Somehow? Maybe by spending years developing Apple Silicon and by spending even more years developing solid laptops with well-integrated hardware and software. You make it sound like this was surprising.
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Are there any decent fanless windows laptops?
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Everyone else in the computer industry is unable to do it!
Even almost 3 years after Apple Silicon.
Oh, I think they can. There's just very little reason to do so.
Macs are a tiny portion of the computing industry, so Macs aren't actually a big competitor to most Windows machines even though they're much better. Most businesses aren't ready for the switch to ARM. So Qualcomm (basically the only real chip maker with power) knows they don't need to innovate.
Once they do make something morneon par with Apple Silicon, they'll have to keep doing so. Why make a big upgrade when you could keep customers paying for a larger number of small upgrades? It's like Apple with RAM or storage. Costs of those have gone down a lot in the last 5 years yet they keep offering 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB storage as the base defaults on consumer machines. Not because they can't upgrade to more RAM and storage and keep their profits. But because choosing to do so would prevent them from earning as much. And once they do upgrade, they can't go back.
not too long ago, people got along fine with computers as big as a car or a house (ok, some might still sometimes be that large / without a smartphone / mobilephone and ... shudder... without the internet.
and fans are used out of a necessity, when current technology does not allow for enough performance without any additional cooling, and not because it's so awesome to have some noisy dust collectors inside each of our devices.
"home computing" actually started fan-less. only later on they decided that in order to proceed in computing power, it was necessary to add some active cooling.
that's ok of course, but nowadays, as Apple showed, even fan-less designs can offer more than what most people need.
there might always be people longing for more processing power, let them be happy with some "professional bricks"
but why stop there... why just a measly MacBook Pro, when a workstation tower could offer you even more processing power.... or a supercomputer with the size of a house? it is giving you the most performance currently possible after all!
or just be happy with pretty capable passively cooled devices that are more than just good enough for most things. this is the same kind of progress as some ultra hardcore system that's topping everything else before, just with the accompanying noise floor and power consumption of a factory
if you need to calculate the beginning of our universe, an MBA is not for you of course, though at one point in time, people were trying to calculate that on way less capable technology (maybe even no technology at all, other than just pen and paper)
I use Parallels 17 with my M2 MacBook Air running Ventura to run a basic 3D MMORPG. It runs for about 6-7 hours with 80% brightness, keyboard off, and low power mode activated. Without running Parallels and using it for work, web browsing, email, and with low power mode activated, I get about 10-12 hours.
Regarding comments about quiet fans that hardly run --
A few updates later you have the fan running all the time. I guess if it was fanless, then there would be significant throttling going on.
There have been rumors Microsoft is working on their own chip designs for PCs and servers. If that is the case, we may see fanless designs as part of that effort, probably as a first on Surface devices unless they sell their chip to other manufacturers (probably likely given that their goal is to sell as much Windows as possible).
A few updates later you have the fan running all the time. I guess if it was fanless, then there would be significant throttling going on.
There have been rumors Microsoft is working on their own chip designs for PCs and servers. If that is the case, we may see fanless designs as part of that effort, probably as a first on Surface devices unless they sell their chip to other manufacturers (probably likely given that their goal is to sell as much Windows as possible).
That’s only going to become more than a blip in the industry if Microsoft finally says “no more” to legacy x86 stuff. The emulation in WoA will cover 90%+ of users needs, but at some point archaic industry programs are going to have to move on, or MS will spin off a flavor of Windows that explicitly caters to Legacy use cases.
Not going to happen. Archaic industry programs are what runs a LOT of businesses these days, nor do we want to spend the money to change that. (No ROI)
I have a 2020 MacBook Air (M1, 8 Core GPU, 16GB RAM) and a 2018 iPad Pro 11inch 256 GB which I use as my daily drivers. The iPad Pro I have had since release but have found that for my use cases, I use it much less frequently than I do my MacBook Air so when I am looking to shed weight in the bag, its the iPad that gets left behind.
Recently, I have purchased two Lenovo devices. I wrote up my experience with one of them (a non-touch Thinkpad E14) in another thread here. The other device I bought was a Lenovo YOGA 7. This is a two in-one device with some fantastic specs:
Recently, I have purchased two Lenovo devices. I wrote up my experience with one of them (a non-touch Thinkpad E14) in another thread here. The other device I bought was a Lenovo YOGA 7. This is a two in-one device with some fantastic specs:
- All Aluminium construction, pale blue, very premium look and feel
- 6000 series AMD Ryzen 5 6600u, implemented on a 6nm process
- 16GB DDR5 RAM, 4 channels at 6400 MHz
- 512 GB NVME SSD
- 90Hz, 2.8k OLED display, 400 nits 100% PCI-D3 coverage and HDR
- Touch and Pen Support
- 1080p webcam with IR and Windows Hello support
- Fingerprint Sensor
- Wifi 6E
- Micro SD Card reader
- USB 4.0 / 40Gb/s and power delivery via USBC
- 1 x USB A port
- 1 x HDMI port
- Two in one design with screen folding all the way back and tablet mode support on Windows 11 Home
- Dolby Atmos certified speakers
- The design looks and feels premium, comparable to a MacBook Air. The CPU is incredibly fast, with (some) benchmarks exceeding the m1. Near all day battery life is also good.
