I drove down to a squat single-story Silicon Valley office building two Fridays ago to look at a MacBook Air. There was no security guard, no ID required, and no PR representative in my demo area. That’s because I wasn’t going to Apple’s headquarters to pick up an undisclosed laptop. Instead, I drove to San Jose to see an existing MacBook that had been surgically changed to demonstrate how far an unusual cooling technology had progressed. Frore Systems is a $116 million-funded firm, and I’ve already showed you its initial product, the AirJet Mini, a piezoelectric cooling chip that weighs just nine grams and is smaller than two US quarters stacked together.
Each consumes one watt nominally and may remove an additional 4.25 watts of heat. What would happen if Frore employed those AirJets to cool a laptop that doesn’t ordinarily have a fan at all?
What the business discovered — and I witnessed myself — is that with Frore’s technology on board, Apple’s M2 processor can operate quicker and for longer periods of time. A 15-inch M2 MacBook Air without it was like a runner who couldn’t race eternally without running out of breath. However, with three AirJet Minis, the identical laptop received a constant second wind.
@verge This MacBook Air has a fan in it thanks to Frore’s Airjet cooling chip. Let’s see how it compares to the Apple’s default M2. #macbookair #apple #m2 #frore #airjet #tech
The bottom line is that the longer I performed an intense test on Frore’s modified and unmodified pair of 15-inch MacBook Airs, the more noticeable the difference became.
Even during the first few minutes of a multi-minute test like Cinebench R23 or Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the AirJet version edged out the non-AirJet version by a few frames per second, probably within the margin of error at, say, 29 frames per second with AirJet vs 28 frames per second without. The Xcode benchmark took 172.7 seconds with AirJet and 178.2 seconds without the first time.
The bottom line is that the longer I performed an intense test on Frore’s modified and unmodified pair of 15-inch MacBook Airs, the more noticeable the difference became.
Even during the first few minutes of a multi-minute test like Cinebench R23 or Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the AirJet version edged out the non-AirJet version by a few frames per second, probably within the margin of error at, say, 29 frames per second with AirJet vs 28 frames per second without. The Xcode benchmark took 172.7 seconds with AirJet and 178.2 seconds without the first time.
However, after half an hour of back-to-back Shadow of the Tomb Raider gaming benches, scores on the default Mac had dropped to an unplayable 22fps vs 27fps on the AirJet version. At the 40-minute point, I noticed considerable stuttering on the stock Mac, although Frore’s AirJets continued to fly.
After only a few repeat benches, Cinebench R23 multicore results dropped dramatically, from 8775 with AirJet to 8380 without. According to a Frore-provided overlay, which I closely monitored, the stock Mac just couldn’t sustain the same CPU clocks. On occasion, both clock speed and wattage dropped, probably because a fanless computer had no other good method to cool itself.
What’s going on here is rather obvious: today’s CPUs are only as fast as they can be cooled, with many boasting “turbo” settings that even the smallest machines can only retain for a limited period. According to Frore, Apple’s Air can operate the M2 processor at 3.2GHz but drops to 2.8GHz after 30 minutes of Cinebench R23 testing.
But, as cool as it was to witness the AirJets giving Apple’s M2 a second wind, I was left feeling a little dissatisfied. Aside from the Tomb Raider stutter, we’re largely talking about an already powerful computer taking a little longer to do the most taxing activities, with less demanding benchmarks (like single-core Cinebench, where I observed similar results) not pushing the processor enough to make a significant difference.
More significantly, we already know what Apple’s M2 processor can achieve when airflow is introduced – it’s known as a 13-inch MacBook Pro!
The major difference between the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the 13-inch MacBook Air, as I noted a few years ago (back when I could cover Apple goods legally), is simply a fan. Since then, we’ve found in our own M2 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro benchmarks that performance degrades after 30 minutes without the fan.
Frore understands this and brought a 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro for me to test alongside the Airs — but comparing them to a 15-inch MacBook Air with a larger chassis and greater thermal headroom isn’t really an apples-to-apples comparison. Despite this, Frore’s modified 15-inch Air was mainly neck and neck with the 13-inch Pro, rather than consistently topping it. (The Pro did take four seconds longer to finish an Xcode run.)
But there’s one excellent reason Frore chose the 15-inch MacBook Air: it’s one of the thinnest computers ever produced, measuring 0.45 inches (11.5mm) thick. It’s unclear if Apple could fit the fan from its 13-inch MacBook Pro — or any fan, for that matter — in there. Even Frore had to meticulously grind 0.3mm out of the laptop’s lid to provide the AirJets with a large enough air gap to function, and the business ended up removing the speakers, Wi-Fi antenna, and even the Mac’s internal keyboard connector in the process.
But Frore did it, and engineering chief Prabhu Sathyamurthy tells me laptops can get even thinner if they’re designed with AirJet in mind — they could reach 9.5mm in thickness simply by substituting a thinner keyboard and a thin OLED display, the company claims.
But there was one element I didn’t see accounted for in Frore’s plan and didn’t manage to test adequately at Frore’s offices: the crucial battery.
While Frore claims that each of their AirJet Mini chips consumes one watt of electricity, I observed three of them consuming more than five watts from the MacBook’s USB-C connection, and the AirJet-equipped MacBook Air (obviously) drained significantly quicker than the power-throttled fanless one during my tests.
However, Frore has been clear from the start that its chips must be incorporated into a device in order to function properly, and the MacBook demo is everything but when it comes to power. According to Sathyamurthy, the AirJet component of a full system can use as little as 0.1W or 0.2W while idle, with the AirJet Minis themselves remaining shut off until or until they need to blow. He believes that the average user will see them activate 10 to 15% of the time and not at all for “emails and web surfing.” We’re talking about a Zoom call, at best.
I can confirm that when they do blow, they are considerably quieter than a fan. I had to crouch down near to the laptop to hear them. The customized laptop also appears to be somewhat cooler than Apple’s fanless MacBook Air — a thermal camera revealed a larger, cooler zone rather than a hotspot around the processor.
This demonstration did not persuade me that Frore can replace the fan. I generally noticed it performing like a fan, but with less noise and in a smaller space. However, for the proper manufacturer looking to push the boundaries of mobility or — please! — use that space savings for more batteries, this might mean a lot.
I’m curious if any laptop manufacturers will give it a shot. Frore’s lone verified design victory so far is this Zotac mini-PC that will always be plugged into a wall, although it has prototyped 4K webcams, doorbell cameras, LED light bulbs, and other products. Sabrent, Phison, and OWC experimented with AirJet-cooled SSDs. Frore appears to believe that AirJets may also fit into a Steam Deck.
I’d want to attempt a battery-powered device to adequately demonstrate why the AirJet method is superior. And I’ll notify you as soon as I know. According to Frore, the AirJet Mini is currently in mass production, with larger and smaller variants in the works.
