Anyone ever use a MacBook Pro for a few hours? The thing heats up around the on board keyboard area so much it can burn you. I think the case is aluminum or some kind of metal. It looks nice and shiny like a house hold appliance or high-tech gadget. It is a beautifully made and elegant looking laptop.

I think the reason it heats up so much is because of the thickness of it. Its really thin compared to other common types of laptops which are about 1 and a half its thickness on average. I like it being thin because its so much easier to carry without being bulky. The area where it will heat around is the speaker/vent holes, well pretty much all around the surface of the base. The LCD screen does not heat up at all. It will be useful in winter when its cold as a heat lol. I can live with it as I do love my mac alot and putting up with the heat is not a really big deal as I have a wireless keyboard I use most of the time anyway.

Just something to consider when you think about buying one of these.

Well actually I have several remedies for it:

-First make sure its properly ventilated get like a lapboard or something if you not working at a table or anything
-Second get a laptop cooling system they are very useful, loud, but when you can drop about 5-10 degree's of heat can't complain. You can find them here and they are very inexpensive so just find one that matches the size of your laptop and you are set.

Thickness has nothing to do with it really, but if you think about it the heat is being spread out more and so if your laptop is nice and thin the heat will be more localized. Of course make sure to dust it every now and then as dust will trap in heat more.

My macbook pro does the same thing, the bottom gets super hot even when its on a desk. Perhaps I'll look into one of those cooling pads.

I've noticed mine has cooled considerably since installing Leopard 10.5.2 and the new WD 320 GB hard drive. Of course, since I'm (or I was) a complete novice at the whole thing, I completely lost everything on both the hard drives when I was in the process of updating them. So now I don't have most of the programs I used to run all the time or any of my files. My external drive died because I tried to install Leopard on it as well so 3/4 of my iTunes are inaccessible as well as my address book and passwords for FF and Opera. Damned computers...