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Comment by heipei | Hacker News Reader

I watched and read multiple reviews and Dave2D seems to be the only one who tried to quantify the throttling to some extent, all the others only had useless statements like "The Pro will probably be able to sustain unthrottled workloads for longer thanks to it's active cooling" - No shit, sherlock. For me the fact that it only throttles after 8-9 minutes (!) of heavy use is going to be the deciding factor that will allow me to go with the Air (and actual physical function keys) over the Pro, so thanks Dave.

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Somebody on twitter reported that during Rust compilation the Air started throttling a bit (20-30% hit) after 3-4mn. The Pro doesn't throttle.

Couldn't the Pro just turn on its fans after 8-9 minutes (to avoid throttling), thus giving the best of both worlds?

Best of both of worlds is:

- active cooling

- lack of a touchbar

I've been wondering if someone could make an active cooling dock for the Mac Book Air. I was even thinking the M1 wattage is low enough that you could have a thermoelectric cooler lowering case temp down to room temp.

I mean if you're desperate to get it to compile in 20 minutes instead of 25 for a particular occasion, you could just grab a bag of peas from the freezer and set the laptop on them.

Got $300 to spare? https://svalt.com/products/cooling-dock

The touchbar is pretty great if you program it yourself using, e.g., BetterTouchTool. I especially love the clipboard widget - works fantastic with VIM/EVIL.

That would be the Mac Mini.

But seriously, I share your opinion on laptop keyboards: regular function keys please.

That's exactly what it does.

But 8-9 minutes of full 100% CPU is a relatively rare occurrence for the vast majority of users. Developers might occasionally do that, but it will be very language and project dependent.

I assume it does. My 13" 2016 MBP doesn't turn on its fans much unless it's busy.

My 16“ MBP is running its fans basically all day (iOS dev work and ARQ backups)

Yeah, I think the 45W laptops always run them, even if sometimes very slowly. The smaller laptops have been able to turn them off completely for a while, though, when not very busy.

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