I have a macbook pro, 15", 1 year old. I use and iLap. it's honestly Man's Greatest invention. It keeps the laptop cool, even when running games in Windows. Without the iLap it can get a little hot, but only while doing intensive stuff. But really, everybody who owns a Mac, should own an iLap. Trust Me!

My 17" MBP C2D gets decently hot when running a batch job in Photoshop CS2 in XP through Parallels while listening to iTunes and surfing the web. Not scorching, but hotter than my old Dell Inspiron 9200... However, it's less than half as thick. I'll take the ball scorching over the craptacular Dell Design; I'm not in the lifestyle of making babies anyway...

Dell Insperon 1501 gets fairly hot due to it has a amd sepron board and is running windows vista over one 512 mb memory stick

my 13.3" mb is 6 months old and could hit up to 90 degrees normally at 52-55 thou heats up my ass through my messenger bag lol

My Sony Vaio gets a little hot, not too much that it will burn my balls but i always use it with two little fans under the laptop and it doesnt even get any hot.

My laptop keeps my "tender parts" nice and warm on a cold winter day.
Not too warm though.

-Dell Latitude D620

My HP dv6500t runs okay I think... Nothing more than 70? (Im guestimating).

My MB (the old ones... before intel) ran very cool Couldn't even notice the heat..

ive got the dell xps m1330, and its hot whenever the video card is doing anything intensive. Running just word and firefox in vista, however, i can use it on my lap for hours.

There is a major problem with cooling in this computer, however, and if it gets too hot when watching a movie or playing a game (it did for me), a connection on the motherboard gets fried and the video card stops working. I had to send it into dell 2 weeks ago to get my motherboard replaced, and checking on forums like notebookreview and dell forums, i can see that the problem is very common.

Maintain testicles at ~95 F for best reproductive performance.

My Dell XPS M170 gets pretty dang hot... at least as hot as our heating pad's low setting. I'll see if I can't get an actual temperature tonight.

I have a Toshiba R15-s829 TabletPC. It gets semi hot. Not hot enough to burn but hot enough to make you sweat. The fan runs a lot and that can kick out some pretty hot air. There are a lot of vent holes on the bottom too. In my experience this laptop is a lot better than my old HP that only had a small hole for the fan. As well as my old 12" ibook that would get burning hot and led to the graphics card failing and having the main board replaced 3 times.

I think it is obvious but the more vents and larger the fan it seems to run cooler.

My Vaio SZ6 blows some scorching hot air out the back vent on a Summer's day, but still seems to remain quite reasonable on the underside and never has overheating problems. How objective do you want this to be? Do you want surface temperature measurments?

Could we please get actual temperature measures? We would like to do a real graph. We love graph and we love Tufte. We need data. Thanks!

My Sony Vaio (Room goes silent. Little boy "No MacBook?", "No little child", "Well then you STINK!", "Stupid , Kid.....") which is not, never will be, and I will never buy, any Apple product.

Yes I just spent about 5 seconds of my life (and yours) ranting about my hate for Apple Products.

And now for the hotness of it, It's usually warm. Unless I'm writing a 500 word essay in MS Word, Surfing about 5 tech blogs ,and doing some serious MySpace Messaging -then it starts to get hot- it's usually just right.

My Macbook can get hot enough to scald. I don't worry about it failing due to heat anymore, this kind of design flaw is exactly what applecare is for.

@DestroyerMTL: I've had the CPU temperature read at 69C and the enclosure bottom was damn close to that.

@Cursemaster0:

I acctually don't check my computers temperature...but i'm guessing about 90+ when I'm running all that junk I talked about.....

I've got a two-year-old Dell Inspiron 1300 and it usually runs between 45-55C. I have a fan control utility that I use that keeps it in that range and kicks up the speed of the fan if it were to get hotter than that.

Apple Macbook Pro (purchased November 18th, 2007) - 2.4ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 gbs of 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRam, 200 gb HD - running temperature is 49 Degrees Celsius on the CPU and the harddrive is at 42 degrees. Im currently in he bedroom which is set at 75 degrees (i know its way too damn hot in here :( ).

