The MacBook Air throttles hard at 100°C.

Badly.

At 100°C internal temperature, the MacBook Air (any M-series model) will aggressively throttle the CPU and GPU to protect itself. You’ll see frame drops, stuttery animations, and compile times double or triple. It’s not broken — it’s the fanless design hitting its thermal ceiling.

The Air relies entirely on passive cooling (no fan). Once the chassis can’t shed heat fast enough, the chip has to pull back power to stay below 100°C. That means sustained workloads — video exports, coding compilations, long gaming sessions — will drop to maybe 60–70% of peak performance after a few minutes. Burst tasks are fine; the chip cools quickly between spikes.

This is not a defect. It’s the trade-off for a silent, thin laptop. If your workflow regularly pushes the chip to thermal limits for more than a couple minutes, the Air isn’t the right tool. Get a MacBook Pro with a fan.

Future You will thank you for not fighting the thermal ceiling.