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I think most of it is the clue in the name .... laptop. If we move for a minute beyond the direct "hard" technical constraints which have already been expresse

I think most of it is the clue in the name .... laptop. If we move for a minute beyond the direct "hard" technical constraints which have already been expressed here (i.e. small chassis, lots of chips etc.). You have a second aspect, the old PBCAK (Problem Between Chair And Keyboard) one. Users will use their laptops in less than optimal (from a thermal perspective) ways. They will use it on their laps. They will use it in bed, resting on duvets. They will use it on pool-side sun loungers with the mid-summer sun blasting down. Yes you can tell them in the manual that they shouldn't, but they still will. So even if you can magically cool the chips passively, the possible use-cases of the product might ultimately constrain your ability to forgo a fan entirely. I note that some people here are seeking to blame the "race to thin" for the requirement for fans. To them I would merely point them at the Panasonic Toughbook. Modern laptop but built like an old-shool 90's brick ... it still has a fan.[1] Apple have done a stunning job with the M1 (and previously with the i5/i7). But even with the unibody chassis of a MacBook (i.e. the whole device is a massive heatsink) the necessity of forced cooling is still there (edit to add: with the exception of the MacBook Air M1 ... thanks for the correction guys !) . But with the non-Air M1s you really have to work super hard to make the fans ramp up at all, they've done a stunning job. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgWZwP28trI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgWZwP28trI

glandium 5y ago
You can do surprising lots with the M1 macbook air (including building Firefox faster than many intel-based laptops), and it doesn't even have openings for airflow.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
microtonal 5y ago
the necessity of forced cooling is still there The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. I used an M1 Air for a while (switched to M1 Pro) and it would only throttle slightly during very long builds. There have also been many tests where the MacBook Pro M1 (which does have a fan), the fan only spins up after minutes of loading all cores. The MacBook Air M1 shows that it is possible to have a fast [1], passively cooled laptop. [1] Beat my 3700X in most Rust/C/C++ project builds.
- CiaranMcNulty 5y ago
  I could count the number of times my M1 (13") MBP's fans have kicked in over the last year on two hands, and in most cases when I investigate there's some rogue process running thrashing some of the cores (looking at you, Fusion360)
  - microtonal 5y ago
    My experience with the Mac Mini M1 is the same. We bought a Mini for our daughter. I use it sometimes to benchmark stuff on the vanilla M1. I don't think the fan every spun up. I can get the fans to spin up easily on my MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro), e.g. when building a large project like PyTorch. Luckily, the fans are not very loud. I can't hear it at the office (plenty of ambient noise), though I can hear it sometimes in our home office. Passive cooling is one of the reasons I recommend people to get the M1 Air, unless they need 8 performance cores or > 16GB RAM. A completely quiet laptop is such a nice feature. I hope that they keep the Air passively cooled in the future. Edit: >= corrected to >
    - aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
      >or >= 16GB RAM My M1 Air has 16GB of RAM.
      - microtonal 5y ago
        Sorry for the typo, of course I meant > 16GB. My wife's Air also has 16GB RAM :).
- traceroute66 5y ago
  > The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. Thanks for the correction My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC. Thanks to you my credit card is trying to tempt me to pull it out of my wallet. ;-)
  - microtonal 5y ago
Gorgo 5y ago
The base of the laptop is the part of the machine being put on the lap/blanket/pillow/duvet while the lid sticks up in the air. A solution would be to put either the radiator (hard) or heat-producing hardware (easier) in the lid (with some insulation between the hot parts and the screen), making it a bit thicker and with that more stable. This also keeps the heat away from the battery which should make it last longer.
- replygirl 5y ago
  oh no, it keeps falling over!
  - Gorgo 5y ago
    Aluminium and magnesium are quite light so that should not be a problem - especially not if the space previously taken up by those hot parts is filled by using a larger battery. The think may weigh 2kg instead of 1.5kg and it may be a few mm thicker. It also should have fewer problems in getting rid of heat (which translates to better performance) and the autonomy should be significantly increased due to that larger battery. I'd choose increased autonomy and performance over a lighter and thinner laptop any time.
    - Gorgo 5y ago
Redoubts 5y ago
Meh, the older 12” MacBook (not pro, not air) was also fanless. I miss that 2 lbs design quite a bit.
- fmajid 5y ago
  And it had abysmal performance, unusable for any development task.
  - Redoubts 5y ago
    I developed on it just fine, and that’s certainly not the only task a laptop is useful for.
    - fmajid 5y ago
      This is *Hacker* News. I had a Docker build that would take 4 hours on mine when it completed in under 15 minutes on my Mac Mini.
      - musicale 5y ago
        > Docker Many people use/need Docker, but of course it requires a Linux kernel (often running in a hypervisor if you're running macOS.) VMs can easily eat up a lot of resources, especially memory. Alternately a VM without enough memory will also perform abysmally. I've also heard complaints about poor performance (vs. native Linux or even WSL on x86 hardware) of x86 Docker images running in emulation on an M1 MacBook Air.
        fmajid 5y ago
        Those docker images were not light, and the max 8GB RAM on the MacBook didn't help, but emulation was not the problem, this was x64 on x64. It's just the Intel m CPUs are just slow, here's the MacBook compared to my Mac Mini: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/12140024?baseline=1880315 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/12140024?baseli... and here versus the 2013 MacBook Pro that I normally used instead for development: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/1965771?baseline=1880315 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/1965771?baselin... You should run arm64 images on your M1 Mac, in fact at my company we are shifting all the workloads we can to Graviton2 on AWS because of the substantial cost savings, but yes, porting is not a completely trivial exercise and migrating our development environment over to Docker on M1 is still work in progress, and in the meantime we have scrounged up all the Intel MacBook Pros in the company and reserved them for developers.

