In many of its most recent hardware launches, including and , Apple has prioritized one thing heavily: thermals. With how powerful Apple Silicon can be, having sufficient passive cooling is important on fanless devices.

There’s one key product line that’s so far missed out on this treatment: the .

As mentioned before, and both received pretty substantial thermal upgrades – to qualm complaints about overheating.

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, as overheating complaints ramped up with the iPhone 15 Pro, Apple addressed the problem in two rounds: a new internal design on iPhone 16 for better heat dissipation , and a full-on redesign on – with a vapor chamber and aluminum unibody .

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

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 M4 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 . That’s still yet to come, but Apple still has another shot with the M5 . It doesn’t even have to invest in a copper heat spreader like the iPad Pro. Apple could just go for a vapor chamber like the .

Despite Apple Silicon getting more and more powerful, the thermals of the haven’t improved at all, resulting in the arguably being underprepared for chips like the M4. That problem will only get worse with M5 if nothing changes.

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.

Apple is about to unveil a new entry-level MacBook model sometime this year with an A18 Pro chip. That device will inevitably be passively cooled, but adding better thermal management to the would give it a leg up compared to the budget MacBook for some buyers.

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