 Here we have the new M1 MacBook Air and this is the new MacBook Pro. Externally, they differ very little. Brighter screen here, fan there, but under the hood, these two machines have exactly the same processor with just one catch. Because there's no fan in the MacBook Air, its only way of cooling is passively radiating heat away. And once the cooler has soaked up all the heat it can handle, it's gotta slow down the processor to keep itself safe. But never fear, because for about $30, I'm gonna show you how to make this perform just like this, or maybe even better. And by now you should know that there's no better way to save money online than our sponsor, Honey. Honey is the free to use browser extension that helps you find some of the best promo codes on over 30,000 sites. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. So, let's get started. By forcing air across the heat sink inside, the MacBook Pro is able to maintain its performance better because it's actively removing heat from the system enclosure. The MacBook Air on the other hand, as counterintuitive as that might sound, it's got air right in the name, has no airflow and uses a completely passive cooling solution. So, in lieu of a fan, Apple's engineers opted to use a large heat sink inside, which is essentially using the thermal mass of a block of metal to soak up the heat and then passively radiated away through air channels below the screen. And for short bursty workloads, this isn't a problem. That thermal mass is able to contain the short spikes in heat output. Unfortunately, when it comes to longer workloads, the heat sink, well, heats up, essentially filling up its thermal tank until it's at equilibrium with the CPU. With no way to further remove heat, the air will reduce its clock speeds and slow itself down so that the heat input matches the heat output. And we can see this when we benchmark these two machines side by side. If the benchmark is relatively short, meaning that it doesn't heat soak the cooler, both machines perform nearly identically, coming within margin of error in terms of performance. But when we get to more extended workloads, the performance gap widens significantly. Let's take a look at how it works. Here is the CPU and this over here is the heat sink. All the heat the CPU generates is transferred into this heat sink. And then the only place it can go is radiating around inside the chassis, except for one exception. It can actually waft out this gap at the back of the machine right here, but that ain't much. So it stands to reason that if we can improve the ability of the heat sink to get that heat out of the system, we could improve the performance of the CPU. But besides the low hanging fruit of like, slapping a water block on it with like tubes and a radiator hanging off of it and calling it a day, what can we do if we don't wanna make permanent, unwieldy modifications? Well, that, I'm glad you asked, is where these come in. These are thermal pads and they're designed to move heat around. This one is really squishy. That is a fat thermal pad. Anyway, all we have to do is slap these bad boys between the heat sink and the bottom of the chassis and we'll turn the back panel, which conveniently is made of aluminum, which happens to be great for dissipating heat, into one big heat sink. As it turns out, all we need to do to make room for it is take off this insulating sponge right here. See you later. Easy peasy. But how does it perform? Well, we already ran the benchmarks and the improvements are nothing short of amazing. In bursty loads, we saw essentially the same scores within our margin of error, but on moderate to long benchmarks, we got a remarkable result, up to an 8% improvement. Even more impressive is that on the standard length multicore Cinebench, we actually beat the MacBook Pro by nearly a hundred points. Our theory here is that the delay between the load being applied and the fans ramping up on the MacBook Pro actually leaves a gap in its performance that the Air is able to take advantage of with its beefier heat sink, which is the entire chassis of the device. There's essentially no delay. It just immediately shunts the heat out of the case, hence the win. But that win comes at a cost, a dire cost, comfort. Because the bottom of our MacBook Air saw temperatures rise by seven and a half degrees to 47 degrees Celsius. Now, if you're an old fogey like me, you might actually remember a story circulating back in the early 2000s about a researcher who managed to burn his, how you say, delicate bits by means of a scaldingly hot laptop. Well, I'm sorry to say the story is probably bogus because we couldn't find any actual first party reporting on it, but nevertheless, that is definitely a danger. So there's gotta be some kind of regulation around that, right? Well, yeah, lots of them in fact. But the most important is the International Electrotechnical Commission Standards. The safety standard for information technology equipment, AKA laptops, is this. And it specifies the requirements for products to remain safe during both normal operation and abnormal operation. The specs are pretty exhaustive. So to keep it simple, the limit for metal, uncoated or anodized for normal use contact is 55 degrees Celsius at an ambient temperature of 35 degrees. To get this temperature without using a heated chamber, we can calculate it by taking the MacBook's external temperature, subtracting the room temperature, then adding 35. So let's do the math. Our office sits at a balmy 20 degrees. So for our stock MacBook's peak temp of 39 and a half, we subtract 20 for the room plus 35, bringing us to 54 and a half degrees. That is half a degree below the IEC limit. And this right here is exactly the trade-off that Apple's engineers needed to make for the MacBook Air to operate fanlessly. Hats off by the way guys for hitting that mark. Exactly. Doing the same math for our modified version means that we would be seven degrees over that threshold. And that might not seem like a lot, but the difference in temperature between threshold pain and maximum pain according to ASTM is only eight degrees. So that's from 48 to 56 degrees. We do have some leeway here because the numbers that we calculated are at an unreasonable ambient temperature, at least for us. But in actual use, yeah, this thing does get uncomfortably hot with the thermal pads. Like I could do a faster 30 minute Blender render on my lap, but I wouldn't want to, and I'd wager that you wouldn't want to either. So where does that leave us? Well, the mod works. It brings darn near MacBook Pro level performance to the MacBook Air at a cost of like 50 cents worth of thermal pads. But it also comes at the cost of external surface temperatures. And obviously we wouldn't warrant your MacBook once you've modified it in this way because we don't know exactly what the long-term effects would be, even if we think that they would be minimal. For a mod that is completely reversible though, and cheap, I don't see why you wouldn't do this as long as you use your common sense and don't burn your junk. This Valentine's day, don't let nicks and cuts ruin your big day. 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