It’s the reason I love my M1 air so much. No fan and barely any heat.
My company issued HP zbook for Software Engineers is very loud and pushes lots of heat out. I would love a quieter alternative for large Windows laptops.
I'm looking forward to using one of those. My mom's old Dell laptop died and she finally made the switch to the new MacBook Air. It seems fantastic.
I had the 2015 MacBook. It was an oddball model which afaik never got a refresh: it didn't have any active cooling, had a 12" screen, a single USB-C port and a headphone jack, and was the and the first version of the terrible butterfly keyboard (which had to get replaced three times over its life!). I got it through my company for half price after an executive had gotten it for travel but couldn't get adapters to reliably work for presentations. The main things I remember about it (other than the terrible keyboard) were that it was delightfully portable and quiet, and that I had to consider the weather when I was deciding what to do. I haven't lived in a place with air conditioning in years, and in the summers I'd sometimes have to stop my chronic multitasking and decide if I wanted to browse/run other programs, or stream videos. On the rare occasions I'd do some programming and needed to compile something, I'd open the laptop halfway and put it on its side with a fan pointed at the back. I also put it on an ice pack on more than one occasion. I've always been surprised that condensation didn't kill it.
The new Airs seems like they solidly solve all of my complaints with the 2015 MacBook, which means I might finally have found a computer which can make me as happy as my Fujitsu LifeBook P1510D did. My only quibble might be that it's still a smidge larger than what I'd like, but it's a minor quibble.
Yeah, reducing heat output and fan noise should be more of a goal for mainstream PC vendors. My ThinkPad X1 Nano is a lovely machine… super lightweight, tiny, solidly built, decent keyboard and screen, but it starts getting hot and spins up its fan with the slightest hint of work. I have to keep its CPU throttled by putting it in power saver mode to keep its fan off (most of the time), which brings major performance tradeoffs.
I have a work laptop with a 12850HX + 3080Ti and 128GB of ram for work - even if you remove all the cooling from it, all the components still take a huge amount of space inside. The 128GB CAMM module for ram alone is larger than the entire motherboard in macbooks. Also the cooling would need to be able to deal with ~200W of heat, even solid state cooling would be quite large for such an amount of heat.
that green module on the right is just ram. And Dell is trying to make this the future standard for ram modules in laptops. (ignore the dust on fans, I was in the middle of cleaning it).
As someone that can hear a lot of "ultrasonic" frequencies, I would not assume it would be quiet. Those ultrasonic occupancy sensors are TERRIBLE. Your "quiet" laptop might be worse since the sound would be continuous instead of loud bursts.
You are correct. LTT's coverage mentions that while it's not loud, it's a bit unpleasant due to high frequencies. Although things might get tweaked with case design probably. Regardless, I am super excited about this tech.
I really wonder about what the impact of having a lot of these devices in a house with animals which can hear higher frequency ranges would be. Most (all?) rodents, cats, and--to a lesser extent--dogs all hear well into the ultrasonic range. I don't know if this is the sort of ambient noise that they'd habituate to easily or if it would cause constant stress.
I still prefer the Apple approach: design a CPU so powerful and efficient, it can handle desktop workloads and larger and not need active cooling at all.
I was never into "PC Building", but had a friend who was and a few years ago they helped me build out a "Small form factor" PC, using this case: https://imgur.com/a/7xLBiC3
The case was designed to have two columns, and one side was dedicated to fitting a full sized graphics card. The other column was the rest of the computer.
The graphics card had its own fan system, but I also needed a fan glued to the CPU and then an extra one at the bottom to help spit out exhaust. The thing ran so hot, and the cords ended up just jammed into the case where they fit.
I had no experience with building PCs and was amazed I could fit a 2TB Hard drive in a tiny little stick on the motherboard, whereas X amount of years before, I would have had to install a spinning disk, much bigger. Such a huge leap forward.
The main reason I wanted this form factor was because the perceived elegance of it appealed to me. But it became clear to me through the process that "small form factor" for enthusiasts is usually more about the challenge of building in a tight space. The thing is super loud with the fans and runs super hot when using it for gaming, even with a 1080ti card.
That's one of the reasons Apple's progress with CPUs is so great to me. I don't want the entire industry to move to SoC style where everything is soldered to the motherboard, but the more efficient you can make the rest of the computer, the better cooling system you can design. Just like the M.2 form factor for SSDs was a huge leap. But even if you can't eliminate the need for active cooling, something like this would make things a lot better. I think you'd still have to design around where the exhaust blows out though.
I think it'd be better to have the ARM increase in efficiency and then maybe combine it with something like this for extra powerful models, the way graphics cards are sold with the fans attached.
