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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

the necessity of forced cooling is still there

The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. I used an M1 Air for a while (switched to M1 Pro) and it would only throttle slightly during very long builds. There have also been many tests where the MacBook Pro M1 (which does have a fan), the fan only spins up after minutes of loading all cores.

The MacBook Air M1 shows that it is possible to have a fast [1], passively cooled laptop.

[1] Beat my 3700X in most Rust/C/C++ project builds.

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Thanks for this dose of reality for the previous poster. It always amazes me to what lengths some engineers can go explaining with extreme confidence all the reasons why they think a specific feature isn't possible, all the while being proven completely wrong by the real world.

I remember my first question on Quora was whether there was a way to sidestep the (then) 30MB size limit for installing apps on the iPad while on cellular. A guy with several 'signal engineer' tags explained that that would completely overwhelm the mobile network. I responded that the SIM card I was using was actually marketed to be used as your main internet for your home and came with a Wifi router for that purpose (which I also used sometimes, transferring the SIM). His only response was that I obviously lacked the mental capacity to apprehend how physically impossible this was (something I was using regularly mind you, for much larger downloads and data-intensive apps), and he reported my profile.

I could count the number of times my M1 (13") MBP's fans have kicked in over the last year on two hands, and in most cases when I investigate there's some rogue process running thrashing some of the cores (looking at you, Fusion360)

My experience with the Mac Mini M1 is the same. We bought a Mini for our daughter. I use it sometimes to benchmark stuff on the vanilla M1. I don't think the fan every spun up.

I can get the fans to spin up easily on my MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro), e.g. when building a large project like PyTorch. Luckily, the fans are not very loud. I can't hear it at the office (plenty of ambient noise), though I can hear it sometimes in our home office.

Passive cooling is one of the reasons I recommend people to get the M1 Air, unless they need 8 performance cores or > 16GB RAM. A completely quiet laptop is such a nice feature. I hope that they keep the Air passively cooled in the future.

Edit: >= corrected to >

>or >= 16GB RAM

My M1 Air has 16GB of RAM.

Sorry for the typo, of course I meant > 16GB. My wife's Air also has 16GB RAM :).

I’ve owned an M1 Pro for a month or so and I have yet to hear the fans spin up once. A Google Meet call on my old Intel MBP would have the fans operating at max.

Same. Even when I realize some process has been using 100% CPU for a while the fans still don’t turn on.

This used to be how I found runaway processes on my previous Intel based MBP.

I’ve maxed out my cpu for 1h recently and the fans are still very hard to hear. It’s a light purr if you put your ear against it.

> The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled.

Thanks for the correction

My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC.

Thanks to you my credit card is trying to tempt me to pull it out of my wallet. ;-)

My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC.

And the fan on the Intel Air was loud and the CPU performance not great :(. The Intel Air and the M1 Air are like night and day. Even though I have the 14" Pro now, IMO the MacBook Air M1 is the most revolutionary Mac of the past decade, if not more.

This - bought an Amber Lake-Y Core-i5 based MacBook Air (True Tone. 2019 - A1932) and returned it, as the fan noise was frequent and ridiculous. (I've heard that the Ice Lake-based sucessor was worse.)

Used an MBA M1 for a year before switching to a MBP 14" M1 Pro. The MBA is the best laptop I‘ve ever had. Fanless, light, insane battery life, always cool and blazingly fast. No noticeable difference between the M1 (8/7 16GB) vs. M1 Pro (10/14 32GB) in daily use, although I don’t usually depend on long running processes going full throttle.

I believe the entry-level MBA is the best laptop you can buy when it comes to price-performance ratio.

Fanless, light, insane battery life, always cool and blazingly fast. No noticeable difference between the M1 (8/7 16GB) vs. M1 Pro (10/14 32GB) in daily use

Indeed. I only got the M1 Pro because I often do larger builds and two AMX (matrix multiplication) units is nice for some machine learning tasks. Other than that, I liked the Air more.

I hope that they carry over some features of the Pro to the next generation Air, in particular MagSafe, supporting more than one external 4k/5k display, and perhaps >16GB, and it would be so perfect.

If anything the M1 MBA is too cool, it freezes my lap off. Intel’s done a heroic job of maximizing performance on x86 but you’ve got to pay the price for the inefficiency of its legacy CISC architecture and power efficiency and thermals is it.

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