glandium 5y ago

You can do surprising lots with the M1 macbook air (including building Firefox faster than many intel-based laptops), and it doesn't even have openings for airflow.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

microtonal 5y ago

the necessity of forced cooling is still there The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. I used an M1 Air for a while (switched to M1 Pro) and it would only throttle slightly during very long builds. There have also been many tests where the MacBook Pro M1 (which does have a fan), the fan only spins up after minutes of loading all cores. The MacBook Air M1 shows that it is possible to have a fast [1], passively cooled laptop. [1] Beat my 3700X in most Rust/C/C++ project builds.

CiaranMcNulty 5y ago
I could count the number of times my M1 (13") MBP's fans have kicked in over the last year on two hands, and in most cases when I investigate there's some rogue process running thrashing some of the cores (looking at you, Fusion360)
- microtonal 5y ago
  My experience with the Mac Mini M1 is the same. We bought a Mini for our daughter. I use it sometimes to benchmark stuff on the vanilla M1. I don't think the fan every spun up. I can get the fans to spin up easily on my MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro), e.g. when building a large project like PyTorch. Luckily, the fans are not very loud. I can't hear it at the office (plenty of ambient noise), though I can hear it sometimes in our home office. Passive cooling is one of the reasons I recommend people to get the M1 Air, unless they need 8 performance cores or > 16GB RAM. A completely quiet laptop is such a nice feature. I hope that they keep the Air passively cooled in the future. Edit: >= corrected to >
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
    >or >= 16GB RAM My M1 Air has 16GB of RAM.
    - microtonal 5y ago
      Sorry for the typo, of course I meant > 16GB. My wife's Air also has 16GB RAM :).
traceroute66 5y ago
> The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. Thanks for the correction My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC. Thanks to you my credit card is trying to tempt me to pull it out of my wallet. ;-)
- microtonal 5y ago

Gorgo 5y ago

The base of the laptop is the part of the machine being put on the lap/blanket/pillow/duvet while the lid sticks up in the air. A solution would be to put either the radiator (hard) or heat-producing hardware (easier) in the lid (with some insulation between the hot parts and the screen), making it a bit thicker and with that more stable. This also keeps the heat away from the battery which should make it last longer.

replygirl 5y ago
oh no, it keeps falling over!
- Gorgo 5y ago
  Aluminium and magnesium are quite light so that should not be a problem - especially not if the space previously taken up by those hot parts is filled by using a larger battery. The think may weigh 2kg instead of 1.5kg and it may be a few mm thicker. It also should have fewer problems in getting rid of heat (which translates to better performance) and the autonomy should be significantly increased due to that larger battery. I'd choose increased autonomy and performance over a lighter and thinner laptop any time.
  - Gorgo 5y ago

Redoubts 5y ago

Meh, the older 12” MacBook (not pro, not air) was also fanless. I miss that 2 lbs design quite a bit.

fmajid 5y ago
And it had abysmal performance, unusable for any development task.
- Redoubts 5y ago
  I developed on it just fine, and that’s certainly not the only task a laptop is useful for.
  - fmajid 5y ago
    This is *Hacker* News. I had a Docker build that would take 4 hours on mine when it completed in under 15 minutes on my Mac Mini.
    - musicale 5y ago
      > Docker Many people use/need Docker, but of course it requires a Linux kernel (often running in a hypervisor if you're running macOS.) VMs can easily eat up a lot of resources, especially memory. Alternately a VM without enough memory will also perform abysmally. I've also heard complaints about poor performance (vs. native Linux or even WSL on x86 hardware) of x86 Docker images running in emulation on an M1 MacBook Air.
      - fmajid 5y ago
        Those docker images were not light, and the max 8GB RAM on the MacBook didn't help, but emulation was not the problem, this was x64 on x64. It's just the Intel m CPUs are just slow, here's the MacBook compared to my Mac Mini: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/12140024?baseline=1880315 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/12140024?baseli... and here versus the 2013 MacBook Pro that I normally used instead for development: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/1965771?baseline=1880315 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/1965771?baselin... You should run arm64 images on your M1 Mac, in fact at my company we are shifting all the workloads we can to Graviton2 on AWS because of the substantial cost savings, but yes, porting is not a completely trivial exercise and migrating our development environment over to Docker on M1 is still work in progress, and in the meantime we have scrounged up all the Intel MacBook Pros in the company and reserved them for developers.