There was definitely some weird with earlier dump it in the frame setups. Though I’m not super familiar with the subject since I’ve never bee super into laptops.
The air is pretty specifically supposed to be a super light, thin device and that whole class tends to be fanless. The better comparison point would tend to be phones and tablets where things have always been that way.
I dunno how the air is assembled but the few phones and tablets I’ve opened up tended to have a very thin heat spreader thermal glued to the CPU and other heat producing parts. Tensioned between the internal frame or metal side wall with a heat pad or paste.
So the idea seems to be to spread the heat to a larger contact patch on whatever it’s dumping to to prevent a hot spot on the exterior. Often time it’s an internal frame not the casing itself. The trick seems to be moving the heat off the CPU fast enough to avoid a problem, while allowing it to spread into the case slow enough for it to actually dissipate.
From the coverage of the Air and other devices like it they tend to badly underperform due to heat. And the rise of “fast and light” as a device catagory has become a major pitch for the industry. AMD’s newer APUs are getting a heavy pitch on that front, Intel pegged some of its 10nm cpus as explicitly for “fast and light” notebooks, and it was a big part of Apple’s justification for switching to in house ARM.
So the entire idea here is that it’ll be able to out perform an existing Intel in this sort of setup. Even the pros have had heat problems recently. So I’d be more skeptical about claims in places where things aren’t already hampered by heat.
So could the MacBook Air’s CPU theoretically perform just as well as its more expensive sibling if you just used your computer in a super-cold environment?
The reason to get the 13" M1 MBP over the MBA is performance. The M1 in the Air will be throttled without cooling. I would withhold judgement until real-world benchmarks are available.
The CPU, yes – it’s the same part in both computers.
I doubt you could run the Air at sustained high clock speeds just by cooling it from outside – as mentioned above, without a fan or similar, the heat would build up around the CPU. It might be possible to drill some holes and pump oil or freon through the case, though even that might not work since there’s very little empty space inside an Air.
I expect someone on youtube will try it anyway. It would be interesting to know if the throttling is imposed by firmware or factory-set fuses, or is simply the chip’s response to feeling hot. Perhaps iFixit will crack open an Air to discover that its speed is limited by putting a little black turtleneck on the CPU.
I am inclined to believe the hype in this case. iPhone chips already get better benchmarks at 5W than Intel chips can manage at 30W. It seems the M1 is going to draw less power than an x86 even in the fan-cooled models (looking at the battery life), and still be comfortably faster, even for single-threaded workloads. Also, Apple wouldn’t be introducing the MBP and Mini as part of the initial lineup if they didn’t think people would be impressed. In fact they wouldn’t be switching at all unless they were confident of that.
This shoe has been waiting to drop for a couple of years. Intel’s been stepping on a succession of banana peels, while ARM chips (especially Apple’s) have been improving at 1990s speed.
Still a solution in search of a problem. I’d much rather have a physical row of keys there.
I bought a new 16" MBP last year. I guess I should be kicking myself for that, but I have a feeling it will still last me plenty of years before it’s time to upgrade even with the new ARM-based processors coming out imminently.
I’ve let my Adobe account lapse for this very reason. Will keep the account and software and rejoin/pay when I have a gig that requires it. The only thing that I need in a professional sense is After Effects which is stubbornly hanging on to an outdated layer based compositing flow!
Blender and Davinci Resolve for free!!
My Adobe ‘red mist coming down’ has been triggered so I’ll bow out now and have a cup of tea!
Just observing the Raspberry Pi family over the years shows that really well. The new Mac Mini is the first Apple box to intrigue me in an extremely long time, especially with ARM-level power consumption, but my Apple fandom faded away with the original 1984 Mac, and I’m worried about Apple’s slow, incremental moves towards total lockdown, since it looks like my operating system choices are MacOS or nothing. And I want no part of a platform where I have to have vendor permission to develop software for it. As it is, iOS is already there.
As far as I know there is no loss or penalty by letting your account lapse. In fact I’ve heard it is actually quite hard to remove yourself from the Adobe ecosystem. Haven’t paid a cent for ten months and I’m still getting pinged about updates to the apps on my system.
Adobe wants whatever bucks they can get and through subscription they’ve gleaned money from the previous pirate software crowd that they relied on to “train up” in their clunky workflows.
Strongly recommend lapsing and then rejoining for the month or so that you may need it for a gig that needs it - and in the meantime skill up in Open Source or cheap equivalents for your creative needs… A bezier curve is a bezier curve and there are a lot better implementations than the non uniform way that Adobe spreads them across their applications.
I had that same bundle and wasn’t using it. When I went to cancel the bundle I was given a choice to cancel or get 3 months for free. I took the free option. I ended up doing that several more times over 2019 and 2020. Finally I got tired of needing to go back every 3ish months and just cancelled it completely.
That’s what I do with InDesign, since I rarely use it, and the CS3 version hasn’t worked for years. But with Illustrator or Photoshop, I use them like breathing, and not just for Official Business; if I had to decide month by month, I’d pay a penalty in terms of making my daily life that little bit shittier. Which you might say means I should be paying, and sure, once I can’t put it off any longer I will add their shithead rent to the list of monthly fines I have to pay for the crime of existing. I get how capitalism works. My personal hatred for Adobe Inc., and its filth employees, is just part of the system working.
So these laptops have tech that will run faster but too hot, so it’s throttled to run slower. Why not have less fast kit that runs cooler and doesn’t need to be throttled? “Right, but I have a 1D.”
It didn’t seem like they would ever stop offering 3 more free months but most often I remembered to go cancel again after 4 months. So even though they were giving 3 months away, they still got a few more months paid out by me than if they just let me quit outright. The important thing is they need you more than you need them.
It works for me. I have no objection to paying for software. Like everybody else, though, I am not a fan of Adobe (is anybody?), and this would be one way to cut down my costs.
My plan is to buy Capture One for FujiFilm but I just haven’t been shooting for some crazy reason lately. Once I am shooting on a more regular basis I will be happy to give them my money.
Once I am shooting on a more regular basis I will be happy to give them my money.