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Comment by kps | Hacker News Reader

“Casio has gone with a very very small form factor and they paid a lot of attention to the form of this instrument — the shape of it, the size of it, the design of it — but the function of it wasn't as important to them. They made a lot of sacrifices with the action simply because to them having the world's most compact digital piano was apparently their Holy Grail.”

Reminds me of a certain laptop vendor.

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I guess that's probably Apple in this context but Fujitsu is worse.

Fujitsu specifically mention in manuals that lid must be always left open or else laptop could be damaged from heat. I've heard MacBook throttles under every imaginable conditions, sure, but never heard that they destroy itself from heat in lid-closed mode(a feature), so,

It's fairly common across laptop vendors: few really do any proper thermal design on the products. We had Dell laptops melt on our frontend devs when docked.

At least Fujitsu gives you a warning about the design defect.

> melt on our frontend devs when docked

User error. Keep the dock on the desk and it'll melt on the desk, protecting your frontend devs.

Some laptops are designed to be open when running, like the asus rog zephyrus.

My ROG runs HOT as hell.

You may need to redo the thermal paste on the CPU and the graphics card. My g73jh needed a re-paste about every 3 months. The frame of the laptop wasn't strong enough to prevent the paste from de-laminating when I moved the laptop around.

So that's what the problem was! I had a g73 10 years ago and it burned through a graphics card and then ram while on warranty. It did get a bit better once I flashed a modded low power vbios i found on some sketchy online site.

Eventually it just stopped booting and I switched to a MBP.

Unless there is some implement preventing you running it closed, I would disagree about "designed" part.

Some cooling openings are open only when the laptop is open. So the laptop is very thin for transport and well cooled when open. You can run it closed but it's not cooled very well.

I don't know about the latest models, but Intel's CPUs have had overheat throttling and shutdown (known as PROCHOT) since the Pentium II. AMDs of the time didn't, and there's a famous TomsHardware video showing what happens if the heatsink was suddenly removed from one.

It's been my understanding and experience that CPUs will automatically throttle and then completely shut down if they get too hot, so seeing damage mentioned is a little surprising. I've encountered ill-designed laptops which would overheat and shut down if left at the BIOS setup screen for too long because the OEM software (drivers) to control the fans would only be present if the OS was loaded, but that didn't result in any actual damage.

My MacBook Pro suffers the orange blob screen problem - which I was told by an Apple guru upon inspection was only possible as a result of me closing the laptop while the fans were on (i.e. it was hot), and that therefore this is a user fault and not eligible for replacement under warranty ..

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