I have a 17" macbook pro, so it's a behemoth of a laptop. And Apple's all aluminum enclosure sure looks slick, but man does it conduct the heat. You really don't want the thing on your lap w/o a stand, because it gets really red hot.
This is the 45h cooling stand I've had for this machine, and already by far the best. The previous two had three important issues - first was that they were small - designed for 15" notebooks, so there was a lot of overhang on mine. Annoying, but not the end of the world. More important was the fact that the power cable plugged into the edge of the stand and could be detached. Since I use my laptop on my lap, that connection tended to get bumped around a lot, and eventually the connection became so loose that the fan would only work intermittently and required fiddling to get going. That's why I replaced both of those - loose connection, no fan, no cooling.
This stand is a huge improvement.
First of all, the power cord is molded onto the stand, so I can't jar it loose like I could on the other stands. Plus, it's halfway up the back of the stand, so it'll be much harder to bump around anyway. So I shouldn't have the same issue I'd had in the past.
Second, it's huge. It fits my 17" laptop perfectly. No overhang. Obviously, this is really only a stand for a big laptop. If you've got a 15", the stand will be bigger than your machine.
Third, the wedge shaped cooling gives it a huge amount of space to pull air in from the sides. Like I said, I use my laptop on my lap. Previous models pulled air in from underneath. But since it was sitting on my lap, there was minimal airflow available. Now, since this one pulls in air from the sides, it really cools things off fast. Since I've had it, the laptop's internal fan has come on only once or twice. it used to come on all the time, even when the old stand's fan was working properly. So the cooling is top notch.
I have two complaints -
There's no power switch, so I need to unplug it to turn it off. A minor annoyance, but it'd be nice to have one.
And as others have said, the rubber bumpers to hold on the laptop are pretty lousy. I lost one within the first two days of getting the stand (I have no clue where), and they didn't do that great a job of holding up the laptop anyway. The laptop would tend to slide down the stand, even just during normal use, let alone when I moved it around. So that was unacceptable.
The fix was just to attach several rubber stick-on picture frame bumpers. Available at arts and crafts stores for about a buck for 16 or so, and 4 seem to do it. I had some sitting around from a previous stand that had the same issue. You will want to add your own bumpers.
But once those are on? it's a fantastic product. Highly recommended.