A video on how to undervolt a locked laptop CPU.

It's a shame we're forced to do stuff like this purely because the industry wants to appeal to hipster Joe Shmoe and makes devices as thin as humanly possible. This issue could be easily solved with a bit of copper, and unlike undervolting it would allow users to squeeze out the performance that's advertised on the box. Apple is the biggest offender in this department with Macbook cooling that makes no logical sense.

 

To be fair, I have nothing against thin devices, they certainly have advantages in terms of space savings and weight, but in the last couple of years I noticed a trend of chasing every mm of thickness at the cost of actual usability. iPhone's bendgate comes to mind, but the same problem affects laptop computers which nowadays have to resort to strongly reinforced shells just to avoid flex damage. I find those devices unwieldy - they're "too thin", especially in the smartphone and tablet segments, there is no real way to hold them comfortably without some kind of extra protective case. These devices often have metal shells with a large amount of surface area that serves no practical function. Even in the case of Macbooks where the aluminium shell could be used to dump heat into, all this extra material is not taken advantage of as the engineers favoured "thermal comfort" of the user over performance. Now, I don't know about you, but if my laptop throttles 90% of the time, I don't blame the low energy chip inside of it, I blame the manufacturer for the poor thermal design of their device, especially if the problem can be fixed with one thermal pad to close the gap. That's neither here nor there though - you are right, we're slaves to the trend. Computers are not made for nerds anymore, unless they're very rich nerds - they're for amateur scriptwriters or other professional time wasters who live in coffee shops.