It would be cool if the bottoms of MacBooks weren’t flat and instead wavy or rippling to increase surface area. There are probably a lot of cool designs (ayyyyy) you could machine in.
Is there a value to increasing surface area on the top or bottom case of a MacBook? I'd imagine most of the thermal management is achieved by fan-directed airflow through the internal heatsinks and convection through the keyboard.
Well the MacBook Air has no fans so it’s a different beast from a design perspective. If I recall, at least with an earlier m series MacBook, notably improved performance could be gained by inserting a thermal pad between the chassis’ bottom panel and the compute module. Apple probably didn’t do this in an effort to avoid uncomfortably hot temperatures contacting people’s thighs.
It's really cool that performance cores are the same between base, Pro, Max (, Ultra) chips of a generation. That really feels like Apple did it right.