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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 :).