[capableweb]

Maybe fanless is important for people who don't use the laptop for work, but as someone who mainly works with computers and not much leisure, I don't care if it's fanless or not, as long as it doesn't throttle just because something compiles for 3 minutes instead of 20 seconds and uses all the cores to the max. Usually, passively cooled laptops are really poor at that, compared to ones that have active cooling.

[nevi-me]

A single data point:

Fanless is important enough for me that when I was about to go home to a hot village over the Nov-Jan break (I was going to work till mid-December), I went and bought the M1 Air so I could ditch my loud work laptop. The work laptop was a Dell with a Quadro, known to overheat and get loud when temp > 45°C. The last time I was home I had observed that it idled at least below 40, while around 35 in the city, so with 10° warmer weather in December, it was going to be loud when idle.

Even when my new job gave me a new device, I hesitated to get the M1 Pro as it has a fan. Only got it after watching enough reviewers say it almost never turns on.

I'm 34 and my ears started constantly ringing in 2019 after my then employer gave me a faulty 'new' laptop whose fan was always at 100%. I complained about it numerous times to no avail.

We didn't fully grasp how loud it was until one day we were in the office past 5pm when the central cooling turner off. It contributed a lot to the office noise.

There were about 10 of us in the office, when I turned off my laptop almost everyone startled, asking what loud object had just turned off (we had been complaining that it's hot, so were aware the HVAC was off).

So yes most people compiling code may prefer beefier machines with fans, I've sadly started a lifelong journey of avoiding fans.

We live in a small apartment, I'm even considering getting a new fridge because our current one is loud.

[nordsieck]

I've really gotten a lot of milage out of wearing earplugs on a regular basis. It is a bit of an unusual practice, but I really like the quiet. Might be an alternative solution to your problem.

Alternatively, I've found that using a laptop pad with a large (200mm) fan can help to keep the machine cool without generating much noise.

[doubled112]

My wife seems to really like air moving around. There's a large fan in this room, and a small one, and an air purifier too. You get the idea.

I, on the other hand, find the noise overwhelming sometimes. Sometimes I wear my over ear headphones with nothing playing just to dull it.

Same idea, I suppose? Maybe I'll try some ear plugs.

[nordsieck]

> Sometimes I wear my over ear headphones with nothing playing just to dull it.

If you like the over-the-ear format, you can also get rated[1] earmuffs. I've tried out a set, but I also wear glasses and their clamping force causes my glasses frames to put too much force on my head for comfort.

---

1. By rated, I mean they have an "NRR" rating.

[brokenmachine]

I'd be looking into a different wife before I'd accept the noise of unnecessary fans.

[capableweb]

Hah, I take it you are not married? Life with a longterm partner tends to be filled with compromises.

[brokenmachine]

My partner hates fan noise as much as I do. There's other compromises, of course... :-)

[quechimba]

I've had two MacBook Pros die in the Amazon rainforest due to humidity. I think the fans pull in humid air and that the water gets stuck. My brother has had an M1 Air for about 2.5 years in the jungle with no issues whatsoever. Also since there is no power grid, it's good to have more battery life (sometimes it rains for days).

If anyone reads this, any suggestions on how to make electronics last longer in such a humid environment? I've been thinking about building some sort of dry box with silica gel but I'm not really sure how... And to use an external monitor instead of the built in one...

[freehorse]

Very similar, I am pretty sure laptop fans were making my tinnitus worse. Noise canceling headphones help, but I do not wanna wear them all the time.

A fanless laptop has been a revelation for me. I am not going back ever.

[anonymouskimmer]

I've read anecdotes of active noise cancelling headphones sometimes making tinnitus worse.

[freehorse]

Yeah I have read such also, and indeed also for me it is not ideal to wear for long time, but it is still definitely significantly better than having to be listening to a laptop fan or similar. Listening to music with it I feel is better than just using it for noise cancelling, but I cannot be certain it makes a difference. Otherwise, if I do not have such mechanical noises around, I disable noise cancelling.

