When I replaced all my spinning disks with SSDs and fans with ultra quiet ones I realized just how much I relied on fan noise to signal things. E.g. if my computer isn’t visibly on, the fan/disk noise tells me whether I need to power it on or just wake it. I’ve had to start changing my habits as a result.

And it dates back from 1988 for me. I’d always rely on the nice scratching sound of the HDD and the LED to know whether my computer had crashed or was just loading. There was no need for a spinning wheel when you could hear the data getting loaded ;)

I could tell what boot phase my 386 + 486 desktops were at by listening to the ticking of the HDD heads. When I installed Win95 on the 486 (the poor thing), the time until the o/s was finished with the drive quadrupled.

At the same time, we are losing disk access LED.

... and then you get an electric car, and the only time you have any auditory feedback is when it's very hot out and you supercharge.

I like it if the laptop only starts the fan up when the device actually is working. Not constantly turning it on and off during like light web browsing.

My 2018 MBP 13” and the Surface Laptop I’ve tried did that well. An XPS 15 I’m currently using does not.

Web browsing isn't a light activity anymore. Web pages consume more memory and more CPU than my text editor

Has there been a time in history where web browsing was lighter than text editing, ever?

No, but there is now, "thanks" to Electron :P

More specifically, HN would use less RAM than VSC would to open a .txt file.

Eh, not bad. not good; we don't know what the new goalpost positions mean yet.

That’s why I specified “light web browsing”.