Proper cooling requires thick laptop. Take a look at mobile workstations or high end gamer laptops. They are not thin, but their cooling is more adequate (although still not on tower level). There's no way to fool physics and combine good cooling, thin design and quiet fans, you have to compromise on something.
All of their current models can have much better thermals without increasing their bulk if they actually tried to make it so. Quite number of other makers have superior thermals in even thinner packages, and, more importantly, cheaper ones.
So far, none of their recent models show a single sign of thermal engineering being being done as such. Their 16 inch model has a thermal solution I would only see in a $300 white label laptop. Yes, they added few extra millimetres to fans, but at the same time they still use the same single skinny heatpipe, and tiny radiators.
And all of that is when they have access to the best parts, and fabrication services on the market. If you look closely on their BOM, they have many surprisingly low spec parts, and very minimalistic, spartan design decision.
A lot of accusations and allegations here, with zero specifics and zero to back any of it up. If you're as knowledgeable on this topic as you allege and seem, could you give you more information?
Which "$300 white label laptop" has equivalent thermal design to the 16" MBP?
Which "other makers" actually have "superior thermals in even thinner packages" that are "cheaper"? That sounds like bullshit to me, given what I've seen and experienced in the PC market, where loud fans that run all the time are very common.
I mean, I agree with you, but you can't look at a thick laptop and just assume it's going to be better.
Thermal zones in servers is a good example of low physical footprint and high density power consumption that cools quite well. The engineering effort being spent on a good thermal solution can cause a device that is thin to outperform a thicker device.
It's just that Apple does not seem to be spending the resources there.
I don't think the parent was saying that a thick laptop is going to be better - but rather that when you are making a device as thin as possible, and that's the metric you index on, cooling performance WILL suffer.
It's not just that they haven't put enough engineering effort in - they consciously made a design tradeoff.
I still think it can be done, whether it's sacrificing performance or rethinking the thermal design to include a smaller battery and a larger heat pipes, or simply using a lower TDP CPU..
Servers blades are typically cooled by noisy fans spinning incredibly fast and moving large quantities of air. Not really a good comparison IMHO. A better comparison is simply one with non-Apple laptops.
Only because there's no need for them not to be. it's common to retrofit slower spinning quieter fans into servers for home/office use.
But the same design constraints were used in a mini-itx gaming PC on the linus tech tips channel a few months ago.. I can't seem to find the video now though. The thermal performance was amazing.
My company uses Dell PowerEdge R340s for our onsite server needs, and while they're certainly louder than a modern desktop, they're pretty bearable.
For contrast, I've got a Sun Fire T2000 at home that's louder than the airliners flying overhead (my current and previous apartment both happen to be under airport flight paths, for SFO and RNO, respectively). For obvious reasons (at least until I can figure out how to get a reliable network connection to my garage) that one gets run pretty sparingly, lol
Been quite happy with my Razer blade 15, it's not a ridiculously thick laptop, but thanks to extra tall rubber feet, beefy fans and a couple other tricks it's able to run a gtx 1060 and a hexacore cpu just fine under load.
I used to have one of those. Sure it can run all that hardware, but it sounds like a jet engine when it's running. Completely ridiculous design that would never be released by Apple.
The Microsoft Surface Books also have a 1060 inside, but they are whisper quiet.
