Okay, Apple. I know this is going to sound a little crazy, but what if the
MacBook Air actually moved some air
around so it didn't thermal throttle after 2 minutes of any kind of work?
Well, believe it or not, it can. And without even adding any fans, all we
need is a couple of these. Mindus, I don't use a MacBook. Why should I care?
And the answer is because anything Apple does, the entire rest of the copycat PC
industry does like 3/4 later. So, if we can get them to adopt this kind of cool
stuff, then maybe the rest of us have a chance. There's only a couple parts of
this operation that might be a bit difficult to perform. Like this
difficult segue to our sponsor, Ridge. Christmas
is coming up and you know what that means? Buying presents for everyone. But
Ridge can lessen the impact on your wallet, pun intended, with sales of up
to 30% off. Go grab a fantastic stocking
stuffer from Ridge down below. For our convenience, Four Systems has sent along
an example of what this should look like when we're done. Emphasis on the should.
There's no way mine will be that clean. Let's get started. Step one is to remove
our back cover with a pentalobe 5 screwdriver. Do you know what you're doing?
Yeah, mom. It would sure work better.
Put on a jacket. Oh, wow. That's cool.
Look at that. It's even still flat. And now that this is removed, the
modification we'll be making to accommodate our air jets is to remove
300 microns. 300 microns. Yeah, it's not very much.
How are we going to Good luck, everybody. What happens if I break it?
One sec. We have instructions. We have instructions. You were just
going to let me struggle on my own.
There's a whole bunch of stuff coming out. These are Apple's wild force
cancelling speakers. Each of these apparently has three speakers in it.
They sound really good. Or at least I think they do. We're never going to hear
them. They are not going back in. Our next step is to remove the ribbon cable
from the Mag Safe connector and then shimmy out the Mag Safe. How are we
going to charge the thing? With the USB. With USB. Oh, we have no Mag Safe
anymore. Did I mention yet that we're going to lose some functionality here?
Cuz we are. The point of this is not that you can just go buy a For air jet
at the store and then install it in your MacBook Air. to show how the system
could be cooled better and fanlessly if
Apple engineered it in in the first place. So, sorry to disappoint you, but
it's still going to be really cool. Oh, look at that. I reconnected some things.
One minor oversight is if you remove MagSafe and the keyboard. Did I mention
we're not going to be able to use the keyboard? Don't worry about it. The point is we're going to have no way of
turning the device on and using it. So, we have to enable a feature in macOS
that allows us to boot it up if we have a USBC charger attached, not Mags safe.
It's Apple logic. We found the setting. It's allow accessories to connect
always. It's under privacy and security. Sure. Better to shut it down before we do
this. Oh, I might have just killed it. You have to shut it down before you
disconnect the battery sometimes. Yes. Oh, boy. Yeah, it's bending. This is
making me very nervous. You're sure this is supposed to come up? Yes. Yes.
I dare you to lick it. Context. What we're looking at right now
is the power supply. Alex, I will not be licking it. And also the M2 chip with
its DRAM right next to it, which raises an interesting question. Is this the
whole cooler for the M2? Guess so.
No wonder this sucks. Yes, Apple. There was clearly no better way to do this.
Not even a little vapor chamber. Nothing. It does have a gap here.
Do they have decent coolers on the latest generation Pros or Wait, we're still waiting for our samples.
Yeah, when I say samples, I mean samples we bought. Apple doesn't send us stuff.
It's like they don't like us for some reason. I don't know. We've never done anything
awful to their computers ever.
Here's the problem we're having a little think about right now. Our air jets need
to be installed somewhere where they can draw air in through the filters on the
top and then expel the air out the back of the system. We're thinking probably
right around here. The issue is that's where Apple's keyboard and Touch ID
daughterboard is. So, no keyboard. And Alex is sort of hoping
that we could Yes. keyboard. It's not looking good. Would also be so
easy to just move if these were not such fragile, stupid little connectors.
Packed. Except for right there cuz we didn't pay enough.
Okay. Hey, see not even ripped mostly a little.
