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Comment by cjrp | Hacker News Reader

If a laptop's performance is on a par with a desktop's, and the fan's aren't going crazy, I'd call that a big win! My 2018 MB Pro has the fans running most of the time, and even then sometimes throttles back the CPU.

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The MacBook Air that GP mentioned doesn't even have a fan! That's certainly a nice benefit.

That's the entire reason I bought mine. Replaced the early 2020 model. I had complete peace and quiet during all of my video calls yesterday

I really want the air for when I work outside in the summer. I worked from an iPad quite often with the magic keyboard, and it started throttling and sometimes overheated to the point of failure while outside in the sun.

It's too cold in Chicago to test, but I would love to see if the MacBook Air can work while outside in direct hot sun - it's the only reason I'm considering the MBP.

> I would love to see if the MacBook Air can work while outside in direct hot sun

I'm not optimistic. An unused iPhone 7 will go into an overheating error state if left in direct sunlight on a British summer's day. I don't know how newer models cope.

The Daring Fireball review of the MBP had this to say about the fan ...

"The two machines are equivalently fast in a sprint, but the MacBook Pro will win a distance race. But Apple doesn’t call it a “fan”. They call it an “active cooling system”. That sounds like a marketing euphemism, but it’s not fair to call this a “fan”. It is something else altogether, and nothing at all like the cooling systems in any previous Mac laptop.

I’ve never once heard it in an entire week.

Never. Not once. Not a whisper.

I presume it has engaged at times when I’ve taxed the system. Again, the Cinebench multi-core CPU benchmark taxes every available CPU core for 10 minutes. But if the active cooling system has kicked in, I never heard it. I’ve never felt any air moving out of the vents, either. This is nothing at all like the fans on Intel-based MacBooks, which, if you’re not familiar, you can definitely hear, to say the least."

https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/the_m1_macs

Wouldn’t the air have the same problem? With no fan it’ll still heat up and have to throttle down.

If you're using the computer outdoors its best to get the MBP for the brighter screen.

One of the challenges of using a large-screen device in the sun is that most screen technologies (including transmissive LCD and OLED, but excluding eInk and transflective LCDs) are inherently "black" -- they absorb light energy that hits them. Even when they're displaying a white screen, they're absorbing nearly all of the light hitting them, and then emitting their own energy.

One of my mild annoyances with the iPhone 12 is that there's no white option. I have a white iPhone 10, and it's essential equipment for me as a convertible driver -- on a sufficiently sunny day, the phone will overheat on the center console screen-up, even when it's powered off! But with the white side up, it's fine even on sunny days breaking 110 degF.

The only way around this I could see for laptops and tablets in the sun would be a return to transflective displays or other non-black options... which would also be a huge boost to battery life in well-lit conditions. But none of these techs seem to have comparable image quality, and there are some inherent challenges (potentially addressable, but challenges) with color balance etc.

> One of my mild annoyances with the iPhone 12 is that there's no white option.

But there is a white iPhone 12? I have one myself. Or is not white enough/too matte or something?

Whoops! My mistake, thanks for that! I has been looking only at the Pro out of habit, but this might push me towards the non-Pro this generation.

If it helps, I'm perfectly contend with the non-pro iPhone 12.

The aluminum sides + white back look really great, too!

Or buy a white case?

Would the "Silver" Pro (white glass with a silver band) be that different?

> One of my mild annoyances with the iPhone 12 is that there's no white option.

There is for the iPhone 12 non pro and mini [0].

The pro comes in what looks like a fairly light silver.

Disclaimer: I haven't seen those in real life, I'm going by the apple store website.

[0] https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/4982/as-images.apple...

I have a white 12; it’s got a gold tint to the white that gives it a warm feel, but I’ve seen mixed reactions to it.

Order a silver one instead of a dark grey one, just to be safe? :)

It's too cold in Chicago to test

I used to have one of those massive 17" MacBooks (Best keyboard ever), and it used to heat up enough to turn my thighs red. Back then, Apple avoided calling them "laptops," perhaps for this reason.

Then I moved to Chicago, and found it was a wonderful machine for using outside on my balcony in cold weather because it would keep at least half of me toasty. If I started to get chilly, I'd fire up Virtual PC and snuggle in.

Have to stop reading this post. Too many real life case so close to heart but also funny.

Virtual PC. Man, how can this nit a real story!

My 2006 Mac Pro was very nice to use in winter for this exact reason

why would you want to work under direct sunlight? you can barely see the screen in that condition

I sit at my patio table and move twice during the day if I am out long enough. I face the sun, to tan, and my screen is away from it (behind it). When the sun is directly above I move under the shade.

It helps increase my mood, and productivity.

+1 - I love the MB12, but then a summer arrived and I found out that stays under 1 GHz basically all the time when I'm outside.

I'm pretty convinced my i9 mac does not have a fan either. A noise maker, yes... but the 2018 model just seems to have a loud audible indicator that docker started. :)

In the same way my car beeps to remind me I’ve left the lights on, my MacBook buzzes to remind me I’ve still got Microsoft Teams open.

There is something wrong with Teams. As well as it’s resource hogging, it tries to connect to all my SMB shares (even if they are disconnected) when I open the app. Why is it doing this?

Microsoft programs get home sick and want to see some familiar file share protocol?

That's Electron for ya. We decided that javascript was thew ay to write cross-OS UI's. God help us.

_Do you think God stays in heaven because He, too, lives in fear of what He’s created?_

> There is something wrong with Teams.

There’s a lot of things wrong with Teams.

When the news of apple silicon broke, apples shitty cooling of their recent laptops made sense. The CPU of my wife's MacBook air throttles several times a day without much heavy work.

I sincerely believe they botched it on purpose to be able to present increadible performance improvements compared to previous generations.

Apple silicon is amazing, of course. But the older machines were downright bad at cooling.

Original comment mentions MB Air, Air has no fans (now that sounds funny :)

Of all the things unveiled during the launch event no-fan thing completely blew me away. That, I was not prepared for!

I now wonder, does that mean that MB Air has no moving parts inside it at all?

Yes, like an iPhone or iPad.

And like the 2015-2019 MacBook.

I hope they do this form factor again with the new chips

I am thinking may be next year or the year after. The MacBook Pro will get new Design, at 16" and 14". ( I hope instead of going thinner they could stay within the current cooling TDP )

Then the MacBook Air will have a 14" as well, before a 12" MacBook Air is introduced at a lower price range, possibly at $799.

> a 12" MacBook Air is introduced at a lower price range, possibly at $799.

That would be great. But it could make more difficult to sell an iPadPro (starting at $799) with a MagicKeyboard (starting at $300) as an alternative to a laptop.

There’s the haptic feedback for the trackpad.

>I now wonder, does that mean that MB Air has no moving parts inside it at all?

In addition, does that mean that the Air has no air vents? Is it a completely sealed unit, like an iPhone?

Don’t dunk it in water like an iPhone. Unlike lightning, usb-c is likely energized and not sealed.

It's not a sealed unit.

It has a keyboard, not a big glass touchscreen. It is not sealed.

The keyboard is still a big mess of moving parts, but there is indeed one less moving part to break.

The electrons are moving millions of miles.

If your MBP fans are running all the time, you may want to open it up and see if it's filled with dust and lint.

The process table as well.

Oh I have, thanks. It's just that running my dev. environment plus Teams and all of the other "necessary" accoutrements ends up using a fair chunk of CPU.

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