[nevi-me]

I'm conflicted on this one. I have really good Sony ones, and whenever I wear them for even 30 minutes, when I take them off I feel worse. I don't know if it's all in my head and they objectively don't make it worse, however I also now avoid wearing them.

I've probably used them for < 20 hours in the last year, half of that while driving long distance. My car also creates a lot of white noise.

[brokenmachine]

>My car also creates a lot of white noise.

Different tyres will change the noise of a car too.

When I bought my last car, it came with a mishmash of different brands of cheap crappy tyres. They were quite noisy all the time, but when you hit exactly 80km/h there was some kind of resonating drone as well, that was very weird...

When I replaced them with good, high-end softer tyres, the noise was reduced by a massive amount all the time, and no more drone.

[reaperman]

The MacBook Air and Pro have the same performance for just over 7 minutes of full power usage / compiling, FWIW. At that point the Air throttles and the Pro never never throttles.

That’s the entire and sole performance differentiator between the Air and the Pro.

[giantrobot]

I've got an old USB laptop "cooler" which is basically a laptop stand with some integrated fans. If I'm doing something intensive on my MBA it will keep it from throttling for a little while longer than the passive cooling.

[r00fus]

I hate my work laptop that spins up and gets loud during zooms/teams meetings.

Heat is also a downside when you have to carry it between meeting rooms.

A silent/cool laptop is highly preferred over something that does maybe 5% faster.

In the case of Apple’s M series you get both. Other laptops (gram) may be lighter but the silent/cool/fast is a winning combo for me.

[ChuckNorris89]

>I hate my work laptop that spins up and gets loud during zooms/teams meetings.

How much of that is the problem of the SW?

[brokencode]

Don’t let hardware makers off the hook for bad cooling system design. Or Intel off the hook for pumping more and more power into their processors to compete with AMD.

If you look at Teams when it’s running, it’s not like it’s maxing out a CPU core or anything. It’s just that many laptops are pitifully bad.

[beebeepka]

Huh. Most corporate windows machines are loaded with crap. The very same hardware behaves much much better with any modern Linux.

That, and apple has a 3 year lead on chip manufacturing side. I moved from M1 MacBook Pro a same size Lenovo with Ryzen 6800h and I cannot tell the difference speed wise. Noise wise, too. It's not even a Zen 4 CPU

[nr2x]

Does it matter if you have no choice but to use said software?

[ChuckNorris89]

Not your fault obviously, but I meant it matters in the sense that part of the problem also lies with the companies and industry as a whole shipping highly inefficient SW and having the solution be "just buy a new MacBook with Mx chip to run a videochat app bro!!11"

Honestly shitty SW should get slapped with an environmental TAX just like motor vehicles. I remember running Skype video calls and Pidgin chats in ~2005 on a 1.2 GHz single core CPU with 512MB of RAM.

[MobiusHorizons]

I doubt those were group video, which is a much more data intensive problem. The quality is also much better these days.

[r00fus]

I have little to no choice in my software options at work.

I can exert some influence in my choice of hardware.

[freehorse]

I use macbook air for work, and I am totally satisfied with it. For heavy stuff I use cloud or desktop computer anyway, having fans working max for hours it was a torture anyway in my older laptop, and portability is quite important for me for work. Yeah a 12c macbook pro max would be more ideal for heavy loads, but if we compare with an i5/ryzen 5 (or even i7/ryzen 7 probably) I would go with the macbook air.

[varispeed]

You probably don't realise how fans can be a massive drag on productivity.

I was so mad about myself that I hesitated buying M1 for so long after buying one.

I've become much much much more productive on this machine, as I now longer feel this drag when I have to do something and then brace myself for the fan noise. I didn't realise that but I was putting a lot of tasks away just so that I don't get annoyed by fans.

My M1 Max has fans, but they are so well tuned even if they do turn on sometimes I don't hear them and most of the time they are off.

Given how much the fans are affecting productivity, I really couldn't care less if my compile time took 3 minutes rather than 20 seconds as long if it was completely silent, as I may have been hesitating for a couple of minutes to run the task in the first place.

