The fans job is to keep the Mac. Book Airs chips from overheating by pushing hot air out the exhaust port. The exhaust port is behind the keyword, at the screen hinge. The Mac. Book Air fan runs constantly by design. The fan runs at or above a minimum speed while the Mac. Book Air is running. On my late 2. 01. Mac. Book Air 1. 1 inch, the minimum speed is 2. At this minimum fan speed, during use, the fan cant be heard by most people. If you put one ear to the keyboard, you can hear the fan. Some people, in a very quiet room, with very sensitive hearing, may be able to hear the fan at the minimum speed. When the Mac. Book Air is busy it generates more heat. The fan then runs faster to keep the Mac cool. At higher speeds, you can easily hear the fan. This is a normal cause of fan noise on the Mac. Book Air Mac. Book Air is busy, fans are keeping it cool. Fan noise is like sweating its a response to strenuous activity. Examples of activities that make the Mac. Book Air busier are running many apps,using web sites with animation Flash or video,playing games,playing or editing video, particularly HD video. The room temperature will affect how fast the fan will need to run to keep the Mac. Book Air cool. In a hotter room, the fan will need to run faster. The highest fan speed on my late 2. Mac. Book Air is 6. You can check your Mac. Book Airs fan speed with the free i. Stat Pro dashboard widget. Stat Pro will also measure the internal temperatures of your Mac. Book Air. If you have constant fan noise, and your Mac. Book Air is not doing heavier activities, your Macs System Management Controller SMC may be confused. You can fix this with a SMC reset. Mac. Book Air Too Hot. The hottest temperature on the bottom of the case Ive seen quoted in the press is 1. F 4. 1C Anand. Tech and in the wild is 1. F 4. 3C thanks for commenting Corbin. This benchmark was running Half Life 2 Episode 2, which works both the main processor and the graphics processor both of which generate heat. Both processors are on the same silicon chip in the new Mac. Book Air. If you have a higher Mac. Book Air 2. 01. 2 2. If your Mac. Book Air is getting too hot, there are some possible fixes below. Heat and Fan Noise Just the Mac. Book Air i. 7, or Mac. Book Air i. 5 As Well The fan noise and heat issues are affecting the i. Mac. Book Air as well. Complaints of the Mac. Book Air heating up, overheating and fan noise are not restricted to the Intel Core i. Mac. Book Air. Ive had a reader send in a video of his Mac. Book Air i. 5 with a loud fan. Mac. Book Air Heat Issues and Fan Noise Causes. There are at least several possible causes for the Mac. Book Air high heat and noisy fan Software functions that consistently use CPU are being used, e. Photo. Apps or other software running in the background is consistently consuming CPU. Adobe Flash, the technology used to deliver some animated ads in web pages and most web video is consistently using CPU. This is a specific, common case of the cause above. Software runs at startup that is not compatible with Mac OS X Lion. The software keeps trying to run and keeps falling over causing load on the CPU. The Mac. Book Airs System Management Controller SMC, responsible for controlling the fans, has become confused. Cause 1 Software that Consistently Uses Processor. Software that is performing an activity that consistently uses can cause the Mac. Book Air to get very hot and the fans to run loudly. A few examples of heavy software are Video export, encoding or format conversion transcoding. For example, Handbrake for converting videos for display on i. Phone or Apple TV. Importing photos to i. Photo or performing recognition of faces in your photo library. Playing some HD video. How much processor video playback uses depends on many factors, including video resolution 7. Generally 7. 20p is fine, 1. Quicktime H. 2. 64 movie playing back in Quicktime, and other 1. Quicktime format, e. MKV or AVI will get the Mac. Book Air hot and fans will run. Playing web video. Web video uses Flash, and Flash video playback is less optimised than Quicktime. Ive noticed that occasionally a web videos use several times more CPU than another at the same resolution. I suspect that is because some web videos uses formats that Flash is optimised for probably H. Flash probably non H. Flash video FLV. I havent confirmed this. D rendering e. g. Cinebench. Video editing and effects e. Final Cut, Adobe Premiere, After Effects. Exporting a music track mixdown, from a multi track music project. Playing 3. D games e. Portal, Half Life. Running benchmarks. If you are doing sustained processor intensive work expect it to get warm or hot and for the fan to become audible or noisy. Using either the main processor CPU or graphics processor GPU generates heat. In these cases that Mac. Book Air is usually performing normally. Some of the heat is dispersed to the case, so the case feels hot. The fan speeds up pull cool are in and push hot air out of the Mac. Book Air. Cause 2 Software in the Background Consistently Consuming CPUEvery application running in the background uses power and heats up the Mac. Book Air. If you use less battery, your Mac. Book Air gets less hot. If it gets less