[laughter] Who needs a keyboard anyway? It's not even mechanical. Now comes the part
where we drop all pretense of being careful and start cutting things.
Goodbye audio jack ribbon cable. Oh.
Oh no. Touch ID. Should have had Face ID.
Now it's all coming together and you can see what the plan is going to be. We're
going to have three AirJet minis here, here, and here. We are going to machine
a little bit of extra space in the chassis so that there's actually room
for them to intake air. And then we need a controller board for these things.
Where is that going to go? Oh, that's why we ripped out the Mag Safe so we can
actually connect this thing to power. We're just going to use a USB cable.
Y nice. Our goal now is to get power to our air jets, which is done with this
little board right here. Thing is though, uh, we don't have power going
into this right yet. Now, you might be thinking that we could just take it off
somewhere in here, but it's not quite that easy. First of all, uh from the
battery, this connector is just super duper small. Probing, it's very
difficult. And when they tried to, uh the whole thing went kablam. Also, you
might be able to probe over here in sort of the power supply region of the main
board, but uh they also [music] did that and it blew up again. So, instead, we're
just going to be using USB power. You just simply pass the little thing
through right here. Solder it together, making sure that you've already passed
it through before you do that, and we should be good to go. Sorry, Mr. USB.
Now, man, that's tight. You need to just
squish this cable down a tiny bit or it won't go in at all.
Not too bad. Now we have to attach the drive cables from our power to our air
jets. This go right in here. For some
strain relief, we're just going to fold these cables around like so. We got rid
of the EMI shield, so we're going to be replacing that with more capton tape.
There we go. Now, we just need to block off the rest of that mag safe hole using
this tiny 3D printed [music] part. This is very important because we're going to
be drawing in air from right here. It needs to cool the stuff on the logic
board, come over and get exhausted over here. If we still have this gap, then
the air just comes in there and it doesn't do what it needs to do. The next
thing we have to do is put in this little TPU gasket. This right here just
prevents recirculation of our hot air. We want all of it going out instead of
coming on back in. But before we do that, we need to make sure that our air
jets can go in here nice and tight. Means we need a little bit of vacuum
lube. that. Boom. I I think I [music] have way too much. [laughter]
Next thing we'll need is a piece of graphite. This acts as a heat spreader.
Uh, okay, not a heat spreader, but a spreader of heat to make sure that when
we have our vapor chamber sitting on top of it, we're not going to get a bunch of
heat from that through to the keyboard, creating a hot spot. Take that, 5minute
crafts. Look at how straight that line is. Would you look at that? There's a
whole system for this and everything. And it's got a little split on the bottom. Nice. Oh, gross. Our t-shirts
also work great as a cleaning cloth. ltstore.com.
Ooh. While we're waiting for the next step, these are really cool. They're USB
PD cables. So, you can see it's labeled 9V 5 amps. That's because if you were to
plug in a regular cable, it would be limited to 5 vol and I believe.5 amps.
That's because for USB PD to activate, so the higher amperages, higher
voltages, there has to be a handshake that goes on. So these special cables
have the handshake chip inside them. So you just plug them in and then they can
grab whatever voltage they need for whatever device you want to plug in. In
this case, their little controller board. Okay, now it's time to cut off
our antenna. So we make a little
incision and then we should be able to just peel it off. Very important though
at this stage that I don't slice myself open. One. And two, that I don't break
this plastic piece right here. I don't want to break this.
Come on. O, don't worry. You guys are good. You're good. You're good. It's all good. It's
all good. The Fore people are here to like show us how to use all this stuff.
It's their It's their MacBook. I mean, I don't want it. It has no keyboard, no
Wi-Fi, no Mag Safe. Don't worry, we're going to get to the part where we show
you guys how if it was integrated from the start, this could be done. My pliers
are stuck together now. I'm not going to break it. I guarantee it.
Did I guarantee it or what? Apparently, we need to cut it now. Don't break it.
