Recently [ETA Prime] felt a bit underwhelmed by the raw performance of his MacBook Neo when it came to running for extended periods under full load, such as when gaming. Thus the obvious solution is to mildly over-engineer a cooling solution that takes care of issues like thermal throttling.The Apple MacBook Neo with its repurposed iPhone 16 SoC seems to have leaned hard into answering the question whether a smartphone can be a good general purpose personal computer. Ignoring the lack of I/O, it’s overall not a bad SoC for a laptop, but like when you try to push the CPU and GPU on a smartphone, they do get pretty toasty. Due to the minimalistic cooling solution in the MacBook Neo it’ll easily hit the 105°C thermal throttle limit.Technically the ‘heatsink’ for this laptop is the aluminium case, as the SoC is coupled via a thermal pad to the case. This doesn’t leave a lot of space and the case will heat soak pretty fast, while also making retrofitting a cooling solution a challenge.Amusingly, replacing the existing thermal pad with a thin copper plate already massively reduced the thermal throttling of the A18 Pro SoC by about 20 degrees. In Geekbench 6 this bumped multi-core scores up by 9.7% and single-core by 15.2%. Definitely a promising glimpse at how much performance could still be extracted from this SoC.For the next step a thermo-electric cooler (TEC) with built-in water cooling loop was used, which happened to be one of those overkill smartphone cooling systems that you’d stick to the back of the phone. Here the cooler was attached similarly, directly to the bottom aluminium of the case.With this solution in place Geekbench 6 results mostly showed a solid bump for single-core results, while multi-core results showed diminishing returns. For Cinebench results this gave a 19% increase over stock cooling in multi-core and 23.5% for single-core.Perhaps most interesting of all was that playing a video game for a while without thermal throttling meant framerates of over 80 FPS instead of hitting that thermal wall with 30 FPS. This shows just how much performance is left on the table due to the cooling choices for the system, even with this still rather inefficient cooling solution.That said, this probably isn’t some kind of nefarious scheme by Apple, but rather the result of designing the thermal solution to not heat the case up to temperatures that are deemed to be unsafe or uncomfortable for the user. After all, if the case if the heatsink, then you don’t want to feel like you’re literally handling one. This is sadly the compromise when venting out hot air is deemed to be an unacceptable solution.