- The tablet mode in Windows 11 has come a long way and is somewhat usable
- The keyboard, whilst good for a windows laptop, is not in the same class as an Apple keyboard. There is no flex to worry about, but it feels a little cramped and spongy. My typing speed and accuracy are both impacted by the keyboard. This particular model has a known issue with keyboard lag, which I have worked out how to work around for my use cases so that is not causing the degradation of typing speed or accuracy.
- The trackpad is plain awful. It doesn't fit the premium design at all, feels plastic and the clicking mechanism feels cheap.
- The webcam, while 1080p requires perfect lighting conditions otherwise the picture is grainy, washed out and containing weird flares
- The screen looks absolutely amazing from afar (think watching content like movies and tv shows) but suffers from a significant Screen Door Effect (SDE) when used for close-up work, especially on lighter backgrounds. This is apparently a common problem on OLED touch panels used in laptops. The screen door effect is very evident on word processing, powerpoint, and even through web browsing as many websites use lighter backgrounds without respecting any dark mode settings and makes the 2.8k display look low resolution
- The speakers sound muddy, with no highlights to speak of
- Charging, despite having fast charging support, always seems to charge slowly
- The keyboard, trackpad and screen without screen door effect make it easier to work more productively on documents, slides, browse web pages etc
- The screen on the Yoga looks absolutely superb when watching movies with great blacks, high contrast but that visual is matched to mediocre, muddy sound that makes it difficult to hear voices. The MacBook Air's screen is no slouch and the audio quality is very good
- For video conferences on Teams, Zoom, Google meet etc, the webcam on the MacBook Air wins as do the speakers/microphone
- I do very little content production, but the content I do produce involves taking screen recordings of business applications with audio. The MacBook Air I have plugged into a 4k monitor and happily records in full 4k just with the built-in QuickTime. On Windows, I hit limits when attempting more than the 2.8k and have to use external software like OBS Studio.
- In tablet mode, the Yoga has one benefit only - screen size - that 14 inch screen is very nice. However, its heavy and folding it into tablet mode means the speakers are firing away from you, making the muddy audio even worse.
- The screen on the iPad Pro, even the 2018 one, still looks very good and the speakers are great
- For video conferences on Teams, Zoom, Google meet etc, the front camera on the iPad Pro wins as do the speakers/microphone
- For me, for tablet use cases, I found myself gravitating towards the iPad for usability / better apps
Thanks for all that info, the Yoga 7 is one I was looking at, however I think I've convinced myself (and your info collaborates) that my existing MBA and the iPad are still the best solution!
I'm in the same boat. I love my iPad, and wish I could use it for my daily driver because of the portability, touch screen, and Apple Pencil. However, I can't run any of my pro apps on it which completely sucks so I then have to switch to my MBP.
Many may disagree, but I wish they would unify all the OSes so I could run my pro apps on my iPad, then dock it to a full keyboard, monitor and mouse and as long as we're dreaming, dock it with an eGPU and do some gaming. Until they do, the iPad seems like a casual, light-duty device.
I hate to admit it, but I've been considering exiting the Apple ecosystem. Apple makes good stuff, but they take forever to produce something. Like the OP, I'd like to downsize the amount of devices I switch between.
Also like a lot of you, I can't stand fan noise. it's beyond annoying and distracting when trying to be creative. It's the reason I went to a Mac in the first place.
Many may disagree, but I wish they would unify all the OSes so I could run my pro apps on my iPad, then dock it to a full keyboard, monitor and mouse and as long as we're dreaming, dock it with an eGPU and do some gaming. Until they do, the iPad seems like a casual, light-duty device.
I hate to admit it, but I've been considering exiting the Apple ecosystem. Apple makes good stuff, but they take forever to produce something. Like the OP, I'd like to downsize the amount of devices I switch between.
Also like a lot of you, I can't stand fan noise. it's beyond annoying and distracting when trying to be creative. It's the reason I went to a Mac in the first place.
That’s what I mean though, MS is “stuck” with dead weight at the end of the day. The x86 road will come to an end for consumers as OEMs will have to answer Apple Silicon in a few years as Apple pulls ahead in features people care about that simply cannot be replicated in x86.
I think we’re only a few years away from “that’s pretty good, for a PC” as the default opinion on battery life, let alone performance ON battery.
Nope, always hated cooling fans. Drove me crazy, still does. I tried to put up with them in the late 90s, but ended up on my desktop for better cooling. When I tried a G4 Powerbook in early 2000s which not only ran cool (prob cause they were slow AF), they also benefitted from a variable speed fan. From that time onward I became a Mac user. The silence was bliss.
Good luck with that. I think your only options out there worth any consideration are Apple Silicon MacBook Airs. Incidentally, I don't mind fan noise so long as it isn't obviously excessive for what I'm trying to do and for the hardware I'm trying to do it on. (Hearthstone on a 2019 MacBook Air shouldn't cause the fans to roar only netting me so little performance.)
