There have been several mentions of the battery temperature of late which I have let pass. Now is the time to comment.
Needless to say, Apple put temperature sensors everywhere, including the battery, so that everything operates, at all times, according to Apple's thermal designs. If the battery gets near its temperature curve, CPU power is reduced in proportion. We don't have to think about these things, they are already taken care of.
The change brought about by a simple thermal pad mod is simply an exchange of a warmer bottom case for better sustained performance. No thermal sensors are disabled and everything runs according to design. As has been well-documented, the higher-end MBAs already have a thermal sponge to give a lift to performance on their specs sheet.
Has there been one report of a failed M1 MBA due to the mod yet? Usually someone makes up such a report and others jump on the bandwagon but there has been nothing, zilch.
I hear that there will be an updated MBA in 2022. I would be astonished if there were not a better thermal design in that. Myself, I will keep my existing MBA and perhaps put the money towards a 6k HDR display which this little, disguised beast can drive.
Lithium batteries exposed to elevated operating temperatures do not fail in the short term. What factually happens is the batteries capacity depletes at a faster rate in comparison to being used at the recommended parameters. People should be aware that such trade off exists and they may be impacted dependent on the relative ambient temperature.
If you don't understand the battery technology Apple employs, it's easily looked up. Likely one of the major reasons Apple sets recommend operating ranges for temperature. So there's no need for drama about batteries suddenly failing they wont, equally people should be informed of the facts.
In general you don't want lithium polymer batteries to exceed 40C as performance/longevity can be negatively impacted, nor is the slope linear being more logarithmical as the temperature increases the negative impact on the batteries accelerates. There's likely more to Apple's design than just surface temperature of the baseplate as they are very deliberate in such matters.
FWIW I also have a 12" Retina MacBook so can see first hand the impact of utilising the baseplate as a heatsink with the trend of the battery loosing capacity faster than it's counterparts, as it can and does push the battery temp past 40C with less than 10W. My rational for posting was simple as the Air in question is in a hard case which will likely insulate, driving up internal temperatures.
Thermal sponge on the 16GB model is likely to dissipate the additional heat from the SOC as the additional RAM will generate slightly higher temperatures so 16GB doesn't perform worse than the 8GB model on CPU bound tasks. That in isolation illustrates the very fine balance Apple needs to strike.
I use my Mac's professionally frequently in the subtropics/ tropics in an engineering role. As much as I appreciate the simplicity of passively cooled systems both macOS & Windows the reality is if you need sustained heavy performance an actively cooled notebook will serve better. More so if time and money is a factor.
My thoughts are people want to do the mod; have at, equally be aware of
all the facts; ambient & battery temperature being significant in this case...
Q-6
