[traceroute66]

I think most of it is the clue in the name .... laptop.

If we move for a minute beyond the direct "hard" technical constraints which have already been expressed here (i.e. small chassis, lots of chips etc.).

You have a second aspect, the old PBCAK (Problem Between Chair And Keyboard) one.

Users will use their laptops in less than optimal (from a thermal perspective) ways. They will use it on their laps. They will use it in bed, resting on duvets. They will use it on pool-side sun loungers with the mid-summer sun blasting down. Yes you can tell them in the manual that they shouldn't, but they still will.

So even if you can magically cool the chips passively, the possible use-cases of the product might ultimately constrain your ability to forgo a fan entirely.

I note that some people here are seeking to blame the "race to thin" for the requirement for fans. To them I would merely point them at the Panasonic Toughbook. Modern laptop but built like an old-shool 90's brick ... it still has a fan.[1]

Apple have done a stunning job with the M1 (and previously with the i5/i7). But even with the unibody chassis of a MacBook (i.e. the whole device is a massive heatsink) the necessity of forced cooling is still there (edit to add: with the exception of the MacBook Air M1 ... thanks for the correction guys !) . But with the non-Air M1s you really have to work super hard to make the fans ramp up at all, they've done a stunning job.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgWZwP28trI

[microtonal]

the necessity of forced cooling is still there

The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. I used an M1 Air for a while (switched to M1 Pro) and it would only throttle slightly during very long builds. There have also been many tests where the MacBook Pro M1 (which does have a fan), the fan only spins up after minutes of loading all cores.

The MacBook Air M1 shows that it is possible to have a fast [1], passively cooled laptop.

[1] Beat my 3700X in most Rust/C/C++ project builds.

[t_mann]

Thanks for this dose of reality for the previous poster. It always amazes me to what lengths some engineers can go explaining with extreme confidence all the reasons why they think a specific feature isn't possible, all the while being proven completely wrong by the real world.

I remember my first question on Quora was whether there was a way to sidestep the (then) 30MB size limit for installing apps on the iPad while on cellular. A guy with several 'signal engineer' tags explained that that would completely overwhelm the mobile network. I responded that the SIM card I was using was actually marketed to be used as your main internet for your home and came with a Wifi router for that purpose (which I also used sometimes, transferring the SIM). His only response was that I obviously lacked the mental capacity to apprehend how physically impossible this was (something I was using regularly mind you, for much larger downloads and data-intensive apps), and he reported my profile.

[CiaranMcNulty]

I could count the number of times my M1 (13") MBP's fans have kicked in over the last year on two hands, and in most cases when I investigate there's some rogue process running thrashing some of the cores (looking at you, Fusion360)

[microtonal]

My experience with the Mac Mini M1 is the same. We bought a Mini for our daughter. I use it sometimes to benchmark stuff on the vanilla M1. I don't think the fan every spun up.

I can get the fans to spin up easily on my MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro), e.g. when building a large project like PyTorch. Luckily, the fans are not very loud. I can't hear it at the office (plenty of ambient noise), though I can hear it sometimes in our home office.

Passive cooling is one of the reasons I recommend people to get the M1 Air, unless they need 8 performance cores or > 16GB RAM. A completely quiet laptop is such a nice feature. I hope that they keep the Air passively cooled in the future.

Edit: >= corrected to >

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

>or >= 16GB RAM

My M1 Air has 16GB of RAM.

[microtonal]

Sorry for the typo, of course I meant > 16GB. My wife's Air also has 16GB RAM :).

[nerdawson]

I’ve owned an M1 Pro for a month or so and I have yet to hear the fans spin up once. A Google Meet call on my old Intel MBP would have the fans operating at max.

[hombre_fatal]

Same. Even when I realize some process has been using 100% CPU for a while the fans still don’t turn on.

This used to be how I found runaway processes on my previous Intel based MBP.

[culopatin]

I’ve maxed out my cpu for 1h recently and the fans are still very hard to hear. It’s a light purr if you put your ear against it.

[traceroute66]

> The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled.

Thanks for the correction

My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC.

Thanks to you my credit card is trying to tempt me to pull it out of my wallet. ;-)

[microtonal]

My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC.

And the fan on the Intel Air was loud and the CPU performance not great :(. The Intel Air and the M1 Air are like night and day. Even though I have the 14" Pro now, IMO the MacBook Air M1 is the most revolutionary Mac of the past decade, if not more.