That's a really good point about fan noise. Not all fan noises are created equal 😆
Although I own more than a few Macs (one of which is a MacBook Air 2020 M1), I also have an LG Gram 2022 model, which I use when I prefer running Windows in a native, non-virtualized environment and don't want to be bothered with Boot Camp. Even though it offers three different software-customizable fan settings, even the low setting results in moderate fan noise at semi-regular intervals, under what I would consider to be rather trivial loads (running a few MS Office programs, Thunderbird for e-mail, One Calendar for calendar usage and WokingHours for time tracking). I can't say that this fan noise is proportionate to the CPU load. The machine has 32 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD, so there shouldn't be any disk swapping involved with such a paltry processor load. I am using an external display (also LG) connected via HDMI, which could be contributing to the processor load, although I would think that the GPU would handle that for the most part. It just seems so odd to hear the fan running so much under these situations. Perhaps the Intel Alder Lake 12th gen. chip is just an underperformer for this configuration, or else the Gram doesn't have an effective cooling solution due to its light weight.
Whenever I go back to the MacBook Air M1, it just feels like a breath of fresh air to hear... nothing.
I don't even care much when performance is throttled on the M1 to help keep CPU temperatures cooler, if it is throttled at all. The absence of fan noise is just... wonderful.
I can handle some fan noise as long as it's not coming on and off repeatedly. A droning sound is almost tolerable. Around 2012 I temporarily re-joined the dark side and bought a Dell XPS 15". It was a good laptop, but each time I would launch Adobe Premiere, the CPU would max out and kick up the fan, even though I wasn't doing anything with the program. I'd have to go into the BIOS and disable turboboost to keep the laptop cool.
"Mrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"
I’m using an iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard as my daily driver… it has remote into my Mac mini at home if there’s something Mac-related that I just can’t live without, but of course there are tasks where it’s helpful to be at the Mac itself. Just depends on what tasks you need on the go, if that would work for you or not.
Hello I just had to register here in order to represent people who have positive experiences with fanless windows laptops.
They are not easy to find today, at least not cheap, but I bought a fanless laptop from Asus in like 2016-2017 that I am very happy with. It's an Asus UX360 with 900MHz Core M3-6Y30 (dual-core, 4MB cache, 2.2GHz with Turbo Boost).
Core M3-6Y30 is an ultra-low power 64-bit dual-core x86 microprocessor introduced by Intel in late 2015. This MPU operates at 900 MHz with a max turbo frequency of 2.2 GHz. This chip, which is manufactured on a 14 nm process, is based on the Skylake microarchitecture.
Now I don't use this for gaming, or anything very performance demanding, but in general use, it has never felt slow for me. Here's tasks that I do on it that feels perfectly smooth:
If you're not going to run anything particularly demanding then I definitely recommend the fanless intel CPUs, if you can find any.
They are not easy to find today, at least not cheap, but I bought a fanless laptop from Asus in like 2016-2017 that I am very happy with. It's an Asus UX360 with 900MHz Core M3-6Y30 (dual-core, 4MB cache, 2.2GHz with Turbo Boost).
Core M3-6Y30 is an ultra-low power 64-bit dual-core x86 microprocessor introduced by Intel in late 2015. This MPU operates at 900 MHz with a max turbo frequency of 2.2 GHz. This chip, which is manufactured on a 14 nm process, is based on the Skylake microarchitecture.
Now I don't use this for gaming, or anything very performance demanding, but in general use, it has never felt slow for me. Here's tasks that I do on it that feels perfectly smooth:
- Programming (having browsers up, spotify, discord, resource-consuming IDE's such as Jetbrains)
- 3D modelling with Blender (I have not used this much, just for tutorials etc, but it works fine)
- Played Stellaris on it quite a bit
- I even played Elder Scrolls Online on it, with extremely reduced graphics quality
- Fusion360, Krita, Inkscape, Lightburn
- General use, browsing, writing, consuming streams, etc.
If you're not going to run anything particularly demanding then I definitely recommend the fanless intel CPUs, if you can find any.
I have owned the surface pros previously and the fan never bothered me. Hell, my wife has slept right beside me while I was using it and it never once awoken her.
My Lenovo Yoga 7 doesn't buzz but the fans do spin up under even moderate loading.
Just discovered that the Thinkpad X13s has a fanless design.
Performance is worse than an MBA (I assume M1), but it is a lot lighter at 2.35lb.
Battery life is better than the MBA.
www.tomshardware.com
Performance is worse than an MBA (I assume M1), but it is a lot lighter at 2.35lb.
Battery life is better than the MBA.
Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Review: Quiet Travel Buddy
The first ThinkPad with Arm inside.
My wife's dell 11 3000 has this chip. I installed a 1tb SSD to replace the 512gb spinny drive and it made the system snappy and a pleasure to use for everyday computing.
What do you call worse? like 100 points lower on benchmark worse or waiting for crap to load worse?Just discovered that the Thinkpad X13s has a fanless design.
Performance is worse than an MBA (I assume M1), but it is a lot lighter at 2.35lb.
Battery life is better than the MBA.
Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Review: Quiet Travel Buddy
The first ThinkPad with Arm inside.