The MacBook Air is one of the best thin and light laptops money can buy, and a revolutionary new cooling solution could make future MacBook Air models even faster while maintaining its whisper-quiet fanless design.
The Frore AirJet is a ‘cooling chip’ for laptops and PCs that uses ultra-thin membranes that vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies to generate airflow without the need for fans. I discussed the potential of the AirJet earlier this year, noting that this could spell doom for the ever-annoying drone of laptop fans. But what if that technology were put into a laptop that relies solely on passive cooling?
Frore Systems has now demonstrated its most impressive use case yet: an internal custom one MacBook Air 15 inch which uses three AirJet Mini chips to cool the M2 chip at its core. The results speak for themselves.
As reported by The edgethe MacBook Air equipped with the AirJet chips outperformed the factory model in almost every area. The initial performance differences were small, but the longer the laptop ran, the wider the gap became. When testing Shadow of the Tomb RaiderSean Hollister of The Verge noticed that a difference of 1 fps became a difference of 5 fps after just half an hour of playtime.
Let’s be honest: the MacBook Air needs more than passive cooling
I’m going to be completely honest here and say that I really hate passive CPU cooling. Years ago I built a fully passively cooled gaming PC for a feature for Maximum PC magazine, and while it ran completely silently, it was a bit bad (or rather, it wasn’t bad enough, due to the lack of fans).
The passive cooling used in the MacBook Air ultimately holds it back compared to the actively cooled one MacBook Pro – and owners of older models, like the still pretty good ones 2020 M1 MacBook Air, can probably confirm that the laptop gets quite warm after prolonged use. We live in an age where thermal limits are one of the biggest obstacles to processor performance; If your computer’s CPU gets too hot, it will usually limit its own capabilities to prevent overheating.
The M2 chip (and the new M3 chip, which isn’t yet available in the MacBook Air) is an impressively powerful processor, so it’s a shame to see it hampered by thermal safety barriers. If Apple were to implement Frore’s cooling solution in the long-awaited situation M3 MacBook Air it could be the best Air yet – and keep Apple’s fanless design ethos intact. And come on, Apple – your product literally has the word “Air” in the name. It’s a match made in Heaven.
Frore doesn’t just focus on Apple either. The startup company has received a whopping $116 million in investor funding and has been pushing to implement its innovative cooling technology into a variety of products, most recently a quiet mini workstation PC from Zotac. That’s really no surprise: the AirJet really has the potential to completely change the game when it comes to PC and laptop cooling, and I personally hope it can replace both fans and passive cooling in the coming years.