Kilo! - Blog - 2024-07-26

Passive cooling sucks.

Have you ever used a modern MacBook with an Apple Silicon M chip? Or some cheap Netbook? Or an iPhone 6s? Have you noticed how HOT it got when doing intensive or sometimes even simple basic tasks?

You can thank passive cooling for that, the fan-less design found in Netbooks, Ultrabooks, or even your phone. Now I will admit passive cooling is sometimes great, like in phones or tablets, however not in higher power Ultrabooks like the MacBook Pro or Lenovo Yoga w/ an 8th Gen i7, or even the lap warmer Celeron/Pentium Netbooks often with Chromebook branding, or hell even DESKTOPS like the Dell Inspiron 20 3052! As of writing this, my HP Chromebook 11 G6 EE (snappy alan) laptop is burning up my lap at a very sad 76°C, with only Discord, Firefox, and SSH open, and I'm literally using a 6W dual core Celeron N3350, so it shouldn't even have enough power to get this hot anyways! Please note I've gotten way higher before, (like 97°C).


Sure this is just a shitty Netbook, but what about the "good" laptops from an overhyped brand? Surely a US$2,000 laptop if you get a good config shouldn't thermal throttle, right? (They totally did not cheap out on fans for no reason, right?)

cough cough Apple Discussions: Overheating M2 Air cough YouTube: Apple NEVER learns. - M2 Macbook Review - LTT cough

And to throw shots at Chromebooks too, YouTube: Is The Samsung Chromebook Pro Overheating? - Chrome Unboxed is a good video that shows a random Samsung model reaching very sad temperatures during basic use of the device.

Although completely unrelated, YouTube: North Carolina student's Chromebook catches fire during Zoom class, and YouTube: Laptop overheats, starts smoking in North Carolina classroom are kinda silly videos showing older HP Chromebooks catching fire but this was battery related, not the fact they are passively cooled.