[guilamu]

My answer: the mind-blowingly cheap, good and passive Acer Swift 1 with a quad-core last gen pentium n6000.

I've been buying dozens of those for people at work since 5 years now (first ones with n5000) and I still have to hear a single complaint about it.

The only point of failure of that thing is the charging port, proprietary, not usb c.

[bytehowl]

What is your use case for those?

[guilamu]

Web browsing, office apps, media consumption on the excellent (for the price) IPS panel.

Also to be noted : one of the lightest 14 inches on the market with an excellent battery life.

[bytehowl]

Yeah, for those kinds of tasks they should be fine. I think OP was asking about laptops useful for more involved workloads, though.

[pappeyrome]

I do in fact have that acer swift N6000 bought for €200 - it is perfect for all my tasks (usually CI/CD, ssh) except may be Zoom. It does not allow changing background owing to paltry CPU/GPU. My boss therefore gave me €1000 to get a better device and I cannot find anything silent.

[bytehowl]

Well, either you can remove the noise, or you can remove your ability to hear it. Have you considered just using headphones? Computer fans are usually quiet enough that you won't even need noise-cancelling ones.