Do break it.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There we go. Now for
the really fun part. We're gonna put some double-sided captain tape on our air jets, and I'm going to show you guys
exactly how we're going to fix the thermals on this thing. The best part of
these kinds of videos is that I hear from them often enough that I know
people at Apple watch our channel. So, that means if they don't do anything
about this, it's cuz they decided they don't care. That reminds me, this is a
very unusual application for these air jets. Normally, you would use the copper
spreader at the bottom, and you would put that directly against the dye or the
chip that you're trying to cool, but in this case, there just isn't enough room
in this device for that to be possible. So, instead, it's being used as more
like a crazy [snorts] lowprofile exhaust fan, cuz you wouldn't be able to get a
traditional fan in here. And there are other advantages besides the thinness.
These things generate over 1,700 pascals
of static pressure. So, what that means
is when you jam them in here, okay, these are little exhaust shrouds. Oh,
boy. There we go.
Ah, the intake here is able to draw air
from tiny little gaps in the chassis over any incidental heat generating
component like the power delivery or oh, I don't know, the nan flash for your
storage. Suck it into the filtered intake and then push it out of the
system. Oh, wait. There's more. Hold on. Okay, let's get the other two installed
and I can show you guys the other little bit of magic that we've got going on
here. Ah, yes. A replacement for that
really excellent heat spreader we had before. You'll notice that our vapor
chamber here is connected to a heat sink fin stack that is extremely dense. You
would have no hope of pulling air through that with a conventional fan.
But with one of these bad boys, you can
position this right next to these. And we're going to use some little uh some
little foamy bits to kind of guide our air flow. You can make it so that their
intake is pulling air through there, saturating that air with heat, and
throwing it out of the back of the system. That's the sound it makes, by the way. I'm just kidding. It's actually
very quiet. You'll see later.
And presto, Chenjo. All the cable management is done. I
would have done this on camera, but it took a very long time. And also I had
for help cuz it involved Y cables and like cutting some of the Y cables and we
had to put these little daughterboard things over here instead of over here
because otherwise there'd be a bulge on the bottom and we'd hate to have a bulge
on our MacBook and be like, "Wow, MacBook, what you got in there?"
Ow.
Okay, let's get this trackpad reattached.
Oh, what a weird thing that it won't turn on at all even though it does have
battery without me plugging in a charger. That was that software setting
that we enabled so that it would be able to turn on. Please turn on. Ah, yes.
Good. [laughter] Yeah, it'll take about 3 minutes for it
to turn on. 3 minutes. Forgot the keyboard doesn't work
anymore. May not have a working keyboard on my MacBook, but I do have this. Boom.
Wow. So seamless. This is a stupid phone
that Reddit made me use. Yes. All right. This is our original
that we were going to try to machine 30 hundredths of a millimeter off of, but
then it turned out our equipment wasn't really set up for that. So here's the
one that Freud did ahead of. Really? That little makes a difference? I can
barely even catch my fingernail on this.
Hey, I can hear the air jets going now, though. So, you just need about 400 microns of
gap. 400th of a millimeter. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. The
point of this is not to make room for the air jets. The point of this is to
make room for the intakes of the air jets. They only need about 400 microns.
So that's what 4 hundreds of a
millimeter in order to get enough space
that the air can go into those filtered intakes. And again, this is because the
static pressure of these things is so flipping high. All right, let's put this
on. [music]
Do we need to take some off of the back cover? Yeah, but it has all the static pressure. It doesn't even need a proper
outlet. Yeah, but look at look at this. I thought that's the whole point of the
product. Oh, can't have that gap. Yeah. What is this? A Model Y?
Wait, how flush is it supposed to be? Yeah. So, that's about right. Yeah,
we're good. Cool. Nice. I can definitely
hear the air jets working. Now, before you say it, incense can be perfectly
manly. It's all in how you light it,
huh? Woo! No moving parts, guys.
