this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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~~Most modern laptops have their air intake in the keyboard, which would cause them to overheat on a matter of minutes.~~
Edit: I may have been confidently incorrect here. I know I’ve seen this done before, but I guess it’s not common like I thought
Most? With the amount of people running laptop docked I would say that is not the case for most business laptops for sure.
I really don't think it's a thing, or maybe just for some high end gaming laptops? Which, yeah, most things on expensive gaming laptops don't actually make sense. They just throw shit on there to justify prices
Decent ones dropped this practice a while ago. Some pull in the sides, some crappy ones use the bottom. My coworker actually got much better performance out of his dell by closing the lid and flipping it over. With it positioned normally it would overheat and throttle the cpu.
The vast majority take in from the bottom and blow out the hinge. That's how you can fit the larger blower fans.
Right, Those are the terrible ones. Put it on your lap (which, let's be honest, is basically the whole point) or a slightly soft surface and it just gets starved of air.
That's why they stopped calling them "laptops" for a while, and instead "notebooks".
But I actually just went and checked Dell, HP, and Lenovo and they do call them laptops again.
Do you have an example?
I tried to find something, but the only mention was five years old saying Alienware might try it.
It sounds stupid but with people using laptops on beds I could see the idea behind it.
If they increased the size of those little rubber feet to keep the screen and keyboard separate, then that would completely solve the issue.
I want to see if no one's thought of that yet since it seemed so obvious, but I just can't find any real example of keyboard cold air intakes. Are you talking about actual vents? Going between the keys may just be an urban legend from what I'm seeing.
Even if there was an intake in the keyboard it wouldn't dramatically affect anything. My P1 does partially intake through the keyboard and closing the lid has no appreciable performance impact. I only leave the lid open so the display doesn't get baked by the i9 using 70+ watts.