It's essential for thermals. Without the unibody, it would throttle sooner and you'd lose performance.

The aluminium chassis cannot be used for heat dissipation without risk of harming users. Which is why there is a "macbook air peformance mod" to add thermal-interface-material (instead of thermal insulation) to turn the chassis into a heatsink.

It's not a heatsink by default.

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Reason077 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Not really. I did the thermal mod to my previous (M1) MacBook Air and it still didn’t get all that warm.

The Intel MacBook Pro I had before that one got far, far hotter - almost scalding hot if you really pushed it - without any modifications.

	▲	tracker1 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The last generation of Intel Macbooks was so bad... the i9 I was assigned from my job at the time would constantly go in and out of thermal throttling, making the whole experience effectively useless... It was also so locked down, I couldn't apply any mods to be able to underclock/volt the thing to something reasonable. I really do hope that Linux becomes an option in more workplaces without being too locked down for developers.

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nagisa 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Air has no thermal connection to the chassis for the purpose of making it safe to have in contact with skin.

People have been modding theirs to make this contact, though. And been getting a significant performance boost out of it.

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zarzavat 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I believe we are talking about slightly different things. Yes if they thermally coupled the body to the processor, then a small patch of the body would get very hot, burning the user.

However, the fact that the aluminum gets hot during prolonged use means that it is acting as a heat sink and cooling the CPU compared to a body made of plastic. Thermodynamics, it's the law!

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delfinom 5 hours ago | parent [-]

>However, the fact that the aluminum gets hot during prolonged use means that it is acting as a heat sink and cooling the CPU compared to a body made of plastic. Thermodynamics, it's the law!

Not really. It's picking up "stray heat" that is radiated from the copper heatsink inside and conduction from the air in the fan system. It does not improve cooling the processor in any kind of manner. If it were plastic, the plastic would get warm too. Maybe it'll be a 2 degree difference.

Direct contact or bust.

	▲	dontlaugh 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It does actually help. All heat radiated into the aluminium isn’t in the copper, so makes it to the environment. The copper remains cooler overall.
	▲	everforward 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It should improve ambient temperatures inside the body, allowing for more heat transfer. It might be marginal, though.