In the past year, Apple has had an interesting trend across its new hardware releases: a bigger focus on thermal performance. It kicked off with the last year, and then continued with the iPhone 16 lineup . However, the unfortunately never received such thermal upgrades, despite being one of the products that might need it the most.

As mentioned before, and iPhone 16 both received pretty substantial thermal upgrades in the past year.

In the case of the , Apple incorporated graphite sheets within the main housing, and also implemented copper within the Apple logo, allowing for far more efficient heat dissipation. With these two upgrades, Apple was able to tote 20% better thermals in the new .

With the iPhone, numerous people complained about overheating issues with the and its A17 Pro chip. Apple promptly addressed that with the iPhone 16 lineup:

The internal design of iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus has been reengineered to allow for an even larger battery and to better dissipate heat, while making battery service easier.

Despite these thermal strides across the and the iPhone, Apple never brought such improvements to the , one of its thinnest and lightest computers.

Apple redesigned the in 2022 with a much thinner and lighter design, and it switched from a large metal heatsink to a thin graphite sheet with no real heat spreader. This was an issue, because it meant that the M2 could thermally throttle faster than the prior model, depending on the workload.

When Apple announced the and its copper heat spreader in the Apple logo, I was hopeful that this was a key indicator of what would later come in the . Obviously, Apple can’t implement the exact same Apple logo thermal setup on the , but I was wishing for something. Just some heat spreader of some sort.

However, when the was announced earlier this month, Apple mentioned nothing about any thermal upgrades. of the new , and confirmed that the internals were pretty similar to prior models.

This was a bummer, as it meant Apple’s , one of its devices that needs better thermals the most, did not get anything to help out with thermals.

One could argue that most users don’t need sustained performance – and that may be a fair point. However, if the iPad Pro can have a sophisticated cooling system while running iPadOS, I don’t see why the should miss out. Ultimately, the is limited to baseline Apple Silicon, so any users who need the best of the best performance will still need to buy a with M4 Pro or M4 Max.

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