It was Surface that started the trend, then MacBook followed and became a feature.

By the way, “throttling” refers to CPU _slowing down_ despite cooling working at full capacity, so loud fans in itself isn’t one.

e: Another way to explain thermal throttling would be “thermal fading”, like brake fading on a car. Whether brake fading is considered a design fault or a feature that allow bursts of stronger brakes is semantic.

I think the Surface was late to the party, the original Macbook Air had huge problems when it launched in 2008.

https://www.theage.com.au/technology/apple-fans-burned-by-ho...

If we're doing analogies, let's do them right :) Therefore I'd argue it is more like supercharger overheating on a car. As a supercharger gets hotter from prolonged load it gets hot and warms the air entering the engine which reduces cold-air intake thus reducing horse power compared to a cooler supercharger. There is a way to solve this: by fitting a chargecooler - which is basically a cooling system for the supercharger.

Sorry, yes, I realise that’s what throttling is but wasn’t clear. I meant to say in the original comment the fans normally come on followed by throttling.

Gaming laptops are huge for a reason: they need to get rid of a lot of heat.

Thin and light is great for short bursts of activity, but, when you need sustainable heavy usage, you'll need a bigger computer, even if it's just to have a bigger heatsink.

My XPS15's GPU runs at 100C (on benchmark loads), even after I replaced the heat pads and cooling paste. It took me weeks to get used to the idea. I guess that's just the new normal. I don't find mine to be loud though.