Apple please watch this. - Frore AirJet MacBook Air

Okay, Apple, I know this is gonna sound a little crazy, but what if the MacBook Air actually moved some air around so it didn't thermal throttle after two 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.

Linus: 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 three quarters 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 segway to our sponsor.

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For our convenience, Frore 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.

Linus: Do you know what you're doing?

Yeah. Mum. It would sure work better.

Linus: Put on a jacket!

Oh, wow, that's cool. 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 of it.

Linus: 300 microns?

Yeah, it's not very much.

Linus: How are we gonna-

Good luck, everybody.

Linus: What happens if I break it?

One sec, we have instructions.

Linus: We have instructions?

And you were just gonna let me struggle on my own. A whole bunch of stuff coming out. These are Apple's wild force-canceling speakers. Each of these apparently has three speakers in it. They sound really good, or at least I think they do.

Linus: We're never gonna hear them.

They are not going back in. Our next step is to remove the ribbon cable from the MagSafe connector, and then shimmy out the MagSafe.

Linus: How are we gonna charge the thing?

With the USB.

Linus: With USB? Oh, we have no MagSafe anymore. Did I mention yet that we're gonna lose some functionality here? Because we are. The point of this is not that you can just go buy a Frore Air Jet at the store and then install it in your MacBook Air. It's 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 gonna be really cool.

Oh, look at that. I reconnected some things. One minor oversight is if you remove MagSafe and the keyboard-

Linus: Did I mention we're not gonna be able to use the keyboard?

Don't worry about it. The point is we're gonna 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 USB-C charger attached, not MagSafe.

Linus: It's Apple logic.

We found the setting. It's allow accessories to connect always. It's under privacy and security?

Linus: Sure.

We have to shut it down before we do this.

Linus: Oh, I might have just killed it.

You have to shut it down before you disconnect the battery?

Linus: Sometimes, yes.

Oh boy. Yeah, it's bending. This is making me very nervous. You're sure this is supposed to come out?

Linus: Yes, yes.

Oi! 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 M.2 chip with its DRAM right next to it, which raises an interesting question. Is this the whole cooler for the M.2?

Alex: 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?

Alex: 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. It would also be so easy to just move if these were not such fragile, stupid little connectors.

Packed. Except for right there, because we didn't pay enough.

Linus: Okay, hey!

See, not even ripped, mostly a little.

Linus: 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.

Linus: 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 air jet 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?

Linus: Oh, that's why we ripped out the MagSafe, so we can actually connect this thing to power.

We're just gonna which is done with this little board right here. Thing is though, 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, from the battery, this connector is just super duper small. Probing is very difficult, and when they tried to, 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 they also 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. 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. Let's 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 Kapton tape. There we go. Now we just need to block off the rest of that MagSafe hole using this tiny 3D printed 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. It means we need a little bit of vacuum lube. I think I have way too much.

Haha. Next thing we'll need is a piece of graphite. This acts as a heat spreader.

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 five-minute crafts. Look at how straight that line is. Would you look at that? There's a whole system for this and everything. It's got a little split on the bottom. Nice.

Oh gross. Our t-shirts also work great as a cleaning cloth, lttstore.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 9 volts 5 amps. That's because if you were to plug in a regular cable, it would be limited to 5 volts and I believe 0.5 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, oy!

Don't worry, you guys are good. You're good. You're good. It's all good. It's all good. The Frore people are here to show us how to use all this stuff. It's their MacBook.

I mean, I don't want it. It has no keyboard, no wi-fi, no MagSafe.

Don't worry. We're gonna 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 gonna 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 Kapton tape on our air jets and I'm gonna show you guys exactly how we're gonna 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 because 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 die 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 low-profile exhaust fan because 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 components 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 heatsink 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 airflow.

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 chango! All the cable management is done. I would have done this on camera, but it took a very long time, and also I had Frore help because 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,

Linus: Oh 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's that software setting that we enabled so that it would be able to turn on.

Please turn on.

Ah, yes. Good.

Linus: Yeah, it'll take about three minutes for it to turn on.

Three 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 three 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 Frore did ahead of time. Really? That little makes a difference?

I can barely even catch my fingernail on this.

Linus: Hey, I can hear the air jets going now though.

So you just need about 400 microns of gap, four hundredth of a millimeter.

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? Four hundredths 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 flippin' high.

All right, let's put this on. Do we need to take some off of the back cover?

Linus: 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.

Linus: 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? Whoo! No moving parts, guys. Pretty cool, huh?

So we are not pulling as much from our intake as we might have thought we were.

Linus: Where the devil are we pulling air into this thing, then?

Where is it drawing air in, then?

I feel like I'm conducting some kind of, like, fortune reading.

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 four 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.

And more power means we must be getting more performance. Now, what's interesting is both of these are running at over a hundred degrees.

So they're clearly both thermally limited in a sense, but processor package proximity is five degrees cooler on this one.

Remember we talked about how these things have super high stator pressure, so they can pull air through little tiny gaps in things. That's a huge advantage.

We're almost eight 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.

It's actually higher than the MacBook Pro, which is at 19 and a half. At the 20-minute mark, we are all the way down to 14 and a half 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 Frore 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 AirJets in it if you were to 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 components.

Okay, that's fine. Let's talk about the exterior temperatures.

Alex: You got the 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?

That's still really hot.

Yeah. 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 of 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 cold one. You can tell 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. Final render. Done.

There it is. 8191 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, 8611 points. So instead of losing 600 points, we lose only about two.

As for our Pro, 8690. 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 that they can move this kind of air with no moving parts in the cooler whatsoever, just using piezoelectrics.

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.

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If you guys enjoyed this video, you might want to check out the much deeper look we took at this tech at Computex 2023, where we even got to completely disassemble an air jet and show you guys how the inner workings work.

Or at least as much as we could see of it. There's no moving parts, so basically magic.