HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Fixing Apple's Engineering in an Hour Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Fixing Apple's Engineering in an Hour

32 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
Cited on HN 8 times, 2020–2021, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Cited in Apple thermal-design debates as evidence the Intel-era MacBook cooling was poor.

Linus Tech Tips water-cools a 2020 MacBook Air, tearing it down and showing the cooling design along the way. The video shows the gap between the CPU lid and die and how little the stock heatsink does.

“It's a fairly entertaining video, the things they try but that gap, the entire cooling solution actually, are a little hard to understand.” (HN, 2020)

3 citations · 5 critical · Demos · partly dated

8 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@dijit Jun 2020 Cites it
on HN thread ARM Mac Impact on Intel
Read more
Everything you said is echoed in this LTT video from yesterday[0]. It does appear to be a very poor thermal design, but you can see that most of the issues appear to be from trying to make the user not feel the heat. It feels a bit icky to leave performance on the table like that; since you paid for a CPU and are getting a marginal performance from it. But I remember Jobs giving a talk before about how "Computers are tools, and people don't care if their tools give them all it can, they care if they can get their work done with them well" That's not a defense of a shitty cooling solution, but it is a defence of why they power limit the chips. When I got my first (and only) Macbook in 2011, it had more than twice the real battery life of any machine on the market. That meant that I was _actually_ untethered. That's what I cared about at the time much more than how much CPU I was getting. [0]: [this video]
Teardown showing poor MacBook thermal design
@HacklesRaised Aug 2020 Cites it
on HN thread Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple [pdf]
Read more
Not really, Apple's CPU/GPU teams are very good, hey chaps and chapesses, but their primary advantage comes from the fact that Apple is looking at revenue for the entire device, the SOC is not the product. They can afford a little more cache etc. It's also right to point out that the margin is pretty narrow in A13 and Snapdragon 865 guise. So saying they are year(s) ahead is hyperbole, perhaps 6 months! In anycase the relatively close performance of the current SOCs makes me eager to see what they do with Apple Silicon in order to bridge the gap to Desktop/Laptop class performance? I do wonder whether the current cooling solutions in Apple's laptops are more about delivering the best product to the consumer or creating a favourable comparison to their own silicon. I found this LTT, [this video] , intriguing and wonder if this is deliberate or a manufacturing defect. Note the gap between the CPU lid and the die. It's a fairly entertaining video, the things they try but that gap, the entire cooling solution actually, are a little hard to understand.
Shows gap between CPU lid and die in MacBook cooling
@bjoli Dec 2020 Pushes back
on HN thread “Hell of a laptop”’s M1 MacBook Air review
Read more
The newer ones might, but the older ones seem to have the worst thermal solution of just about any modern laptop if that Linus Tech Tips video is to be believed. If I opened my computer that was thermal throttling and found that I would demand a refund. An undersized heatsink that wasn't making proper contact to the die. With a fan that 1. Isn't sucking air in from anywhere. And 2. Isn't blowing anything over the heat sink. "Think different" as in "be dumb". Or smart; Because that makes their new computers that are properly amazing look even better in comparison. Edit: paste mistake. the video link is here. Can't edit the original commet. [this video]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close