Making the bottom case a heatsink and then putting a plastic insulator around it seems to defeat the purpose of the whole attempt?

Thanks for that info. I've been interested in this hack and use plastic hard shells, but have been concerned that the plastic covering might prevent proper heat dissipation. It sounds like the tradeoff is worth it.

When resting on a fixed position on a desk,

You can also put cabinet fans under the macbook to draw air away.

AC Infinity ones are nice for that. Had to do that with an old i9 macbook pro that was completely incapable of cooling itself due to being too thin.

I hope apple engineers see this and cringe as hard as I do each time people have to come to such hacks to work around their infamous thermal design...

Take the product expected to have top-notch design with best in its class UX and discover you need to open it up and make a hardware modification and then cover its metal body with a cheap-looking plastic case...

If you run Asahi on it as well, at this point why even bother with Apple...

> Have these new M3/4 MPBs gone back at all to being easy to dismantle or change the battery in?

No.

They're not as bad as the touchbar era (which was truly awful) but they're still a lot worse than the unibodies: ifixit scored the unibodies at 7/10, the apple silicon generation get 4/10 (although the criteria have changed a bit so the comparison is not quite 1:1 this matches my impression: while I've not yet had to dive into my M1P's guts what I've seen of it don't seem easy, while I was able to easily dive in and out of my 2010 and replaced the ram, the battery, the drive (twice), the superdrive (by an HDD tray, then put the superdrive back a few years later), the fans, ...

And the Unibody was a step down from my previous polycarbonate macbook in terms of accessibility (the battery could just be popped out, and let you access the RAM and HDD without even having to unscrew the case).

I fixed the eGPU disconnecting issue on my 2012 MacBook Pro by placing the entire motherboard inside an oven for 10 minutes (a rather unconventional solution for reballing). So, yes, MacBooks from that era were not as fragile as they are now. By the way, that laptop still works.

I was tempted to do that with my first-gen Intel MacBook because it just wouldn't run quiet when idle, that is until I discovered by how much I could undervolt that chip with a random tool that I could just download. I believe I went from 1.26V to 1.03V, or at least these are the numbers still etched into my brain.

Ratio of the squares of those numbers is 2/3, and so the laptop was certainly quiet without having to open it up. But I was surprised at Intel's product back then.

I replaced battery and did repaste on Intel MacBook Pro (with Touch Bar). Quite tedious process. So many extremely tiny screws with different sizes and all those small connectors. Having been mostly opening ThinkPads before I wasn't really prepared for it. Also did the mistake of not reading the full instructions before starting. The process took way longer than I expected and with zillion teeny tiny half millimeter screws on table I was afraid to take a break.

I had to replace the fans on a 2013 MBP that I use as a linux laptop and the experience was one of the most nerve-wracking in my whole life! It really is put together to dissuade people from tweaking anything inside of it.