Someday I'd like to be able to upgrade the build and optimize it. The dream would be to not have any fans, but some other form of active cooling, and for the machine to be basically silent, while packing a 3090+ tier graphics card.
Through overzealous cleaning I broke the fans on my Ryzen 4800HS laptop but with the right fan-control software even that TSMC 7nm CPU operated largely fanless(they only spooled up above 80°C, which was rare) until replacements came in the mail.
The M1 in the Air is throttled to roughly half the TDP of other devices with the same chip, so it's not like you're getting all the performance it can offer.
That being said Apple's design is somewhat faster than competition using the same lithography.
> The M1 in the Air is throttled to roughly half the TDP of other devices with the same chip, so it's not like you're getting all the performance it can offer.
Throttling only kicks in on the M1 Air when the CPU has been running full tilt for ~10m. Outside of that it performs identically the the regular M1 in a Mac Mini, iMac, or 13" MBP.
Even a lot of heavy users rarely keep the CPU pegged for that long. Most workloads are instead short and bursty. There's stuff like compiling Chromium that'll do it, but people who do that regularly should probably be looking at something like a 14" M1/M2 Pro MBP instead if portability is a priority.
But Apple's Mx chips can't handle desktop workloads without active cooling, and are demonstrably worse at workloads that are demanding enough to require active cooling.
It's funny because I actually had to buy app called "Macs fan control" just to get the M1 Pro's fans to spin up. While I also prefer quiet laptop, if I do some heavy tasks, I want it to actually spin up instead of making the case hot. The app is nice because if you pay, you can have quick presets for different fan behaviors and temperature curves. Other than that I usually SSH to a Ryzen workstation to run heavy workloads, but it's useful when that option is not available or not needed.
Why do we need thinner laptops? You can hardly work on any of the current models today, which their almost zero height keys. We need better keyboards and not thinner laptops.
Hard disagree. Shorter key travel is a matter of preference. I quite like the ultra-short-travel of my laptops even though I have half a dozen mechanical keyboards that I use on my desktops. It would be nice to have more options, but I'd take a thin and light over a chunky laptop any day.
I'd like if we got to the point where the computer was on the back of the monitor so it'd be easier to cool, and then the bottom would be dedicated to peripherals, including way better keyboards.
We're already there with tablets (Surface, iPad) with attached keyboards. Personally, I prefer the bulk and weight of the device to be on the table, not propped up, but some folks love this configuration.
The Surface Book 2 sort of did this, most of the computer was behind the screen, the base only had a keyboard, more batteries, and a GPU (which could be disabled so you could detach the screen).
It got really hot really fast if you did any graphics/video work on it, even more than regular laptops do.
If you can make the frame thinner under the keyboard area by moving some computing components around to areas that are normally housing cooling components, then you can have a longer travel distance for the keys. So, not necessarily a thinner laptop, but thinner where it would count.
You realise I was not making a point about fascism and mass murder but about dishonest ways to change people's minds – you got that, right? You understood, yes? I was talking about computer hardware not death camps, yes? You didn't carefully misunderstand the point I was making at all, did you?
i have mixed feelings about thin&light laptops... i thought i wouldn't mind a bit more weight, but after getting a 14" macbook pro for work i appreciated my personal x270 (and my old T440) so much more.
Interesting point from the Linus Tech Tips video: A lot of the thermal throttling in laptops is based on user comfort (don't burn the user) rather than CPU limits. He had a demo of a laptop CPU running faster and hotter with this system because the body of the laptop was the focus of the cooling.
I was actually thinking high-end tablet PCs (like the Asus ROG Flow Z13, Microsoft surface) where they have thermal constraints due to having both a medium-TDP CPU (and GPU) AND a large display to backlight.
The units have paper filters on them and they have said that the very high static pressure means that laptops designed around them could start using external filters without hampering the performance like they would on existing laptop cooling solutions.
The LTT video quoted something like a 5+ year service life for the filters. That could probably be extended with disassembly and cleaning or potentially by replacing the filters which seem to basically just be a sticker that goes on top of the unit.
“ We were told the vibrating membranes are made with techniques similar to those used for production of semiconductors and screens – hence the “solid state cooler” description.”
In other words, not at all solid-state. Some process they used to make a component reminds them of solid state manufacture techniques.
Would you call a quartz clock "not at all solid-state"? After all, it uses a piezoelectric material that vibrates to cause an effect.
I think that description would be technically correct while also being very misleading to the average person, and I think that's why we've seen the colloquial definition of "solid-state" expand to effectively mean "non-mechanical" in some domains.
No. Not at all. I would call it crystal resonator. Because it’s not solid state, there’s no semiconductor. I think you might be confusing that “it looks like a chip kinda”.