Also it is such a comfort to have a meeting without having to say "sorry guys, these are my fans going off".

I also never noticed any performance issues. Anything I do is snappy, no hiccups and works regardless if I am plugged in or not.

I had situations with my Dell where I couldn't plug in and the anxiety that it could shut down at any time (battery meter wasn't trustworthy) was painful plus massively worse performance on battery.

Apple is a different league. As much as I hate Apple I see no alternative right now.

[plandis]

As someone that works in an open floor plan I _hate_ when my coworkers laptops sound like jet planes because the fans are going full blast. It’s so distracting.

[capableweb]

I'm at least happy your career seems to have been limited to indoors office work, much of the professional industry is very difference when it comes to noise. Doesn't mean you're not right, but I wish didn't have experience spending 7 hours / day next to very loud construction and cleaning machines, as it kind of shrews my perspective compared to my current peers it seems.

[fbdab103]

A fanless-first design would mean I am not subject to the continual whine of whatever teeny high RPM fans that come standard. As someone stuck on corporate Windows machines, I have 24/7 fan noise from the combination of work-spyware + Teams + Onedrive continually indexing and stomping over each other.

Edit: I rarely do much CPU limited workloads. More RAM heavy than anything else.

[reaperman]

The MacBook Pro often completely turns off its fan, no? I almost never hear it/feel it so it seems like it’s off to me.

[zimpenfish]

Pretty much the only time I hear the M1 fans are when I'm doing something with tensorflow-metal, ffmpeg'ing or rendering video, or otherwise deliberately thrashing the CPU. e.g. Minecraft (albeit modded with Sodium et al) makes it noticeably warm but no fans.

[usefulcat]

I’ve had an M1 mini for a year now. I think it has a fan, but I’ve literally never heard it, even though it sits right in front of me. Even when using all cores to do video encoding.

[coldcode]

I have an M1 Ultra Mac Studio and I routinely push its 20 cores, yet I've never heard a fan, if it even has one.

[plorkyeran]

The Mac Studio actually has a low RPM always-on fan. It's quiet enough that it can get away with that, and not turning it on and off avoids the noticeable transitions in volume. Under very heavy load the fan speeds up slightly.

[tripdout]

Yeah, 16in MacBook Pro M1 here and I never hear the fan.

[nevi-me]

Mine turns on when it's on the charger and I'm compiling something that takes very long or otherwise running a lot of programs.

Even then, it's still quiet enough for the person next to me to barely notice.

[pram]

Yes my M1 Max MBP is typically at 0rpm

[kitsunesoba]

I don't necessarily want fanless, but the system being inaudible under moderate load and not a banshee at high load is important. With proper engineering this is possible without too much of a performance hit but a lot of laptop manufacturers either don't put in the time to tune their offerings for this or do what Apple used to and chase thin-at-all-costs even in workstation machines (e.g. Dell Precision laptops being downgraded to close relatives of the XPS line).

Between my personal iMac Pro which is easily the second best-cooled Intel Mac desktop made in the past decade (after the cheesegrater tower) and the employer-provided 16" M1 Pro MPB I use for work I've been spoiled. My tolerance for fan noise has become very low, to the point that I'm debating replacing the case on my Ryzen 5000 gaming tower with something with big slow 200mm fans (like the Fractal Torrent) so its noise level can match that of my iMac and MBP.

[nevi-me]

I got a beefy Ryzen 3000 personal desktop in 2020 when my 2014 laptop started giving in (noisy even with new thermal paste, lid broken).

I can't stand the noise of the fans when it's next to me, it has a water cooler fan. I recently bought quieter fans to replace the existing ones with, however haven't fitted them due to calling issues.

Just wanted to say that your suggesting of getting big slow fans has intrigued me. Right now the desktop sits in the living room, and I only turn it on at night when I'm in the office and the family's in the bedroom, or out of necessity.

I remote into it, so things like games are out of the picture as it gets really loud when the GPU fans start going.

[kitsunesoba]

The size of the fans makes a huge difference, way more than you'd think.

