Apple has filed two patents bringing liquid-cooling to increasingly powerful (and hot) laptop computers. Once the domain of massive number-crunchers, liquid-cooled notebooks foresee a day when quad-core processors and better video overwhelms current fan-driven cooling.
In its U.S. Patent Office applications, the Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple outlined an active and passive liquid-cooling process.
The active liquid-cooling process involves bathing circuits, the heat relieved via fins. A more inexpensive passive liquid-cooling procedure would include a heat sink located behind the laptop’s display. Moving the heat away from the computer’s body could solve the dilemma of an overheated lap.
Although Apple is first to patent liquid-cooling for laptops, the method has been used in the past by other computer makers to dissipate the nearly 100 watts of heat produced by laptops.
In 2007, HP unveiled a line of Voodoo laptops which used water instead of fans to cool the gaming machines. Hitachi and Toshiba have also investigated water-cooled portables.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
