Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Wistron has designed a “Dynamic airflow” laptop that has a mechanical system that extends the back of the laptop outward when the lid is open, revealing additional vents and providing more room for the laptop to circulate air in order to keep the insides of the notebook cool.
It’s unclear if this laptop will ever see the light of day, but it recently won an iF Design Guide Award, so pictures and a (very) few details are available.
According to the awards listing, the back of the laptop moves thanks to a “Hinge Auto-Extension” mechanism that ensures “the heat module is automatically extended using an interlocking mechanism.”
Wistron says that normally the motherboard and “thermal component” are right on top of one another, which doesn’t provide much room for airflow, so this system pushes the “heat module” back a little further.
This could theoretically help thin laptops provide a little extra cooling power, which could be particularly useful in gaming laptops and mobile workstation-class systems that have to dissipate heat not only from a primary application processor, memory, and storage, but also a power-hungry discrete GPU.
Wistron is a manufacturer that typically makes computers and other electronic devices on contract for other companies. So you’ll probably never see a “Dynamic airflow” laptop with the Wistron name on it. But the company could theoretically license the design to PC companies.
So, reduced performance when laptop has lid closed? This is unacceptable for business laptops, as they are often docked with closed lid.
It’s been a while since I last even saw a laptop that had a dock connector on it, everything is on USB-C now. And since everything has the power buttons on the inside, unless it has a 360 degree hinge, it’s kind of hard or at least inconvenient to use them with the lid closed.
In fact because of this loss of the dock connector I feel like it’s the convertibles that do this best now, since you can flip the laptop into tent mode, plug in your dock, and at least use it without taking up so much desk space.
Problem with convertibles is near all of them use touch display and non matte display.
“Docked”, of course, means “docked via USB-C” (or Thunderbolt) in modern world. See docking stations such as Dell WD19S. Power button is not required – all (or most?) business laptops power on automatically when plugged into their USB-C docks.
Just save money and buy a 20 euro desk fan.
…and carry around with your thin laptop everywhere cooling device of the same width.