This weird cooling system makes your M2 MacBook Air faster for longer

The MacBook Air, powered by Apple's M2 chip, doesn't have a fan inside. That helps to make it thin, light, power efficient, and most important, silent. And all while being nice and fast as well. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with the same M2 chip inside has a fan with the aim being to allow people to run the chip harder for longer before the laws of thermal dynamics kick in and the silicon has to slow down to avoid permanent damage. But what if you added a new type of cooling to the fanless MacBook Air?

That is what a company called Frore Systems did before it took The Verge out to see what it had been working on. The machine in question was a 15-inch M2 MacBook Air while the cooling system uses three AirJet Minis, products that use a piezoelectric cooling chip that weighs nine grams but can still remove 4.25 additional watts of heat. So what happened?

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According to The Verge, the MacBook Air was able to run longer and faster than it was capable of doing previously. Examples show the Xcode benchmark finishing in 172.7 seconds with the AirJet cooling system involved but taking 178.2 seconds without it, suggesting that the additional cooling means the M2 chip doesn't need to throttle itself quite so aggressively, if at all when it's kept cooler. Longer gaming sessions also benefited greatly from the additional cooling.

None of this is a surprise to most people of course, but other than to perhaps show that cooking is a good thing. However, what makes the Frore Systems fanless design so impressive is the fact it can fit into the MacBook Air at all since it's one of the thinnest machines on the market. And that, right there, is the point. Maybe one day this company's technology will allow for thin machines to run nice and cool as well.