It would be nice for consoles and other living room electronics. My PS5 fans are annoyingly loud.
The downvoting anything critical of Apple is getting ludicrous. Maybe you believe they are a benevolent user-loving company who always does what's best for their users regardless of how it affects their business, but viewpoints who don't share that position aren't automatically wrong because they have a different opinion than you. Skeptical people are what built the hacker community. If you don't want to embrace that spirit, at least don't try to silence it.
Edit: And yes, whether Apple would want this or not is very relevant, because if you read the article, they do not sell to consumers. The only customer for this would be Apple, and having Apple buy their product and put it in macbooks is the strategy they are pursuing.
2) it's not critical of Apple
To quote Doc Brown, "you're not thinking fouth-dimensionally!" It was when I posted the original comment.
This is unintentionally funny, because the law of fans is that the smaller they are, the louder they have to be to achieve the same cooling.
Air moved is a function of blade size and speed (and shape and count and more, all applying to big and small fans ~alike) — and those two are indirectly proportionate. The smaller the blade, the faster you have to spin it. The faster you spin, the more turbulence you make, the more sound you get.
Biggest hack for silent active PC cooling is to use upsized fans spinning slower (see Notcua).
The PS5 is fairly loud, but the noise is quite directional - it's much louder from the rear than the front. By keeping all of the vents on the front and rear of the console, it can work effectively inside a TV cabinet or media center that would suffocate an Xbox. It's not the set of tradeoffs I would have preferred, but it isn't a thoughtless design.