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.

▲

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.