In the end, the design choice justification doesn't really matter. What matters is that apparently the CPU keeps burning out on these macbooks, and that's pretty unacceptable for a (iirc) 2 year old model.
The subject of this thread is the brand new 2019 MacBook Air, not older versions. (Not that there's any evidence they routinely fail due to overheating, either.)
In the end, the design choice justification doesn't really matter. What matters is that apparently the CPU keeps burning out on these macbooks, and that's pretty unacceptable for a (iirc) 2 year old model.
What is the rate of incidence? Is it known/proven to be thermally caused? Seems like a massive overreaction and lots of guessing around some insignificant number of failures.
Indeed. I don't think there's any evidence that they fail often, never mind due to a single reason. The anecdotes from Rossmann et al (who see only failed units, not the millions that don't fail) can't in any way be extrapolated into a failure rate, as the Apple haters love to do.
why use a heat pipe to move heat to a heatsink in the fan output when you can use a heatsink directly mounted and in the
fan intake air?
The idea here is that the current fan design doesn't even try to move air anywhere in the design, that just a smidge of effort could have improved the situation without added cost, maybe even saving apple money in the long run.
1. The current design clearly
does move air around, using the bottom case as an air guide. The airflow doesn't really care
where the fan is, what matters is where the flow happens, and it's going over the CPU just fine.
2. You're taking as a given that there is a "situation" that needs to be "improved", and there's exactly zero evidence of this. The TDP of the CPU in this thing is 7W,
far less than what was in earlier MacBook Airs (mine has an i7 with 17W TDP), so it doesn't need the same cooling solution.