[pstadler]

Used an MBA M1 for a year before switching to a MBP 14" M1 Pro. The MBA is the best laptop I‘ve ever had. Fanless, light, insane battery life, always cool and blazingly fast. No noticeable difference between the M1 (8/7 16GB) vs. M1 Pro (10/14 32GB) in daily use, although I don’t usually depend on long running processes going full throttle.

I believe the entry-level MBA is the best laptop you can buy when it comes to price-performance ratio.

[microtonal]

Fanless, light, insane battery life, always cool and blazingly fast. No noticeable difference between the M1 (8/7 16GB) vs. M1 Pro (10/14 32GB) in daily use

Indeed. I only got the M1 Pro because I often do larger builds and two AMX (matrix multiplication) units is nice for some machine learning tasks. Other than that, I liked the Air more.

I hope that they carry over some features of the Pro to the next generation Air, in particular MagSafe, supporting more than one external 4k/5k display, and perhaps >16GB, and it would be so perfect.

[fmajid]

If anything the M1 MBA is too cool, it freezes my lap off. Intel’s done a heroic job of maximizing performance on x86 but you’ve got to pay the price for the inefficiency of its legacy CISC architecture and power efficiency and thermals is it.

[daviddever23box]

This - bought an Amber Lake-Y Core-i5 based MacBook Air (True Tone. 2019 - A1932) and returned it, as the fan noise was frequent and ridiculous. (I've heard that the Ice Lake-based sucessor was worse.)

[glandium]

You can do surprising lots with the M1 macbook air (including building Firefox faster than many intel-based laptops), and it doesn't even have openings for airflow.

[Gorgo]

The base of the laptop is the part of the machine being put on the lap/blanket/pillow/duvet while the lid sticks up in the air. A solution would be to put either the radiator (hard) or heat-producing hardware (easier) in the lid (with some insulation between the hot parts and the screen), making it a bit thicker and with that more stable. This also keeps the heat away from the battery which should make it last longer.

[replygirl]

oh no, it keeps falling over!

[Gorgo]

Aluminium and magnesium are quite light so that should not be a problem - especially not if the space previously taken up by those hot parts is filled by using a larger battery. The think may weigh 2kg instead of 1.5kg and it may be a few mm thicker. It also should have fewer problems in getting rid of heat (which translates to better performance) and the autonomy should be significantly increased due to that larger battery. I'd choose increased autonomy and performance over a lighter and thinner laptop any time.

[Redoubts]

Meh, the older 12” MacBook (not pro, not air) was also fanless. I miss that 2 lbs design quite a bit.

[Tagbert]

I had the 11” Air and it was a delightful little laptop at the time. Very similar to the 12” MacBook. The screen was small and the screen height was limited but it worked well with an external monitor when at my desk. I may go try to fire that up today.

I would not be surprised if Apple eventually brings out a new laptop that addresses the ultra-portable market. With new screens it might be a 13” screen in a tight & light case.

[fmajid]

And it had abysmal performance, unusable for any development task.

[Redoubts]

I developed on it just fine, and that’s certainly not the only task a laptop is useful for.

[fmajid]

This is *Hacker* News.

I had a Docker build that would take 4 hours on mine when it completed in under 15 minutes on my Mac Mini.

[musicale]

> Docker

Many people use/need Docker, but of course it requires a Linux kernel (often running in a hypervisor if you're running macOS.) VMs can easily eat up a lot of resources, especially memory. Alternately a VM without enough memory will also perform abysmally.

I've also heard complaints about poor performance (vs. native Linux or even WSL on x86 hardware) of x86 Docker images running in emulation on an M1 MacBook Air.

[fmajid]

Those docker images were not light, and the max 8GB RAM on the MacBook didn't help, but emulation was not the problem, this was x64 on x64. It's just the Intel m CPUs are just slow, here's the MacBook compared to my Mac Mini:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/12140024?baseli...

and here versus the 2013 MacBook Pro that I normally used instead for development:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/1965771?baselin...

You should run arm64 images on your M1 Mac, in fact at my company we are shifting all the workloads we can to Graviton2 on AWS because of the substantial cost savings, but yes, porting is not a completely trivial exercise and migrating our development environment over to Docker on M1 is still work in progress, and in the meantime we have scrounged up all the Intel MacBook Pros in the company and reserved them for developers.