I don't know how reliable iStat Pro is, but at most it's reached about 96-7 degrees F on the bottom enclosure after prolonged use. When on idle for a while, it settles around 85.

hp tx1000 tablet, hot enough to melt my balls off if I do anything video card related and the fan goes like a jet taking off even streaming flash video

@Cursemaster0:

Feirenheight that is :D

@imTheKing: sorry for the double post, just wanted to confirm that this thing also has the Spek clear case on it and its much much cooler than my fiance's Powerbook G4 1.6ghz. Her's burns your legs if its on your lap, mine doesnt :)

Powerbook G4 17 inch high-res model 1.67 and it has a fan issue. With istat, I have recorded temperatures of 167 degrees F. thats on the top of the CPU, according to temperature sensors. the bottom of the CPU is generally 110-130. this thing has left burn marks across my legs.
(keep in mind the temperatures taken are during WoW)

my mbp hits 209f while rendering.

i have a macbook and I dont think it gets too hot

BTW doin this on my awsome new N810

I have an ASUS F3Jp, it gets reasonably warm, but not overly hot. Unless I start burning a DVD, then it starts burning my legs.

my 15" core 2 duo 2.16 MBP gets hotter than you would want!! I've read the bottom surface to be like 110 F. Thats not that much for a MBP but to me thats pretty hot for a notebook! Defiantly cant have it on you lap!! I called and asked apple about that temperature, and they said that it was perfectly normal, the way they design their notebooks is for the bottom to be a "heat sink" and "it's supposed to get that hot" and that "you should always have it on a hard surface!"

My Macbook Pro ( 2.33GHz, 2gig ram ) runs at a cool 57C during normal use ( currently running Photoshop, Terminal, Xcode, iTunes, Safari, XP via Fusion ) and during heavy use ( rendering and compiling large projects ) it usually runs about 70-80C. I use smcFanControl and MenuTempurature ( uses the cpu scaling .kext ). There is never a point when my MBP gets to hot for my lap.

I have a Hypersonic-EX7. It's a huge 17" laptop with Dual DVD burners, a Desktop Pentium 4 3.8Ghz, dual 7200rpm 100GB hard drives, and 4 gigs of ram. It had 4 fans in the bottom and houls like a hairdryer all the time. You don't put it on your lap nor block any of the vents in the bottom, it'll burn you better then a hot cup of coffee from McDonalds.

Gateway CX210X Convertible Tablet PC. Usual high is 60C, most I've gotten it up to using its own fans was around 65C, happened only once. Usually goes to 60C, fans down to 45C, etc etc.

I have a macbook 2.16 GHZ, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD. Average temperature while surfing the web and listening to iTunes (etc), is 55-60C, and while watching movies it can as hot as 80C before the fans get up to max and bring it down into the 70's.

I have 2 laptops a Dell D800 and a HP tc4400.
The HP just gets annoyingly warm <100 Fahrenheit but the dell has the memory compartment right over your "tender area" and i measured the temp as 125 degrees when it was running with proper ventilation at idle.
If your running anything intensive well it preforms free vasectomies.

Oh one more thing, the Brick-Size powerbrick will also burn you. I'm affraid to set it on my leather seats in my car ir gets so hot.

@Jesus Diaz:

It will be very hard to get any accurate external temps from a range readers. It's not real accurate to sit a laptop on top of a thermometer to measure the heat, some spots will be hotter than others and different thermometer styles will read differently.

How about CPU temps?

Here's a dashboard widget for Macs: [www.shockwidgets.com]
My 12" PowerBook G4 runs about 115º F CPU heat and is comfortable to use.

Asus F3sv keeps me nice and toasty while play CS:S and CoD4. (45~55C CPU). When Burring DVDs i could use the bottom as a George Foreman grill. No really it would probably cook eggs, have not tried, yet.

Until I got it repaired, my Alienware m7700 would randomly power down in the middle of anything graphics intensive. I soon figured out why. I found with a Temperature utility that the system's emergency shutdown temperature was 85 C. (158 F.) I hit that critical limit more that 15 times... Its a wonder the thing didn't melt.

