Apple could've made MacBook Neo much faster and cooler with just a copper plate
The Apple MacBook Neo’s passive cooling is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the absence of internal fans means that the laptop is always quiet. On the other hand, the MacBook Neo can quickly heat up, resulting in a sharp performance decline under load. For instance, we measured that the power consumption of the Apple A18 Pro dropped from 8.8 W to around 5 W during our stress test.
While this performance loss won’t be felt in day-to-day use, MacBook Neo does suffer from reduced performance under sustained heavy loads like gaming. As such, YouTuber ETA Prime shows that even a simple copper plate without any fans can supercharge the sustained performance of the MacBook Neo.
Using some thermal paste and a copper plate on top of the Apple A18 Pro, ETA Prime managed to decrease the SoC temperature from 105 C to mid-80 C in No Man’s Sky. More impressively, this operating temperature drop brings much better performance, as the average FPS jumps from 30 FPS to nearly 60 FPS.
The performance increase is also seen in synthetic benchmarks. The modded MacBook Neo gains around 9.7% in multi-core and 15.2% in single-core performance in Geekbench 6.6.
ETA Prime also tested a thermoelectric water cooler to see how much better the MacBook Neo can perform. The thermoelectric cooler dropped the Apple A18 Pro’s operating temperature to mid-70 C in No Man’s Sky, with FPS barely below 60. In Geekbench 6.6, the MacBook Neo ran even faster, with total single-core and multi-core performance gains of 17.5% and 18.6%, respectively.
Apple could’ve made the MacBook Neo a whole lot better
The entire premise of the MacBook Neo is an affordable alternative to the MacBook Air that gets the job done for most people. The MacBook Neo undoubtedly succeeds at that. However, there are plenty of areas where Apple could’ve made the MacBook Neo even better.
ETA Prime’s cooling mod makes us believe that the MacBook Neo could’ve benefited massively from active cooling, or, at the very least, a simple copper heat plate. Seeing a 2x increase in average FPS in No Man’s Sky and a cooler operating temperature is too good to ignore.
We hope Apple is looking at the result and the next version of the MacBook Neo implements some form of cooling.
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