Does The 2020 MacBook Air Have An Overheating Problem? Debate Rages On

Does the 2020 MacBook Air get too hot too fast? It’s a question that keeps coming up.

If the Retina MacBook Air overheating debate has a high water mark, it’s probably this Reddit post that links to a widely-watched (close to 1.4 million views) YouTube video from Louis Rossman, who is trying to repair an MBA with no power. In the video, Rossman rants about the cooling solution in the 2018 MacBook Air.

After opening up the MBA, Rossman expresses shock (at the 0:50 mark) with the placement of the fan vis-a-vis the heat sink (and again at the 1:55 mark).

“The newer Macbook Air models don't have a well designed heatsink so it's gotten worse overtime,” a spokesperson for the Rossmann Repair Group told me in an email.

More recently, YouTubers reviewing the 2020 MacBook Air have criticized it for high CPU core temperatures and spinning fans under not-so-heavy workloads. Max Tech (at the 6:30 mark) says, for instance, that the MBA has “annoyingly loud” fans* while simply watching a 4K YouTube video.

But there are YouTubers that don’t agree completely. Another review of the 2020 MacBook Air (see Austin Evans at the 9:44 mark) says that, yes, the MBA gets hot but that’s nothing new. As the review notes, the MBA is using a very-low-power Intel 10-watt i5 1030NG7 processor that can get very “bursty,” referring to the Intel Core burst modes. The MacBook Air’s quad-core i5 1030NG7, for example, can Turbo boost to 3.5 GHz above its base clock speed of 1.1 GHz.

That review is mostly positive and goes on to say that the 2020 MacBook Air “feels just as snappy as any premium modern laptop out there” — which wasn’t the case for previous iterations of the Retina MBA, the reviewer says.

(Update: It’s worth noting that the 12-inch MacBook, which the Retina MacBook Air in effect replaced, was fan-less. And the iPad Pro, which uses an Apple processor, is also fan-less.)

Yet another review (see Matthew Moniz at 3:20 mark) says, “Looking at temperatures when you’re doing simple stuff like listening to Spotify spike up to 99 or 100 degrees makes me feel a little nervous,” Moniz says. He goes on to take Apple to task for not making use of a heat pipe with the fan and the CPU.

I asked Apple several times for comment but never received a response.

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NOTES:

*I experienced the same issues cited by Max Tech with a late-2018 MacBook Air and eventually sold it because of heat and performance issues. I upgraded to a mid-2019 13-inch MacBook Pro.