It does make the name kinda ironic, since the batteries will make the tram heavier then a normal one that's powered by overhead wires, so its not 'very light'
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.
Maybe fanless is important for people who don't use the laptop for work, but as someone who mainly works with computers and not much leisure, I don't care if it's fanless or not, as long as it doesn't throttle just because something compiles for 3 minutes instead of 20 seconds and uses all the cores to the max. Usually, passively cooled laptops are really poor at that, compared to ones that have active cooling.
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.
I've really gotten a lot of milage out of wearing earplugs on a regular basis. It is a bit of an unusual practice, but I really like the quiet. Might be an alternative solution to your problem.
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.
> Sometimes I wear my over ear headphones with nothing playing just to dull it.
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.
I've had two MacBook Pros die in the Amazon rainforest due to humidity. I think the fans pull in humid air and that the water gets stuck. My brother has had an M1 Air for about 2.5 years in the jungle with no issues whatsoever. Also since there is no power grid, it's good to have more battery life (sometimes it rains for days).
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...
Yeah I have read such also, and indeed also for me it is not ideal to wear for long time, but it is still definitely significantly better than having to be listening to a laptop fan or similar. Listening to music with it I feel is better than just using it for noise cancelling, but I cannot be certain it makes a difference. Otherwise, if I do not have such mechanical noises around, I disable noise cancelling.
I'm conflicted on this one. I have really good Sony ones, and whenever I wear them for even 30 minutes, when I take them off I feel worse.
I don't know if it's all in my head and they objectively don't make it worse, however I also now avoid wearing them.
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.
The MacBook Air and Pro have the same performance for just over 7 minutes of full power usage / compiling, FWIW. At that point the Air throttles and the Pro never never throttles.
That’s the entire and sole performance differentiator between the Air and the Pro.
I've got an old USB laptop "cooler" which is basically a laptop stand with some integrated fans. If I'm doing something intensive on my MBA it will keep it from throttling for a little while longer than the passive cooling.
Don’t let hardware makers off the hook for bad cooling system design. Or Intel off the hook for pumping more and more power into their processors to compete with AMD.
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.
Huh. Most corporate windows machines are loaded with crap. The very same hardware behaves much much better with any modern Linux.
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
Not your fault obviously, but I meant it matters in the sense that part of the problem also lies with the companies and industry as a whole shipping highly inefficient SW and having the solution be "just buy a new MacBook with Mx chip to run a videochat app bro!!11"
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.
I use macbook air for work, and I am totally satisfied with it. For heavy stuff I use cloud or desktop computer anyway, having fans working max for hours it was a torture anyway in my older laptop, and portability is quite important for me for work. Yeah a 12c macbook pro max would be more ideal for heavy loads, but if we compare with an i5/ryzen 5 (or even i7/ryzen 7 probably) I would go with the macbook air.
You probably don't realise how fans can be a massive drag on productivity.
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.
As someone that works in an open floor plan I _hate_ when my coworkers laptops sound like jet planes because the fans are going full blast. It’s so distracting.
I'm at least happy your career seems to have been limited to indoors office work, much of the professional industry is very difference when it comes to noise. Doesn't mean you're not right, but I wish didn't have experience spending 7 hours / day next to very loud construction and cleaning machines, as it kind of shrews my perspective compared to my current peers it seems.
A fanless-first design would mean I am not subject to the continual whine of whatever teeny high RPM fans that come standard. As someone stuck on corporate Windows machines, I have 24/7 fan noise from the combination of work-spyware + Teams + Onedrive continually indexing and stomping over each other.
Edit: I rarely do much CPU limited workloads. More RAM heavy than anything else.
Pretty much the only time I hear the M1 fans are when I'm doing something with tensorflow-metal, ffmpeg'ing or rendering video, or otherwise deliberately thrashing the CPU. e.g. Minecraft (albeit modded with Sodium et al) makes it noticeably warm but no fans.
I’ve had an M1 mini for a year now. I think it has a fan, but I’ve literally never heard it, even though it sits right in front of me. Even when using all cores to do video encoding.
The Mac Studio actually has a low RPM always-on fan. It's quiet enough that it can get away with that, and not turning it on and off avoids the noticeable transitions in volume. Under very heavy load the fan speeds up slightly.
I don't necessarily want fanless, but the system being inaudible under moderate load and not a banshee at high load is important. With proper engineering this is possible without too much of a performance hit but a lot of laptop manufacturers either don't put in the time to tune their offerings for this or do what Apple used to and chase thin-at-all-costs even in workstation machines (e.g. Dell Precision laptops being downgraded to close relatives of the XPS line).
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 got a beefy Ryzen 3000 personal desktop in 2020 when my 2014 laptop started giving in (noisy even with new thermal paste, lid broken).
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.
The size of the fans makes a huge difference, way more than you'd think.
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.
The 180mm Fractal fans are ... not very good. They're the best 180mm fans (there is not much choice, just Silverstone and some cheap stuff), but pretty shitty compared to the available 120/140mm choices or the 200mm Noctuas (which will not fit cases designed for 180mm fans).
Nice catch, I hadn’t noticed that Torrents came with 180mms instead of 200mms. Even if they’re not amazing they keep my friend’s temps reasonable without making much noise.
The number of cases that will fit 200mms is tiny and none of them are particularly great which is a bummer.
It depends on the work. A lot of people just do web development where either they are fiddling around with APIs or interacting with some VM over SSH or are just creating presentations and reports. Even if you are working with a massive codebase, there are tools to just selectively run the tests that are relevant to the changes you made before pushing it all off to a CI/CD pipeline.
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.
I'm not sure what the point here is, if you want an actively cooled laptop, just buy that. Just because you personally need something different it doesn't mean that feature isn't important to other people.
> I'm not sure what the point here is, if you want an actively cooled laptop, just buy that. Just because you personally need something different it doesn't mean that feature isn't important to other people.
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.
>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
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.
The person that you're responding to is essentially expressing this exact same sentiment to the person above them?
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?
Fabless is nice, and the air can do a good job, but the real kicker is the non-airs also just generally don’t make the fans kick in - even building massive amounts of code doesn’t seem to do it. As per usual the real “I need a fan” killer is the GPU, which is to me the least compelling bit (because I’m not super interested in gaming on laptops in general)
I use it professionally and hate the fan, but in experience the MacBook Air M1 holds up well to sustained (Rust) compilations. None of the infuriating bursting behavior of old Intel chips.
> If you think 8gb of ram is enough, which it isn't, especially on macOS.
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.
So in the context of an article about this AMD chip, you instantly downgrade M2 to merely "good" while extolling the virtues of the cooling and battery life?
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.
Well from the perspective of an engineer: I get and respect all the hard work that went to making the the M2 and generally ARM revolution that Apple had unleashed.
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.
Older Gen Z and developer here, I don't think there was something to GeoCities or MySpace growing up, but I came up with other things that personally got me and my friends a bit into development:
Maybe the most popular was developing our own Discord bots, that got me first to backend with Python and JS (I think I even learned JS before HTML and CSS...).
Growing up we mostly learned programming in school (mostly C#, yet some friends of mine learned Mobile development in Java with Firebase in high school) it was homework mostly, nothing really came out of it.
I can say that gaming got us to learn a bit of networking, trying to host our own Minecraft and Maple Story servers cause we didn't have money to rent them.
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