talking about the heat itself, I'm talking about how we make that power. Those airconditioning units during the summer aren't all powered by solar or wind. They add a lot of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.
Those airconditioning units during the summer aren't all powered by solar or wind. They add a lot of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.
If you want to save A/C, then you should go outside yourself, since you're putting out dramatically more heat than a laptop.
And see what you can do about blotting out the sun, drive that's what's really heating us up.
Alright, if you don't want to discuss it anymore, there's no need to be dramatic about it.
Apple won't like that at all. The air is not supposed to be able to do real work that active cooling enables.
Neat little gizmo though, great to see it in real world use. Been wondering when they will demonstrate one capable of cooling a higher wattage chip, the ability to include dust filters in laptops would be very useful as far as maintenance.
Based on their announcement presentation for the MacBook Air M2, you're supposed to use it for gaming and video production. I don't understand the whole "the MacBook Air is only for web browsing and word processing" excuse when Apple's own marketing materials claim otherwise.
The Air certainly can be used for more than just web browsing and word processing. Although I doubt a fan would ever need to make it into the air. 90% of the original performance at 75% of the power in 30m+ workloads is like more than reasonable compared to a properly cooled mbp with the same chip. You would still have to either lose battery or increase the device thickness to compensate, at that point isnt it just a mbp?
The only thing would be to see if this can become the fan in the pro rather than adding a fan to the air that doesn't need it.
I'd like to get my hand on one to cool a speedy M.2 SSD. Conventional fan doesn't fit and a really small one that do fit, moves less air than a farting flea.
LTT literally uploaded a video about this.
Literally?
Dropped the server containing the footage I'd guess?
AirJets.
One of the most interesting and exciting technologies coming up.
This could revolutionise cooling not only in laptops, but also tablets and phones.
Phones probably not but definitely could work in tablets and ipads
I definitely can imagine gaming phones using this. For normal phones the technology needs to improve further so it may only happen in the far future or not at all.
I wonder well these devices perform in humid climates.