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Contribution of OS to slim nature and passive fanless cooling of MacBook Airs

3 donboscow 7 3/27/2025, 2:32:27 PM
If you recall Jobs' iPhone keynote in 2007 - he quoted Alan Kay saying that companies who are serious about software should make their own hardware. As we see MacBooks today are slim, fanless, passively cooled. That is indeed an engineering feat.

Question - how much of it is due to innovations in the OS - like optimizing code, multithreading architecture novelties, etc., and how much of it is pure hardware engineering like shoehorning lots of components in cramped space? Does the passive cooling without fan dependent on the OS in any way - that it runs in such a way that the machine is never heated above a certain threshold and hence fan is not required?

MacBook folks often say that Apple devices are col because the hardware and software are "intertwined". How exactly?

Comments (7)

simon_acca · 32d ago
Plenty to read on this topic here

https://eclecticlight.co/m1-macs/

A good start is the series of articles “Making the most of Apple silicon power”

pvg · 33d ago
Macbook Pros have fans.
donboscow · 33d ago
Oops, sorry, I meant Air. Editing the question, thanks. But the Pro also rarely seems to emit sound of fan, unlike my earlier MacBooks (pre-2016), so something's changed for sure I think.
throwawayffffas · 33d ago
Feels like marketing bs. The main thing that has driven the adoption of fanless designs is the improvement of the silicon process. The better the process gets, the more performance you can get out of the same watts. There are many fanless designs from other verndors as well.
donboscow · 33d ago
Hmm thought so. They make hardware chips first, right, packing as many cores and transistors as possible in heat efficient manner? They make software like OS, apps, UX on top of the chips? Or is it that they plan the software first and build custom chip that is powerful and efficient enough to support their software vision? Seems unlikely, but just want to know.
scarface_74 · 30d ago
They work in tandem.
donboscow · 30d ago
Can you explain a bit? How can they design chip based on software requirements? I mean - they can add more threading, cores, etc. to ensure that heavyweight software like gaming, photo or video editing etc. can benefit from them, but still, the chip design is generic and any heaveweight software can benefit from it, not necessarily Apple's own upcoming in-house software, right?