Is cooling ever a concern for MacBook?

I went to Best Buy to check out the MacBook. It felt very warm to touch especially near the palm rest area. Is cooling ever a concern for MacBook? I'm concerned about its reliability with the heat built up inside the chassis. Thanks!

 

The bottom left area of the MacBook does warm up, yes, but my palmrest never gets warm.

If you're worried about the heat being damaging in any way, don't worry; it won't be. My MacBook usually idles around 40-50 C (with SMCFanControl setting fan speeds at 3600 RPM), and Core 2 Duo chips are designed to withstand over 100 C without damage, so its nothing to worry about.

 

cooling on Macs SUCKS
my bro has a MBP, and i have thinkpad
mine is thicker, and less fancy, but it's quieter and cooler
you decide which is more important

 

That's interesting for sure.

I don't doubt that the Thinkpad may run cooler than the MBP, but Macs are really really quiet, compared to many of the PCs I've tried.

 

I agree with Sam - the macbook that I recently purchases makes no sounds, except for the occasional "bip" that I hear from the processors. The heat 'can' be uncomfortable if you put it on your lap while in bed or in a similar situation, but otherwise, it's fine (especially if you live in Canada like me, where its cold for 11 months and 2 weeks of the year in Toronto.) ...

 

The MBPs and MBs should be advertised as a toaster that happens to be a notebook. I had a MBP, but returned it promptly due to heat issues. The things even runs hotter than my old P4. However, it's important to note that this is probably because, as Sam said, they don't make a sound.

 

Whats the problem of having your heater serve dually as a heater and entertainment/work/ um... everything else (computing) device? I would take silence and a little heat over an obnoxious fan and an icicle to rest my palms on.

 

cept for the CD drive, that sound scares people to death if they dont know what it is.

 

Does anyone know how the cooling system works on the MB? It has absolutely no air vent in sight.

 

i have a CoreDuo Macbook v1.1 and it never run that hot. when idling it gets a bit warm on the back, but not on the palm rest. toward the left of the keyboard, yes there is a little warmth. the things runs very quite on idle.

when you push it, the fan spin up faster, it makes a whoosing noise, fairly noisy, but not audible if you put on a music or something. but; the whole thing is actually runs very very cool. the CD does makes a noise when it is detecting for CD (such as when waking up from sleep)

i have recently own a 17" Core2Duo MBP, man are those things sweet! runs very cool, very very quiet. even at 100% it remains very cool, and the fan don't even spin up. very impressive. you can only feel a little warmth in the back bottom of the laptop, towards the vent, where the CPU and GPU lives.
the CD drives is even quieter than my quiet desktop unit. defintely a very quiet machine.
now when early generation CD MBP, i can remember how hot that is! now thats HOT!

oh and apple notebook are thin (so they can expel more heat throught he case), and are designed to be semi-passively cooled. so of course you feel the heat more on the case, if you compare it to a thicker notebook.

 

The back of the MacBook is the vent.

 

my 2ghz core2duo is cool on top and slightly warm underneath. It's cooler and quieter than any other similar sized laptop I've used (compared to Acers, Toshiba, HP and Zepto). Granted it doesn't have a separate GPU putting out more heat.
Yes the cd drive does sound like it's eating you disk when you put one in but then most slot loading drives do.
At the moment mine is running at 50degrees with fan running at 1794rpm this is with iTunes running in the background and FF to type this post.

 

About Macbook cooling being an issue: yes and no.

You shouldn't be worried about the heat damaging the laptop. It will increase the fan speed up to a very audible 7000~ rpm to keep itself cool, and if that fails, it will start throttling the processor to keep temperatures at a max of around 90C, which will avoid damage to the laptop. At least, mine hasn't burst into flames or exploded yet.

On the other hand, if you were thinking you'd get a real 2 GHz of performance, forget about it Best this thing will do, due to aforementioned throttling, is 1.6-1.8 GHz.

 

apple used to have a problem with the first generation. they are too hot, even though they're with in intel specification. and in some cases exceed it. now, there is no need to worry about heat. they're infact one of the cooler running notebook around.