So does it mean a passively cooled laptop like MacBook Air?, I mean the M2 performance are good but what makes it attractive are battery life and fanless yet capable laptop.
Edit: I rarely do much CPU limited workloads. More RAM heavy than anything else.
Even then, it's still quiet enough for the person next to me to barely notice.
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.
How much of that is the problem of the SW?
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.
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.
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
I can exert some influence in my choice of hardware.
That’s the entire and sole performance differentiator between the Air and the Pro.
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.
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.
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.
Semi-passive PSU is kinda table stakes nowadays.
The number of cases that will fit 200mms is tiny and none of them are particularly great which is a bummer.
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.
A fanless laptop has been a revelation for me. I am not going back ever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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1. By rated, I mean they have an "NRR" rating.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm 90% sure that most laptops do not include a fab :D (though maybe some are fabulous [sparkle sparkle glitter])
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.
Excited to see the competition though!
I got more in mind, but if your computing needs are checking your email and editing word files, it’s fine.
Depends what you do, and for many people you'd be wrong.
I've been using an 8GB M1 Air for a couple of years and never had an issue caused by memory constraints.
And that's with multiple instances of Rider and GoLand, VS Mac, VS Code, dozens of Brave tabs, multiple terminal sessions, locally-running Postgres, MS Word, Calibre, and more running simultaneously on a cold and silent machine. Also AI art generation using Stable Diffusion models, 768x768 rendering, and 4x upscaling, without issue. Plus running Parallels with Windows 11 and Visual Studio (ARM) was totally acceptable.
The only thing I haven't tried, and that I expect it would choke on, is multiple VMs or loads of containers.
It's amazing what you can do with 8GB RAM. I'd echo your original especially on macOS but to show the exact opposite, as my 16GB 10th Gen i5 Windows 11 machine lags with a much smaller workload whilst heating the house.
I just love imagining the Asahi Linux folks making a blood oath to reverse engineer these machines so that they may one day enjoy the peace and quiet of a laptop with no fan.
From the perspective of average joe: yeah I hear about performance every new device announcement can we do something about the shitty battery life and loud fans on non apple Machine my phone can do more with less power and noise. (For real though, I just want an M1 iPad Pro like device that runs Windows)
So yeah I guess yeah excluding battery life and cooling ,I don't really give a shit about Apple silicon TBH, and I think I'm not the only one.