It's a fact of life. Laptops heat up. Sometimes a bit too much for our laps, really, and we're forced to find alternative means of cooling them down, lest our prized possessions melt into so much useless slag.

Notorious for heat buildup are Macs, from the Macbooks to the Macbook Pros and the Macbook Air (particularly the Air, which turns into a stuttering mess when it gets hot under the collar).

Solutions range from simple, obvious ones, like devoting an electric fan to them full-time or using them exclusively in air-conditioned rooms, or even cruder ones, like propping up the back end with a stack of magazines so the heat can escape and you and the computer can breathe easy.

Proactively, you might want to spend for a coolpad, which ranges from cheap, no-frills plastic stand to expensive branded platforms with powered fans, LED lights and USB hub extensions.

With laptop prices being the way they are, heat is really a serious concern. But if we told you there was a great coolpad solution available, would you consider shelling out around P3,500 for it?

Before you answer, read about the Moshi Zefyr Macbook Cooler.

Cool pad

It seems atrocious you'd spend that much for a laptop cooling stand, but we'd just like to say - it's worth it. The Zefyr is a small, sleek, collapsible cast-aluminum cooling pad with a little whisper-quiet fan that runs off a USB port. It comes in classy, Apple-worthy packaging that makes you think you were unboxing a new iPod.

Out of the box, it's less than 4 x 8 inches, is just half an inch thick, and weighs a little under 11 ounces. If you can find one around, know that it comes in black and in silver, and in two models, one for the Macbook and the Air, and one for the bigger Macbook Pro.

To use it, you pull the ends outward and it extends to the full width of the Mac. Opened, it reveals the fan and a cleverly recessed USB plug, which has a cord that is sensibly short, just enough to reach the port and not get tangled up in anything else. Pull it out, plug it in, settle your Mac onto the pad and you're cool, literally and figuratively.

How it works

Essentially, the Moshi Zefyr is a big, cast-aluminum, finned heatsink. In fact, the entire bottom is composed of fins that run the length of the cooler. Being aluminum it weighs next to nothing, but is solid and sturdy, with build quality that matches the laptops it was meant for.

Cool, you think? Wait. It gets cooler still.

No worries about scratches - nothing metal touches your Mac. The points of contact are all rubber, from two raised portions on the ends, and one big, generous rubber pad in the middle. This middle rubber pad is the best thing about the Zefyr, because it's made of a special compressive, heat-conducting rubber compound, which ensures contact and conducts heat away from your precious (like a CPU's thermal paste), absorbed by the fins and shunted out by the ultraquiet fan (which runs so silently that you'd need to look at the little spinning blades to confirm that it was running at all).

If Macbook Air owners are worried that their single USB port will be hogged by the Zefyr, fear not. It's a pass-through port, and you can connect other devices onto the plug itself as if it wasn't there, no prob.

Effective

It's effective - you get anywhere from a six-to eight-degrees centigrade reduction in heat with just a few minutes of use, which greatly improves your laptop's performance and life span. (And solves the overheating and consequent performance hits that plague the Macbook Air.)

Since it's small, compact and shares the same Apple design ethic, it also looks great while it does its work effectively.

One of the bonuses of the Zefyr, like most coolpads, is that it raises the keyboard just enough to position it ergonomically, which reduces the chance of getting repetitive stress injury and makes work more comfortable over the long haul.

But not perfect

It isn't perfect; there are still a few concerns. Over time and use, the pad fittings loosen a bit, so while in repose it might slide open on its own in your bag.

And the lack of a pouch or carry case can result in scratches from it on your other stuff in the bag (or God forbid, on your bare laptop), as the ends of the fins aren't as rounded as they could have been.

Additionally, as an ergonomic stand for a Macbook Air, you have to position it just past where it should actually be to make it more stable, and keep it from tipping over backward from the slightly awkward center of gravity.

As a result the Zefyr juts out the back of the Air an inch too much to look completely cool. Macbooks and Macbook Pros are okay though.

Of course, other solutions exist. Inexpensive ones for sure, but they worse just as good. Whether this coolpad, at its current price of US$75 for the Macbook/Air version or US$86 for the Macbook Pro, is worth it is a matter between you and your wallet.

But the Moshi Zefyr Macbook Cooler works, and works well, and looks good doing it. It's in the upper tier of accessories all right, but hey, what are Christmas bonuses for, right?

This story was first published in The Philippine Daily Inquirer on 27 September 2008.