"10 cores", "silent": you can only choose one.

No. It's "10 cores", "silent", "5mm thick": choose two. Personally I don't see the point in having a laptop thinner than 20mm. I would pay very good money for a 25mm thick, reasonably powerful laptop with super quiet cooling.

The Thinkpad T440s was dead quiet. It was the first generation of thinkpads with a 15W CPU instead of 35W. A current mobile CPU configured to 15W TDP would be powerful enough for basically any task that you would throw at a single computer. Instead of keeping things quiet, manufacturers focus on making laptops thin enough to replace a knife.

On current laptops, the noise level tends to follow the system load very closely. Just putting a bit more thermal mass into the cooling system would allow for a much more steady noise level, which is much less annoying (and the fan would not have to spin up at all on short load bursts like starting a VM).

> Instead of keeping things quiet, manufacturers focus on making laptops thin enough to replace a knife

They focus on what customers want. If they want 10 cores 5mm thick notebooks, they'll get it. It'll be noisy but who cares. It'll be used to like facebook posts anyways. Professions will buy stationary computers for the heavy lifting anyways.

T440 is an awesome machine although X1 is more popular, which is kind of slender version of t440.

> Professions will buy

I, a professional, have no say in what equipment I use in my profession — my employer does, and they do not allow outside equipment. (I get 1 MBP.)

I don't think this at all uncommon, either; I've only worked for one company so far that allowed personal machines, and that was only briefly while they were so small they weren't purchasing any equipment for the employees yet. (They rapidly outgrew that.)

You can add a centimeter or so of thickness and get perfectly adequate cooling for high power parts - look at all the gaming laptops for an example of this (if you can get past the godawful visual design).

This isn't a "laptops" issue, this is an "ultra thin" issue. Trouble is most people only want to buy ultra thin laptops and don't realize that that super powerful 8 core cpu isn't any faster than a much less expensive one when there isn't adequate cooling.

Laptops certainly can be designed for actual work. Its just macbooks are focused on being as thin as possible. If they put the current gen macbook in a 2012 macbook case they could make it run much much better since they could put a good cooler in it.

In theory, laptop manufacturers that use aluminum in their chassis could just put the CPU die right up against the chassis, Remove the bottom feet, and then tell you to only ever use it sitting on top of a table designed to function as a top-down heat pipe (i.e. the kind they use to make “scraped” frozen yoghurt.) The table would become the CPU’s direct-contact heatsink.

Not practical at all, of course, but this is well within the laws of physics. (And people do lesser things all the time, using e.g. those laptop “cooling stands” with clearance and fans built in.)

It would be practical to at least have some form of heat transfer to the case for passive cooling advantage, but this can have the downside of the end user getting burned/uncomfortable and saying, Why does my computer get so hot?

The recent metal-cased RTL-SDR's from rtl-sdr-blog have this "problem". The metal case actually helps the chip run cooler, but it gets hotter to the touch then the early insulating plastic models.

They are not that slim nor very beautiful, but gaming laptops can handle serious workloads for a long time. And many of them have a feature to stay silent with lower performances. They actually have a much better cooling system, but it's heavier and more expensive.

My MacBook Pro can (loudly) build LLVM just fine. The rest of the time it doesn’t make a peep and I make sure it stays that way.