If you wanted a solid state clock source, that is a MEMS.
And further, no one calls, Crystal resonators “solid state” for marketing purposes, which is all that’s going on here.
I feel like we've reached the all too common HN cliche of having to address that words have multiple meanings and those meanings change over time. "solid-state" only means "semiconductors" because solid semiconductors replaced gaseous state devices.
If we operate by that definition these devices are very much solid so perhaps from context we can choose infer that they mean "non-mechanical" and not "made of semiconductors" rather than getting wrapped up in pedantry.
> And further, no one calls, Crystal resonators “solid state” for marketing purposes, which is all that’s going on here.
Yeah, a company is trying to communicate the benefits of their product using words that convey them i.e. HDD->SSD, fan->AirJet. We can shake our fists at the sky in righteous anger or we can acknowledge that there isn't really any harm to using the terms that evoke the right meaning for most people in a new context.
> I feel like we've reached the all too common HN cliche of having to address that words have multiple meanings and those meanings change over time
It's not even an HN-specific thing.
Arguing semantics is a time-honored method for derailing discussions. A sort of quasi-bikeshedding, except more often done in bad faith for creating a winnable meta-argument by someone who otherwise has nothing useful to say about (or was losing a debate of) the actual underlying subject.
[quote]Frore believes small is beautiful and hopes many more products will follow, selling the AirJet for tightly-packed devices in which passive heat management means lesser CPUs are deployed, or silicon is throttled back to avoid overheating.[/quote]
How about leaving the throttling on and making the device even cooler and quieter instead?
For motherboards you can typically set them in the BIOS, so no software needed there. For GPUs, IDK what exists outside of windows, but I'd expect there to be some kind of utility for it in the Linux world.
Fine tuning the fan curves in the BIOS is a pretty crummy experience requiring multiple reboots to test the system under load and play with the configuration. If there was a Linux compatible tool to tweak them on demand, I would love to know.
Struggling to see how this will not get clogged up in a week flat. Tiny membranes moving air through a narrow slit sounds like bad news for even moderately dusty houses. Hopefully I'm missing something there though because fanless would be ideal
From the LTT video linked elsewhere in these comments (timestamp 6:13), it has insanely high static pressure, which means you can install dust filters on the actual laptop intake, in addition to the AirJet itself having a dust filter, without sacrificing airflow. In addition, supposedly there's a reverse airflow mode that would allow it to blast dust out of the dust filters.
Frore is claiming that you could slap two AirJet Minis in a Steam Deck and that it'd cut down on the noise, lower the device skin temperature and free up enough space for a bigger battery that'd allow for 30% more game time.
I don't think they've actually built a prototype (the PDF and the website show off two separate designs) but it seems promising if these stop being as expensive as they are currently.
I saw this video[1] of them at CES and was wondering when people would actually be able to get their hands on one. Cool to see they'll actually be in a product soon.
Been seeing press releases, like this article, for this tech over awhile now. I'm now in a "start selling it or it didn't happen" phase of attention to it.
For thin and light design I am still much more on the phase-change material cooling side. But I hope they push forward to what they promise double the cooling efficiency in a few years time.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadMy company issued HP zbook for Software Engineers is very loud and pushes lots of heat out. I would love a quieter alternative for large Windows laptops.
I had the 2015 MacBook. It was an oddball model which afaik never got a refresh: it didn't have any active cooling, had a 12" screen, a single USB-C port and a headphone jack, and was the and the first version of the terrible butterfly keyboard (which had to get replaced three times over its life!). I got it through my company for half price after an executive had gotten it for travel but couldn't get adapters to reliably work for presentations. The main things I remember about it (other than the terrible keyboard) were that it was delightfully portable and quiet, and that I had to consider the weather when I was deciding what to do. I haven't lived in a place with air conditioning in years, and in the summers I'd sometimes have to stop my chronic multitasking and decide if I wanted to browse/run other programs, or stream videos. On the rare occasions I'd do some programming and needed to compile something, I'd open the laptop halfway and put it on its side with a fan pointed at the back. I also put it on an ice pack on more than one occasion. I've always been surprised that condensation didn't kill it.
The new Airs seems like they solidly solve all of my complaints with the 2015 MacBook, which means I might finally have found a computer which can make me as happy as my Fujitsu LifeBook P1510D did. My only quibble might be that it's still a smidge larger than what I'd like, but it's a minor quibble.
https://imgur.com/a/L24ATjp
that green module on the right is just ram. And Dell is trying to make this the future standard for ram modules in laptops. (ignore the dust on fans, I was in the middle of cleaning it).
