How to really cool down your Mac

I used to work on a glass desk, which always kept my Mac's temperature under control. But ever since I had to change to a wooden desk (the glass one no longer fitted the space in the new room), my Mac started heating up more than it should.

At first, I tried using some leftover pieces of wood to place the Macbook Pro a little higher...that is, to avoid having direct contact with the table.


This helped maintain the computer's temperature a little lower, but doing some CPU intensive tasks (like my PhD simulations) triggered the Macbook's fans to work at its maximum, thus making the aluminium case hot enough to turn it into a nice frying pan where I can make some scrambled eggs.

As I was thinking about following Ikea Hacker's suggestion to use the Lämplig trivet as a cheap laptop stand, a friend of mine that had similar problems with his Asus laptop, recommended using a cooling laptop stand with extra fans that he bought on Amazon. So, I bought the Antec Notebook Cooler.


This nice notebook cooler stand works like a charm. It's very silent (due to having two speed settings - "low" for normal use and "high" for some hardcore cooling) and it's USB-powered, which means that I don't have to carry an extra charger. It is also very light, making it possible to carry everywhere in my laptop bag.

It really keeps my Mac's temperature down, which in the long run means that the hardware will probably last longer. And I know what you're thinking: "But the Macbook Pro only has 2 USB ports and keeping one of them occupied with this might be a waste of USB connectivity". Well, the guys at Antec thought of that too. The very own notebook cooler stand's USB connector is a small USB hub making the USB port still usable for other devices.

Cool, isn't it? (see what I did here?)