Any diagnostic program that gives real time temperature out there for laptops?

I don't have any kind of thermometer handy, but my Dell XPS M1210 is a pretty damn good blanket heater.

i have a MBP and it never runs past 45ºC if it does, i just turn this on [www.mactips.org]

@Rhomp: It would seem the ASUS F3 series all suffer from the same heat problem when burning discs.

15" MacBook Pro 6 months old.
about 30ºC

I swear I've gotten burned on the tops of my knees with the Dell XPS M1710. Like boiling frogs. A few times it has hung up when I was trying to Hibernate and I hadn't noticed. When taking it out of the case an hour later, the keyboard is too hot to touch.

2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook - CPU temp 69C running Photoshop, iTunes and Safari.

MBP 2 Ghz, 2 Gigs ram
Bottom Enclosure is 103º and is resting on my lap.

I've got a handy little temp app that tells me the temp of all the major bits as pieces. The read out is at the top of the screen.

Since the latest OS X Update my MBP 17" has resumed having its overheating issues it had back when I first got it april 07. Now on 10.5.2 I've seen some scary (like 70C) numbers -- with the average being 45-49C.

my macbook air stays at about 120 F, i am about to bring it in. (RPM at 6200 always)

What part of "list REAL temperature on the bottom surface" do some of you not understand? Or do you just enjoy typing random unsolicited gibberish?

At any rate, I have a Compaq F750US(Turion X2 TK-57) and at full load the underneath heats to about 45C.

My CPU consistently runs about 140 Fahrenheit in my Macbook. (measured via istat pro). ive seen it get as high as 160.

i swear, apple will be remembered one day for kick ass mp3 players, and killing all our future generations with their laptops.

40ºC average, for the record.

My black macbook is so hot I stuck my penis in the dvd slot..... you know what they say, once you go black you never go back.

Just surfing the Giz and my bottom enclosure temp of my 15 inch MacBook Pro is 101 degrees!

Bottom enclosure for my Macbook is at 80ºF according to iStat Pro, CPU is at 117. That's with PS CS3, Safari, iTunes, and Pages running, plugged in, set to Better Performance.

Gotta be the legal eagle here - Apple has not in and way officially called their little compy's "laptops" I think since they moved up to the G4 chips. The are "portable computers" and Apple states they should always be operated on a hard, flat, unobstructed surface for optimal air flow. Just had to correct the terminology...

And yeah, my MBP Core Duo gets pretty warm when I'm working in Aperture and running a few other apps at the same time. According to a widget I have, the processor temp hangs out around 140 degrees normally, going on up to about 180 when really humming along.

Dell XPS M1710
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7600 @ 2.33GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.3GHz
2046MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX

Processor currently running at 42C. However I'd say it would range from 25C-50C. It's definitely very hot to the touch, so it's a good thing it stays mostly on my desk hooked up to my external monitor.

Even though it does get a bit toasty, it runs much cooler than my previous Dell XPS Gen 2. I wouldn't be surprised if that thing got >80C.

additionally, alot of you are frakking dumb for thinking you will contribute to the compiling of a useful chart if the data points will involve "not too hot" or the temperature your testicles are supposed to stay at.

Is this arstechnica? Are we compiling official like graphs in excel now? You forget your place giz.

My Macbook only gets to about 70-80 degrees so it's not bad at all.

macbook from august about 150 C accoring to smc fan control

I don't have an exact temperature, but thanks to cheap components from the manufacturer, my Toshiba Satellite A60 would run quite hot until it overheated and shut itself down. After replacing the system board, it runs significantly cooler, but still somewhat warm. Maybe I'll use a statistics program to find the exact temperature if I can find a good program later.

MBP - 1.83, family planning the $#@ JOB's way.

My first gen Macbook usually idles at 60 degrees, but it can go lower if I speed up the fan or am sitting in a cooler environment. If I'm doing some intensive stuff, it usually goes to 70-80. I almost never have this thing on my laptop without some sort of protector like a cutting board in the way.

@xtremesniper: Okay I actually meant "on my lap" not "on my laptop".