hot, it doesnt have to use the fan. And on the way, you might double your battery life. You can see how much power each app is drawing, use the free software coconut. Battery. To help cool down your laptop, quit background apps or pause them using the 3rd party software App Tamer. Note that its not just apps running in the background that consumes power. Other background services often called daemons can also consume power. Mostly these are pretty efficient, but for power users, its worth checking. See my article Mac. Book Air Battery Life for more info on reducing power usage and making your Mac cooler and quieter. Cause 3 Adobe Flash Consistently Using the Processor. Flash is software that can be installed as a plugin to most web browsers, such as Safari, Fire. Fox Opera. Googles Chrome browser includes Flash. Flash is mainly used to include animated and video ads in web pages, to deliver web video and provide games in webpages. Flash is not uncommon for charting. Its also often used for entires sites for big product launches, like Hollywood movies. Flash tends to use a lot of CPU. Most people who use Flash arent professional programmers, theyre usually creatives. One poorly written banner ad can swallow an entire core of your Mac. Book Airs processor. While the latest versions of Flash do some hardware acceleration for video playback, Flash still uses considerably more CPU to play video than native video players like Quicktime X. Consider if a Flash banner ads is not visible its in other browser tab, your web browser is in the background while youre in another app e. Word, or the banner is in part of the webpage that isnt showing in the browser window. The Flash portions of webpages continue to run and consume your processor and battery even when you cant see them. Flashs heavy use of CPU was running of the reasons Apple doesnt include Flash on the i. Phone or i. Pad, and why Flash doesnt come preinstalled on the Mac. How to Send Web Pages From Your Phone to Your PCIt isnt hard to go from reading an article on your phone to reading it on your laptop. All you need to do is remember where you found it, right But searching for something you already have in front of you is redundant, especially since companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple all have ways to take whats on your phone and bring it to your desktop in an instant. Chances are, with a few settings tweaks, you can enable the feature right now. Microsofts Continue on PC is Device Agnostic. The companys new Continue on PC feature is a site sharing tool for both Android and i. OS devices. It exists as an app that lives in your devices share sheet, the icon that lets you perform actions like sharing images, sites, or messages to social media services or other apps. Hit your share icon, select Continue on PC and watch the page youre looking at appear on the corresponding screen. You can download Continue on PC in the App Store. Youll need to sign in with the same account you use on your PC. You can link your phone to your PC by visiting Settings Phone. After you link the two devices and install the app, you can choose to continue now which opens up your PC browser, or later which places the link of your choice in your Windows 1. Action Center, the operating systems notification tray. If you dont have an offsite cloud storage plan and you really should, Googles newest update toRead more i. OS Users Can Use the Built In Handoff Feature. With i. OS you can send whatever site youre looking at on your i. OS device to your Mac using Handoff, one of Apples Continuity features that syncs compatible apps between Mac and i. OS devices. If youre on an i. OS device and looking at some webpage or are using a supported app like Messages, Safari, or Bear, youll see the corresponding icon appear in your dock, letting you leave your phone alone and access it from your Mac. Even when using Safari on my i. Phone, Handoff uses whatever default app I designate, making Chrome my go to browser on the desktop. Youll have to jump through a few hoops like turning Bluetooth on and signing in with i. Cloud to get Handoff working, but once its up and running youll be able to see every supported i. OS app in your Macs dock, ready to help you continue doing what youre doing. You can enable Handoff in your i. OS device by going to Settings General Handoff. You can do the same on your Mac by opening System Preferences General, and checking the Allow Handoff option. Google Chrome Supports Tab Syncing. If youd rather keep your contents cross pollination strictly to the web, Googles got your back. Signing into Chrome with your Google account enables a variety of syncing features, keeping your browser history, extensions, and login information accessible in nearly every iteration of Google Chrome though extensions dont work on Android or i. OS devices. If youre looking at a piece of news or checking the menu of some restaurant on your phone, you can plop down in front of your PC or Mac, open the History tab with Y or CTRL Y, and see the tabs and history of your other synced devices. You can do the same on mobile devices, which will list your synced devices and the last visited sites so you can resume your browsing.