Indeed, the fanless design makes no sense. My 13" M2 MacBook Air thermal throttles a lot, it's not even funny. The only reason I got the M2 MacBook Air over the M2 MacBook Pro, was because the MacBook Air had a redesign but the 13" MacBook Pro was still on the old design.
But nowadays, the 13" MBP has been "redesigned" as the entry 14" MBP. I didn't have this choice back then.
- Allergic to 6-15% throttling? → Apple made an M2 MacBook Pro for you
- Need to time-compress huge computational tasks? → Apple made an M2 Pro/Max MacBook Pro for you.
And people who complain about fan noise, my 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro is just as quite as my M2 MacBook Air. In cases where the M2 MacBook Air would thermal throttle, only then the fans of the 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro might kick in.
- Fans on M3 Max MBP do spin up louder—or the fan curve is different—than the M1 Max MBP.
- 16-inch MacBook Pro has huge internal heatsink and two huge fans in comparison to the little space available inside a 13-inch MacBook Air, for instance.
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