Reviewer Tests M3 MacBook Air’s Thermals, And It’s Searingly Hot

Reviewer Tests M3 MacBook Air’s Thermals, And It’s Searingly Hot

MacBooks, for better or worse, are known for their tendency to pin their CPU at the thermal limits in exchange for as little fan noise as possible. With the recent MacBook Air models, Apple has done away with active cooling entirely to get a truly silent laptop thanks to the efficiency of its M-series chips. However, these chips do overheat, too.

YouTuber Max Tech has brought one M3-powered MacBook Air for thermal testing, and it recorded a searingly hot temperature of 114°C at its peak. While laptop chips are indeed designed to manage these extremely hot temperatures just fine, it’s pretty rare to see a laptop chip go beyond 100°C as it is a common safe limit for most laptop CPUs.

Image: Max Tech (YouTube)

Due to its passive cooling design, which utilizes the chassis itself to act as a giant heatsink, this caused the laptop to get pretty warm, too. It was recorded that the chassis reached 46°C at its hottest point, which definitely isn’t comfortable to put on your lap. Still, such temperature is not sustainable by design, as the M3 SoC throttled down to 100°C shortly after, more in line with the safe operating limit of laptop chips.

While the MacBook Air certainly does overheat if you push it to the limit, one thing to know is that this laptop is not designed for heavy workloads. Apple is more inclined to sell you the MacBook Pro, which comes with active cooling if you have anything that requires the compute muscle to get done.

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Pokdepinion: That’s hotter than I’m comfortable with, especially given that this is the range where most chips just trigger thermal shutdowns.