Fan vs Fanless

[kjd2234]

Hi,

I'm trying to understand the benefits and drawbacks of fanless macbook air vs fanned macbook pro. They seem similar otherwise.

Does this mean the air will run slower in heavy workloads, due to heating?

OTOH, I've had problems with fans running too much on macs before.

TIA

 

[dogslobber]

The MBA without a fan will be thermally throttled for sure. These things are Passively Aired (no pun) so if you can't get enough air circulating without a fan then you're gonna need to ratchet down the MHz.

 

[dolbinau]

The MBA without a fan will be thermally throttled for sure. These things are Passively Aired (no pun) so if you can't get enough air circulating without a fan then you're gonna need to ratchet down the MHz.

The key question for me though is 1. under what conditions would this happen today (I don't believe we can answer until people have tested both of the computers), and 2. in 5 years time when presumably the hardware demands are higher than now (hard to predict)

 

[dogslobber]

In general the mobile chips are good for a very short duration burst of GHz speed increase but the fans come on when you sustain any load. It's why laptops are pretty useless for CPU intensive activity as they generate too much heat. It's a bold move to toss the fan in the bin but Apple always pushes the envelope (no pun!) when it comes to thermals. We need to see real professional reviews of the new ARM Macs instead of the fanboy reviews which will flag wave and reprint Apple Marketing information. That generally needs somebody to buy one and put it through a set of benchmarks to measure chip behavior.

 

[leman]

Based on Apple slides yesterday and what we know about MacBook Air thermals, I would guess that the thermal dissipation limit for the MacBook Air in prolonged operation should be around 9-10 watts. For the MacBook Pro 13" it should be around 15 watts. Both laptops should be capable of generating comparable performance for short bursts.

What this means in practice is hard to guess. We need benchmarks. My estimation would be about 20-30% difference for demanding workloads.

 

[ssong]

FWIW though iPads don’t get anywhere near as hot as regular intel macs when playing 4K video so dunno if that’s an indication of thermal efficiency but I’m cautiously optimistic about the air.. I’m just very confused as to what this would mean to the iPad Pro line cos now it’s a veeery blurry line between an iPad Pro + keyboard and a M1 Mac

 

[KPOM]

FWIW though iPads don’t get anywhere near as hot as regular intel macs when playing 4K video so dunno if that’s an indication of thermal efficiency but I’m cautiously optimistic about the air.. I’m just very confused as to what this would mean to the iPad Pro line cos now it’s a veeery blurry line between an iPad Pro + keyboard and a M1 Mac

This may be Apple didn’t bring back the 12” MacBook. That said, Macs don’t have touch screens, so they won’t be as ideal for running iPad apps.

 

[Runs For Fun]

The MBA will certainly get throttled under a prolonged heavy workload but it will still be able to give great performance in shorter bursts. The Pro on the other hand will perform much better under a prolonged heavy workload due to having active cooling.

 

[MayaTlab]

A typical real-world example : as a photographer, I make use of the CPU/GPU intermittently. When applying a filter, loading an image, etc. I need the SoC to be super fast (ie excellent burst performance), but then it will idle until I change something else. That's typically the sort of application where putting an M1 in a fanless design still makes quite a bit of sense as it will be able to cool when it's idling between manipulating the files. In a certain way it's a "race to idling" sort of thing : the faster the SoC, the faster it can idle and cool down again. Apple's implementation probably allows for the SoC to overshoot the MBA's designed thermal envelope quite a bit in these situations to go back to idling quicker.
When doing video editing on the other hand, and particularly rendering, you need the performance to be sustained over a long period of time. The SoC can't rely on the downtime between activity to cool down and that's where a fan can help to raise the body's designed thermal envelope beyond what a fanless design could achieve.

 

[leman]

I’m just very confused as to what this would mean to the iPad Pro line cos now it’s a veeery blurry line between an iPad Pro + keyboard and a M1 Mac

Most likely iPad Pro with a keyboard is just like an Macbook Air with less RAM. But it won't run macOS. Unlike some others, I do not fear that it will make the iPad Pro irrelevant — it is still a tablet and it will continue to behave like a tablet.

 

[bluecoast]

It's going to be fascinating reading the benchmarks. As unless the baseline MBA is more powerful than we expect it to be (likely it is) then this is the default 'regular consumer/business user' computer.

It gets interesting though when you go to the next level of the Air i.e. the 8 & 8 version.

As unless you need insane amount of storage (which you might if you are a photographer) then the baseline MBP is probably better to get. At least that's the only usage case I can work out as to why you would need the 8 & 8 MBA.

 

[dugbug]

The key question for me though is 1. under what conditions would this happen today (I don't believe we can answer until people have tested both of the computers), and 2. in 5 years time when presumably the hardware demands are higher than now (hard to predict)

will have to wait and see. Comparing throttled M1 vs throttled-but-fanned previous gen. I can guarantee that a lot of reviewers (who supposedly have units now?) are going to do this very test.

 

[LonestarOne]

I’m just very confused as to what this would mean to the iPad Pro line cos now it’s a veeery blurry line between an iPad Pro + keyboard and a M1 Mac

I see myself running Sidecar on the MacBook Pro, using the iPad Pro as a graphics tablet to edit files in PhotoShop, etc. Text-based stuff like word-processing, etc. will probably migrate to the MacBook. I might stop carrying the Brydge keyboard, which is constantly attached to the iPad at present (which makes me a little sad, because it’s a great keyboard). Some iOS apps will work great on the MacBook. Others really need the touch interface, so I’ll only run them on the iPad.

There is something a bit kludgy about needing two devices to do this, though, and I look forward to Apple unifying them some day. Although, that will pose some problems for marketing messaging. (“Hey, you got your iPad in my MacBook!” “You got your MacBook in my iPad!”)

 

[ADGrant]

Based on Apple slides yesterday and what we know about MacBook Air thermals, I would guess that the thermal dissipation limit for the MacBook Air in prolonged operation should be around 9-10 watts. For the MacBook Pro 13" it should be around 15 watts. Both laptops should be capable of generating comparable performance for short bursts.

What this means in practice is hard to guess. We need benchmarks. My estimation would be about 20-30% difference for demanding workloads.

You don't have to guess. Apple said 10W for the Air in the presentation. The Pro is a bit more of a question but the current single fan 2 tb port chassis was engineered for a 15W TDP.

 

[Lucifer666]

Maybe it’s a good idea to look at theese fanless versions as big iPads, then you might have an idea of what to expect.

They should also outperform the iPad, at least a little, and the thermal situation should be somewhat better, as there’s more room (much more room) to apply things like heat-sinks, etc.

Just guessing, but it seem clear.

 

[kjd2234]

You don't have to guess. Apple said 10W for the Air in the presentation. The Pro is a bit more of a question but the current single fan 2 tb port chassis was engineered for a 15W TDP.

Which presentation are you referring to? The launch event or was there something else?

 

[Tech198]

The MBA without a fan will be thermally throttled for sure. These things are Passively Aired (no pun) so if you can't get enough air circulating without a fan then you're gonna need to ratchet down the MHz.

That's what i assumed. Fanless could never equal that performance with a fan, because the hotter it will get will have to slow down to dispatch heat, you would otherwise have external fan to draw that away.

This would be for instance when using Handbrake to encode videos, or Adobe Premier