That combination of decent performance (even while unplugged), battery life, and silence is hard to come by in x86 laptops, even in ultraportables built with efficiency-focused laptop CPUs where one would expect at least battery life and fan noise to not be issues.
Apple’s silicon helps here but I wonder if part of the problem isn’t x86 laptop manufacturers trying too hard to juice perf numbers at the cost of all else, as well as penny pinching on heatsink and fan.
Ever opened up the average laptop? They look like someone threw the list of component dimensions at a bin packing algorithm, let it run for a couple of minutes, then added some extra plastic struts to fill the dead space.
They are obviously doing a great job at what they set out to do but besides reparability and customization I don't think they are really ahead in anything compared to some premium Windows laptops.
> efficiency-focused laptop CPUs where one would expect at least battery life and fan noise to not be issues.
AMD laptops seem to be pretty decent at that. You can get something on par or even ahead of MBPs in battery life and performance and just a bit louder fans (IMHO the Air is till unbeatable if it works for your use case though)
Apple’s silicon helps here but I wonder if part of the problem isn’t x86 laptop manufacturers trying too hard to juice perf numbers at the cost of all else, as well as penny pinching on heatsink and fan.