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by SturgeonsLaw 75 days ago
It's fine, but it's a design decision with tradeoffs, and gamers are prepared to make different tradeoffs (bigger and noisier are ok if they deliver a big enough performance jump).
1 comments

Is that the tradeoff they make with the Nintendo Switch? I’ve never heard the fan in my Nintendo Switch and it’s a very compact device. My Nintendo Switch 2 is also very compact, smaller and lighter than a MacBook Neo, and it can play AAA games at high frame rates (e.g., Resident Evil: Requiem) while the MacBook Neo struggles with 5 year old titles like Cyberpunk.

This is a very comparable device considering it’s also an ARM-based computer essentially.

We need to stop making excuses for Apple’s unwillingness to include a basic form of cooling for their low end devices. It’s just price segmentation. Make the cheap stuff artificially slow, push you up to the MacBook Pro.

If you cannot hear the fan in a Switch, I implore you to get your hearing checked. It’s not a noisy fan, it’s not a problem the fan is there, but it’s not silent!
I don’t believe I ever said it was silent.

Do you not agree that having a fan in the system was a good design trade-off?

> I’ve never heard the fan in my Nintendo Switch.

If that's not saying it's silent for you, you don't only need to get your hearing checked.

I listen to the game audio, which is why I don’t hear it.

I still never said it’s silent. I merely implied that it’s quiet enough to satisfy the design parameters, where it is so quiet it’s forgettable. My ears might hear it but my brain doesn’t notice it. Maybe you need to dust out your Switch, it’s not a loud system.

I have no idea why you’re arguing this so hard, but I guess people just go crazy to defend trillion dollar corporation Apple. Enjoy your fanless computer that gives up 15-30% performance just to save a few millimeters and $3 on the BOM.

I bet Mac zealots would be surprised to find out that almost every PC with a fan comes with configurable modes so you can decide how loud or quiet you want your system and trade off performance. Crazy right? The user gets to choose for the situation rather than having to choose at time of purchase.

I would rather own a system that doesn’t slow down after 7 minutes of sustained activity. MacBook reviewers act like this is no big deal since they don’t play any games like the other 900 million PC gamers in the world. “Oh, your video exports will be done by the time throttling starts, so it’s not big deal.” These reviewers also only know about video editing since it’s their job to edit videos. But playing games is by definition dependent on sustained high performance. If I lose performance after 7 minutes I’m losing performance for most of my session.