One of my friends has a tower built with a i7 12700k in a Torrent Compact case (2x 200MM fans) which is very quiet on its own, and the giant hunk of metal NH-D15 cooler with a 140MM fan it uses adds almost nothing to that. Its PSU can also run with its fan off most of the time and even when it does spin up isn't too bad.

[formerly_proven]

The 180mm Fractal fans are ... not very good. They're the best 180mm fans (there is not much choice, just Silverstone and some cheap stuff), but pretty shitty compared to the available 120/140mm choices or the 200mm Noctuas (which will not fit cases designed for 180mm fans).

Semi-passive PSU is kinda table stakes nowadays.

[kitsunesoba]

Nice catch, I hadn’t noticed that Torrents came with 180mms instead of 200mms. Even if they’re not amazing they keep my friend’s temps reasonable without making much noise.

The number of cases that will fit 200mms is tiny and none of them are particularly great which is a bummer.

[formerly_proven]

I've really only seen people use them for external radiators like the MORA 420.

[kaycey2022]

It depends on the work. A lot of people just do web development where either they are fiddling around with APIs or interacting with some VM over SSH or are just creating presentations and reports. Even if you are working with a massive codebase, there are tools to just selectively run the tests that are relevant to the changes you made before pushing it all off to a CI/CD pipeline.

Even if fanless is a luxury, a lot of professional developers can just make do with something with the power of a 2016 Macbook Air. Then the nice-to-use screen, keyboard, trackpad etc are extras worth having, much more than a buzzing fan.

[CyberDildonics]

I'm not sure what the point here is, if you want an actively cooled laptop, just buy that. Just because you personally need something different it doesn't mean that feature isn't important to other people.

[kibwen]

> I'm not sure what the point here is, if you want an actively cooled laptop, just buy that. Just because you personally need something different it doesn't mean that feature isn't important to other people.

The person that you're responding to is essentially expressing this exact same sentiment to the person above them? For many of us, fanlessness is irrelevant; in other words, "if you want a passively cooled laptop, just buy that". Hell, I may be an outlier here, but as far as I'm concerned battery life is also irrelevant, and power consumption only matters to the extent that it increases my power bill. I use laptops because they're easy to carry around when closed, not because I'm coding at the top of Mt. Everest or anywhere else that is far from an outlet.

[midoridensha]

>but as far as I'm concerned battery life is also irrelevant, and power consumption only matters to the extent that it increases my power bill. I use laptops because they're easy to carry around when closed

I'm somewhat in the same boat, but I sometimes use mine when traveling (without being plugged in), but fairly rarely.

However, another thing I really like about having a laptop is that my current one, at least, is very very quiet. Years and years of having a noisy desktop PC with loud fans really made me hate fan noise. With a modern laptop, I can do normal computing tasks and almost never hear the fan (and when I do, it's hard to hear), and I don't have to build some custom, non-portable liquid-cooled machine to get that.

[CyberDildonics]

The person that you're responding to is essentially expressing this exact same sentiment to the person above them?

I'm glad you asked. The answer is that no they are not. They are saying 'it might do this'. The person I responded to is saying 'I don't personally want that'. These are two separate things.

If you said 'tell me about this truck' and someone said 'this truck is good for towing boats' and you said 'I don't have a boat', they would say 'you asked and I explained it'. Why are you acting like a news article is trying to sell you personally on something?

[olliej]

Fabless is nice, and the air can do a good job, but the real kicker is the non-airs also just generally don’t make the fans kick in - even building massive amounts of code doesn’t seem to do it. As per usual the real “I need a fan” killer is the GPU, which is to me the least compelling bit (because I’m not super interested in gaming on laptops in general)

[olliej]

fanless and too late to correct the autocorrect.

I'm 90% sure that most laptops do not include a fab :D (though maybe some are fabulous [sparkle sparkle glitter])

[FullyFunctional]

I use it professionally and hate the fan, but in experience the MacBook Air M1 holds up well to sustained (Rust) compilations. None of the infuriating bursting behavior of old Intel chips.