[refactor_master]

Still baffles the mind that Apple solved this issue some 20+ years ago, and others _still_ haven't. I remember being basically surrounded by jet engines running Word in school.

A few years ago in an old job I got a monster-specced Dell laptop, and it would still roar if I opened anything. I had to pull all the nerf tricks through the BIOS to at least keep it somewhat tolerable in low-load scenarios (i.e. most of the workday).

[wqaatwt]

> Apple solved this issue some 20+ years ago

All the i7/i9 Macbook pros that I used back in the day were obnoxiously load. Even when not under particularly heavy load.

[prawn]

Even a 2015 MacBook for me ran the fan hard almost constantly. First Apple silicon MacBook was silent. Now using an M1 Max MBP from 2021 and external hard drives are the thing making noise on my desk.

[heelix]

Agree. The i9 went full fans as soon as I fired up docker. The arm based macs are an entirely different beast.

[myself248]

I have a number of passively-cooled silent machines, from metal-chassis rugged subnotebooks popular with the military and field-service techs, to plastic cheapies intended for the student market.

They're all fairly low-spec in absolute terms, but even 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC is adequate to run Win10 and office apps, at least, it was before all the Copilot bloat. And you can buy them as an individual, if you search them out explicitly.

But that's not what the mass market buys when they go shopping. Partly because that's not what Best Buy puts on the shelf, and partly because Microsoft sternly warns that such machines aren't recommended for the AI-encumbered future. Gotta push 40 TOPS and have at least 16GB to get Microsoft's blessing, which I think is the single largest driving force behind the hardware upgrade cycle.

[socalgal2]

I wish I lived in the reality. My 2014 MBP and 2019 MBP’s fans come on quick and loud

[SXX]

Apple silicon is only been around for 5+ years, but people tend to forget how bad Intel macs overheated, throttled and hand tons of other thermal related issues.

[victorbjorklund]

Totally. I had an Intel Mac until 2 years ago and it was loud. Not worse than other laptops from the same year. But far from silent.

[a96]

Others solved it 20 years ago. Apple still hasn't.

Fanboys.

[AnthonyMouse]

A fanless CPU needs more, lower-clocked cores to have the same multi-thread performance as an actively cooled CPU with fewer cores, and higher core count CPUs cost more. So you only get a fanless CPU if you either a) get a low multi-thread performance CPU or b) pay for a high-performance CPU and then get only medium performance out of it by running it fanless. Notice that even Apple's highest performance laptops have fans; fanless there isn't a thing.

But Apple's fanless machines do b) and then they just charge you the premium. There are a few fanless PC laptops that do the same thing, but most people don't want that, because they'd rather save a significant amount of money by getting the same performance out of a less expensive CPU with a fan.

[freehorse]

This is oversimplified. It is sustained multithreaded performance that brings throttling with fanless cpu. Anything for a short enough amount of time is fine, and sustained single threaded stuff is also fine. Bursts are also fine. A lot of work that people do on a computer is fine. Fanless doesn't really hurt unless you process large amounts of data in parallel for some time. Performance in a cpu does not only show in this kind of tasks.

I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.

Of course one could say that ~having~ using the fan is always optional anyway (like the older 13" macbook pro was mostly an air with a fan) and in these types of tasks you may barely hear it. But still I prefer the peace of not ever hearing a fan for my to-go laptop.

[ToucanLoucan]

> I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.

Can confirm. I used an Air for a couple of years as a bit of an experiment at work. Ultimately we did go back to Pros, specifically discounted M3 Max ones, just because I did start hitting bottlenecks running Xcode + Android Studio + Firefox + Slack + Telegram + god knows what else, I did FINALLY find the thermal throttling at the end and we ended up going with more expensive machines. That was over a year ago and I purchased the Air I had been using for my wife, who is using it today. It meets and exceeds all her needs and she loves the thing.

Ultimately I did have to cave and get a bigger Mac for work, but that was more out of convenience than necessity. I could've made the Air work if I wanted to, but ultimately I wanted a larger screen and more displays.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.

5W Phone CPUs of today are faster than 105W workstation CPUs of ten or fifteen years ago. It's not a matter of whether it can do real work, of course it can. The question is, in the instances when you still have to wait for the machine, would you rather wait noticeably longer or pay significantly more money in order to avoid white noise? That's the trade off, and most people pick saving time and money over silence, so that's what most vendors offer.

It's not that they can't figure out how to do it. They do make them. There are AMD chips with TDP configurable down to ~15W and fanless laptops that have them. They're just not as popular when you give people the choice.

[freehorse]

> 5W Phone CPUs of today

Yeah tbf I would probably consider just using my phone with my mobile usb-c monitor and bluetooth keyboard, if iOS was not so hostile to be used for actual work (and it does not seem simple in android either, though maybe I would be eventually able to make it work there). It would be very useful to have such a light setup on the go, as I do not necessarily need strong multicore performance all the time.

> AMD chips with TDP configurable down to ~15W

I don't trust the TDP values companies publish because there is no standard way to define what TDP is or how it is measured. At best they are consistent in how they measure them within each brand, so you can at least compare different generations.

And in any case, the question is how competitive such a configuration is vs an ARM-based laptop, with much longer tradition in the low-power space. Could be my searching skills, but looking to get a laptop recently I did not find anything in a better spot in the efficiency/performance/price axes than an air. In particular I was unable to find AMD fanless laptops anyway.

Just as an example, during light work with my m5 mac (eg editting a text file, or writing this comment while a youtube video plays in the background and a bunch of light stuff run in the background too, screen low lit) I see 3-4W total system consumption reported by the OS, while a wattmeter shows 7-9W consumed. Part of it may be hardware, part of it software, but figuring out idle consumption is actually very important for making fanless work. A lot of work a cpu does in a normal day of mine is in bursts. Much of the time it is not necessarily doing much, and you need the thermal headroom for when it is actually needed. Last time I tried tinkering with a thinkpad and linux I did not get remotely as far. I would be happy if there get to be more options.

> The question is, in the instances when you still have to wait for the machine, would you rather wait noticeably longer or pay significantly more money in order to avoid white noise

If I encountered these instances often enough, then definitely a fanless laptop would not be appropriate for my use-cases. But I don't encounter them for what I want to use it for, and the next option with a fan is a larger, heavier and more expensive laptop, which I don't need. When I needed one for my work, I got one. I also have a 16" one that stays mostly at home because I cannot carry this weight around daily and I do stuff I cannot do with an air there.