Laptops should still have fans for when they're plugged in and have the power available to ramp up clock speeds.

Then why shouldn't tablets, or phones?

Well, for starters, tablets and phones aren't generally equipped with connectors and cables that can supply enough power. Charging over USB limits you to 25W at most, but laptops generally come with power bricks to supply two or three times that, and desktop-replacement notebooks go much higher than that.

I feel adding fans to a tablet or phone would somewhat defeat the goal of a small, portable computing device as fans need space. We'll always have the tradeoff between computing power and size, and tablets and phones favor the size side.

I ran a Dell Mini 9 for years, and loved that it had no moving parts (SSD, no fan).

I replaced it with a MBA 13, and I was shocked after 6 months when a firmware update made the fan come on. Before that, I didn't even know it had a fan.

Exactly. We already have silent and fanless tablets so I'm not sure why GE would be so troubled to get "almost silent" coolers.

How can the Dell Mini 9 be fanless, though? I don't think any Atom processor besides the smartphone-only Medfield is fanless. My old EeePC is also quite noisy when loading stuff, and it gets quite hot, too.

Some of us want the highest performance CPU and GPU possible in our laptop, but that requires a fan, but a silent fan would be a real value add over the current ones. Personally I'm happy to hear this, hope it makes it way into production laptops soon.

The Dell Mini 9 had an Atom N270, which is rated at 2.5W max. TDP: http://ark.intel.com/products/36331/Intel-Atom-Processor-N27...

There are (or were) plenty of fanless designs around that CPU on the market, from embedded/industrial PCs to nettop barebones, ITX mainboards and "panel computers" (i.e. early tablets).

For a data point, my home server is a fanless Atom D2700.