wish it was unnecessary...

Not disaggreeing that capitalism is a cancer, though second to the cancer of the fiat money system.

But what makes these necessary is the often insufficient or overly loud cooling systems in laptops.

If every laptop was cooled like an Asus G74, I agree, we would not need these pads.

But a load of laptops come with under specified or just poorly designed cooling systems that are desparate for some help.

If you happen to live in a hot climate, you'll end up with your laptop frequently shutting down or simply crashing from over heat. In addition, you'll have the tiny internal fan scream away at max RPM, making it unpleasant to work with, even if its just barely not overheating.

Since I picked up a cheap plastic version of whats shown here, I could work in near silence, cause my laptop's cooling didn't have to struggle anymore.

Its annoying enough to require something thats about the same size of the laptop itself, just to work normally, but I guess that's where the faster-slimmer design doctrine has gotten us.

So, it would be right to complain about the 'make-it-thinner' design trend, rather than a fairly decent solution to the problems.