If the MacBook Air had a fan, it would be thicker and would need a bigger battery. It would then be the same, aside from the screen, from the base MacBook Pro. You are 100% correct. The fact it has no fan allows Apple to reduce its weight and thickness. Thus reducing its price. You’re absolutely right.
Fans in laptops are more and more a gamer pilled flight of fancy. Phones and iPads have shown they’re not a necessity.
Is the Nintendo Switch/Switch 2 a thick device? They are thinner than the MacBook Pro, and they have more space constraints than a MacBook Neo.
If fans in laptops are just for “gamer pilled” why does the MacBook Pro have one?
Do you think Apple can continue to grow their marketshare indefinitely if they continually ignore the 900 million PC gamers who currently own Windows PCs? The PC gaming market is the only one that has been growing since 2021.
https://www.techspot.com/news/106371-gaming-industry-hits-wa...
The iPad doesn’t prove anything, it’s routinely criticized for wasting its performance potential with inflexible and limited software. Its performance limits are never tested because you can’t actually do things on it in comparison to a full desktop OS.
My phone will regularly dim the screen, halt charging, and throttle performance when I’m out in a sunny day during the summer. You ever been to Miami? I would actually be interested in an actively cooled phone if it existed and would accept a device that was thicker.
I don't bet against simplicity. Those who really require complexity pay for it. On the Apple side, that now includes those who need sustained throughput achieved by a fan.
This argument falls apart since Apple themselves offer computers with fans. Even the Mac mini has a fan and that’s their cheapest system.
They just don’t care about sustained compute on their cheaper consumer laptops not only because they alienated gamers a long time ago, but because it’s a price segmentation to the Pro systems. Their users derp around on safari and their video encodes are done by the time the system throttles.
That’s totally fine for those users but there are 9X more PC gamers in the world than the entire install base of Mac users and those people like myself benefit from sustained performance.
Apple’s loss if they don’t want to sell affordable machines that have sustained performance, they gate that to professional machines that have a bunch of stuff I don’t need.
I don’t know why people parrot this talking point about a lack of fan being a positive feature. It’s like a shared propaganda talking point that Mac enthusiasts all agree upon universally. If Apple added fans to the Air and Neo you’d all change your tune since Dear Leader changed their mind, just like when Apple enthusiasts stopped blindly hating Intel suddenly during the architecture transition. You’d all say stuff like “Apple gave us boosted performance and you can’t even hear the fans! All those PC laptops that I’ve never cross shopped since 2001 sound like jet engines!”
A simple passive heatsink has been shown to boost performance significantly in the MacBook Neo.
The throttling of the chips in Apple’s lower end systems are an intentional form of price segmentation. The MacBook Pro won’t be any faster than the Air if the Air was just cooled properly.
I would unironically take a fan in my phone if it stopped it from throttling, dimming the screen, and halting charging when it’s a hot day in direct sunlight. It would just have to make sense in the context of a phone design, of course, which is a challenge.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/118431
There are phones on the market with detachable active cooling solutions to help with sustained intense gameplay:
https://rog.asus.com/phones/rog-phone-9-pro/