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Comment by 2III7 | Hacker News Reader

- thermal throttling under sustained heavy load, though apparently there is the possibility to add thermal pads to get rid of throttling, probably at the expense of comfort

- no Linux support

Otherwise I agree, it is a wonderful machine. I'd replace my crappy thinkpad if I could.

My 2014 Air is still going strong for light web browsing and terminal use.

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> thermal throttling under sustained heavy load

This gets mentioned a lot, but I do quite a bit of dev work on my M4 MBA and have never even felt it get warm. Sustained heavy loads are extremely rare with how quick this thing is.

And the fact that there is no annoying fan noise ever is just priceless.

With the way most consumer laptops have their fan curves set, you open a new web page and get an annoying ramp up. It is not just a hardware thing, but mostly a self inflicted wound of having a fan curve that is way too aggressive.

If it's not aggressive then quickly laptop will be too hot to touch. For instance, I did tune the fan on my friend's laptop so that it wouldn't be waking up everyone for light browsing, but then it was getting uncomfortably hot. None of such issues on Macs.

Even if it had fans. If they are like the Pro, you won’t hear them. I did extraction with LLMs for a long time to the point where they came on and I had to get my ear close to them to confirm they were on

How long are your compile times?

I wouldn't call my personal project "heavy load", but I have a cross-platform C++ project that I am developing on both a Windows gaming PC and a 2020 M1 macbook air.

I use clang to compile on both machines. The M1 mac has noticeably faster compile times.

Fairly short, I'm a Go developer generally working with terraform and microservices. I'd expect some throttling if you're doing 3+ minute compiles, I think. But I think the problem is overblown by the tech video reviewer population that regularly does extremely intensive workloads.

> for the general consumer

linux does not apply here. General consumer doesn’t even know what linux is.

Are the think pads at $1000 crappy?

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