Pretty cool, huh? So, we are not pulling
as much from our intake as we might have thought we were. Where the devil are we
pulling air into this thing then? Where is it drawing air in then? Feel like I'm
conducting some kind of like uh fortune
reading the Mac. Yes, your MacBook will not need Apple Care. Don't bother
spending the extra money on it. It will live a long life. Now, it's time for the
moment of truth. We ran Cinebench R23 on our three systems. a stock M2 MacBook
Air, our modified M2 MacBook Air, and an
M2 MacBook Pro. And in a stunning
development, they all performed exactly the same. But we expected that. Yes,
this flimsy piece of metal can allow the
M2 to run at full performance as long as you only do a short run. But what
happens if we do a 30 minute test? Never mind your 10-minute timer, Alex. This
has only been running for 4 minutes and we can already see that our unmodified
MacBook Air is down to just shy of 17 watts and our modified
one is just shy of 20. [music]
And more power means we must be getting more performance. Now what's interesting
is both of these are running at over 100°. So they're clearly both thermally
limited in a sense. Processor package proximity is 5° cooler
on this one. Remember we talked about how these things have super high static
pressure so they can pull air through little tiny gaps in things. That's a
huge advantage. We're almost 8 minutes in and we're all the way down to 15.7
watts here. still holding steady at 20 watts here, which I just realized I
haven't given you guys an update on the MacBook Pro, is actually higher than the
MacBook Pro, which is at 19 12. At the
20 minute mark, we are all the way down to 14 1/2 watts on our unmodified air,
19 watts on our modified air, and okay,
20 watts on the MacBook Pro. Okay, so it turns out building cooling into the
design of the product is a good thing, but there's no reason that something
like this couldn't be integrated if Apple decided to do it. The control
board, for example, could be integrated into the motherboard. And the for
systems team, bless their hearts, even if it's a little bit desperate looking,
actually calculated the remaining internal volume and even though the
geometry doesn't work right now, figured out that yes, in fact, you could fit air
jets in it if you were to uh want to do that. Hint, hint, wink, wink, nudge,
nudge. Hi, Apple. There's more to the story than just power consumption and
temperatures of the internal component.
Okay, that's fine. Let's talk about the exterior [music]
temperatures. Alex, you got thermal camera running already? Yeah. Stock MacBook Air hotspot 49.
That's like burn you hot. Burn you over time hot. Let's not
overblow this. And it's on like three keys. How about our four systems
modified unit? Mhm. That's still really hot.
Yeah, but it's like 48 I'd say within margin of error.
What's interesting though is it has a bit of a different spread pattern to it.
Way less if it's hot. Like there's only just a tiny little bit right over top of
where the CPU is. Whereas on the not
actually cooled one how much of the heat is just soaking into the chassis and
then eventually dissipating. Yeah.
Is that something that I would actually notice with my hands though? It is
noticeable. Not much though.
As for the MacBook Pro, I mean, it has cooling up. Final render
done. There it is. 8,191 points, which
it's actually kind of impressive when you consider how little of its power budget was still available to it because
of thermal throttling. As for our modified one, 8,611
points. So, instead of losing 600
points, we lose only about two. As for
our Pro, 8690. [music]
So marginally faster than either machine. In conclusion then, not a practical DIY
upgrade, but the technology is super cool. The fact that they can build this
into something so slim [music] that they can move this kind of air with no moving
parts in the cooler whatsoever just using PZO electrics. [music] I said it
before and I'll say it again. I am very excited for the future of this
technology and very excited to tell you about our sponsor, Cson Sonic. They make
power supplies so great that frankly I'd
take a bullet for them. That's only slightly hyperbole. I mean, look at the
Prime TX1000. Its hybrid fan control system lets you keep your system quiet
without creating a real life game of the floor is lava. And it's got an 80 plus
platinum rating for supreme power efficiency. RGB frivolous cosmetics.
What? Why would CIC add those things when they can put that money toward
power? UNLIMITED
POWER. [screaming] ALSO, IT'S backed by a 12-year warranty.
And should you need to use that warranty, their customer support is
excellent. So, if you want a reliable power supply for your next build or even
an upgrade, start by checking out CIC at the link below. If you guys enjoyed this
video, you might want to check out the much deeper look we took at this tech at
Comp Computex 2023, where we even got to completely disassemble an airjet and
show you guys how the inner workings work, or at least as much as we could
see it. There's no moving parts, so it's basically magic.