The case was designed to have two columns, and one side was dedicated to fitting a full sized graphics card. The other column was the rest of the computer.
The graphics card had its own fan system, but I also needed a fan glued to the CPU and then an extra one at the bottom to help spit out exhaust. The thing ran so hot, and the cords ended up just jammed into the case where they fit.
I had no experience with building PCs and was amazed I could fit a 2TB Hard drive in a tiny little stick on the motherboard, whereas X amount of years before, I would have had to install a spinning disk, much bigger. Such a huge leap forward.
The main reason I wanted this form factor was because the perceived elegance of it appealed to me. But it became clear to me through the process that "small form factor" for enthusiasts is usually more about the challenge of building in a tight space. The thing is super loud with the fans and runs super hot when using it for gaming, even with a 1080ti card.
That's one of the reasons Apple's progress with CPUs is so great to me. I don't want the entire industry to move to SoC style where everything is soldered to the motherboard, but the more efficient you can make the rest of the computer, the better cooling system you can design. Just like the M.2 form factor for SSDs was a huge leap. But even if you can't eliminate the need for active cooling, something like this would make things a lot better. I think you'd still have to design around where the exhaust blows out though.
I think it'd be better to have the ARM increase in efficiency and then maybe combine it with something like this for extra powerful models, the way graphics cards are sold with the fans attached.
Someday I'd like to be able to upgrade the build and optimize it. The dream would be to not have any fans, but some other form of active cooling, and for the machine to be basically silent, while packing a 3090+ tier graphics card.
Through overzealous cleaning I broke the fans on my Ryzen 4800HS laptop but with the right fan-control software even that TSMC 7nm CPU operated largely fanless(they only spooled up above 80°C, which was rare) until replacements came in the mail.
The M1 in the Air is throttled to roughly half the TDP of other devices with the same chip, so it's not like you're getting all the performance it can offer.
That being said Apple's design is somewhat faster than competition using the same lithography.
Throttling only kicks in on the M1 Air when the CPU has been running full tilt for ~10m. Outside of that it performs identically the the regular M1 in a Mac Mini, iMac, or 13" MBP.
Even a lot of heavy users rarely keep the CPU pegged for that long. Most workloads are instead short and bursty. There's stuff like compiling Chromium that'll do it, but people who do that regularly should probably be looking at something like a 14" M1/M2 Pro MBP instead if portability is a priority.
It got really hot really fast if you did any graphics/video work on it, even more than regular laptops do.
I reckon you bought into it.
I think that analogizing persistent marketing propaganda to genocidal fascist propaganda is going a bit far.
Tell that to the millions of people who work on them daily without issue.
the macbook pro is crazy heavy.
Definitely a new one for me and an easy 'what? It works really well...'
Noise currently is worse than regular fans because it's higher pitched.
Tablet setups also can facilitate better keyboards and an eye-level screen, as shown by members in https://reddit.com/r/ergomobilecomputers
The LTT video quoted something like a 5+ year service life for the filters. That could probably be extended with disassembly and cleaning or potentially by replacing the filters which seem to basically just be a sticker that goes on top of the unit.
In other words, not at all solid-state. Some process they used to make a component reminds them of solid state manufacture techniques.
I think that description would be technically correct while also being very misleading to the average person, and I think that's why we've seen the colloquial definition of "solid-state" expand to effectively mean "non-mechanical" in some domains.
If you wanted a solid state clock source, that is a MEMS.
And further, no one calls, Crystal resonators “solid state” for marketing purposes, which is all that’s going on here.
If we operate by that definition these devices are very much solid so perhaps from context we can choose infer that they mean "non-mechanical" and not "made of semiconductors" rather than getting wrapped up in pedantry.
> And further, no one calls, Crystal resonators “solid state” for marketing purposes, which is all that’s going on here.
Yeah, a company is trying to communicate the benefits of their product using words that convey them i.e. HDD->SSD, fan->AirJet. We can shake our fists at the sky in righteous anger or we can acknowledge that there isn't really any harm to using the terms that evoke the right meaning for most people in a new context.
A crystal and this cooler - have moving parts. And don’t fit even a laissez-faire definition.
It's not even an HN-specific thing.
Arguing semantics is a time-honored method for derailing discussions. A sort of quasi-bikeshedding, except more often done in bad faith for creating a winnable meta-argument by someone who otherwise has nothing useful to say about (or was losing a debate of) the actual underlying subject.
How about leaving the throttling on and making the device even cooler and quieter instead?
https://www.froresystems.com/application/handheld-gaming
I don't think they've actually built a prototype (the PDF and the website show off two separate designs) but it seems promising if these stop being as expensive as they are currently.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGxTnGEAx3E