Mac laptops forum: MacBook Pro 13 runs hot?

The plastic macbooks do not disperse heat through the case the same way the aluminum MBPs do. As such, the bottom of the Macbook has more concentrated heat, whereas heat is distributed across the bottom of the MBP.

Nothing to be too concerned about. the hardware integrity is not compromised.

I dont know why I saw Macbook pro and Only thought Macbook, but I can tell you from first hand experience ( I recently bought my sister a 2.26 Ghz Macbook Pro, and I often work with the 2.53 Ghz model at work) that they run almost exactly the same temperature wise. Now, that being said, under strenuous work loads they both get pretty hot. I use both macs on a desk so under these conditions the computers operate (temperature wise) exactly the same.

Under further research though, I did notice something interesting about the MBP chipset architecture. To illustrate I will use an example:

Safari 3.1 running on both the MBP 2.26, and the MBP 2.53.
Safari uses (lets say) 2,000 processes to run on any machine. For arguments sake let us say this requires only a 1.0 Ghz processor to work. In this situation we are using 44% of the MBP 2.26 processor power and 39 % of the MBP 2.53. As such, you will be stressing the processor more proportionally by using a 2.26 ghz processor. ( I know this is a very rudimentary analysis but it serves the purpose)
Because of this the 2.26 might run slightly hotter. It should not be a significant difference though. So the temperature of the models should not influence your decision much...