Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

> Nothing has competed with Apple laptops since the M1 dropped.

That's not remotely true.

It might be exaggerated, and the Apple Silicon MacBooks still fall behind as soon as gaming or other GPU-centered tasks come up.

But having a super thin laptop that does 4K Video editing and has an really good battery life doing it, is amazing.

What they can do with 30W from the wall is simply amazing. Not even talking about the Pro/Max Chips that can decode and encode several ProRes Streams at once.

But again, some people don't just edit hi res video.

Give me at least one example of a fanless laptop with performance, weight and battery life of M1 Air, I’ll wait (probably forever, because I haven’t found one).

It isn't hard to create an arbitrary set of constraints to single out a single laptop. Just because some laptop has a fan, which is often a complete non-issue in non-Apple laptops (Apple's laptop fans in the models that have them are some of the loudest I've experienced), doesn't mean that it doesn't compete and that there aren't tradeffs. For example, Apple laptops are extremely uncomfortable on your actual laptop due to how hot they get.

How is that not a problem when it is?

I want completely silent laptop that doesn’t get dust inside of it.

It's a tradeoff, not a problem. My XPS has fans and is silent except when doing something very intensive, like gaming, which macOS is terrible at if a game is even available for it. If the XPS gets dusty, which it hasn't so far, then I can easily clean it by removing the back panel since the XPS is made to be repaired and even upgraded. So if you truly want a fanless laptop, then it looks like the Air is the main contender, but then you have to use macOS and the other downsides of a Macbook. Microsoft makes fanless laptops, but those are the Surface Pros, with their own set of tradeoffs. The Surface Laptops do have fans. For me personally, whether a laptop has a fan or not is pretty immaterial. So like I said, it's a collection of tradeoffs and personal preferences.

And please note the original quote that I responded to. They referenced all Apple laptops with the M1 and later chips.

Lack of evidence is duly noted

The number of other laptops with similar battery life is very small. I’ve looked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com