What Intel supplied was the bigger problem, but Apple was definitely not trying to make the chips perform well. They were hitting thermal limits constantly, and more directly toward "sandbagging" the recent macbook airs have a CPU heat sink that isn't connected to anything and has no direct airflow. They could easily have fit a small array of fins that the fan blows over, but chose not to.
I've seen the video that makes that claim but it's just plain wrong, if you look at an Intel Air the whole main board complete with heat sinks lives in a duct formed by the rear section of the chassis.
Some air goes over it but it's not enough with the tiny surface area. A proper block of fins would have done so much more while still being small and light.
If it’s that easy, do you have an example of another vendor doing it? It seems like Intel would love to highlight, say, Lenovo or HP to say Apple was cooling it wrong.
Apple is actually just really terrible at thermal design, simple as that. It's surprising, because you'd kinda expect them to at least be slightly competent (like they are in other areas), but they're just not.
They've gotten around it with M1 by building an entirely new chip that's power efficient enough that it practically doesn't need good thermal design to perform near it's peak. It's an impressive technical accomplishment, but it's also hilarious that Apple had to go this far to cool a chip properly.
Yes, we knew that design was common - that’s why that PC fan made the video picking it as a point of criticism – but that doesn’t tell us whether it’s as big a deal as being claimed. That would require some benchmarks running for long enough to see substantially greater thermal throttling, higher CPU core temperatures, etc.
