Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

There are hobbyists that have been able to run Ryzens at very low power without much performance impact. If you raise this with any manufacturers, then they ignore it. Most people are on autopilot

Weight and power density are the biggest issues. Some of the lower end APUs (think tablet mode) might work out, but to literally be usable on top of a lap they aren't allowed to get that hot.

Tablets mostly spend their energy budget (under normal operation) on illuminating the screen and most of the action content they see would either classify as webpages or video encoded with codecs they have hardware support for decoding efficiently.

A generic PC meanwhile runs a heavy OS and is often asked to do large volumes of local processing tasks. E.G. that bloody 16GB Outlook mail database that has to be stored locally because your power user that demanded a laptop has to be able to read all of their past email while they're in the field with no reliable net connection.

Oh, they also demand that it has to be light. Fans are cheaper and lighter than putting enough metal inside to do something passively; and also run cooler since even a pathetic volume of airflow is many times better than waiting for convection alone to move the heat.

You can blame the noise of the fan on the push for crazy flat laptops though. There's no reason a still light but thicker laptop couldn't use a larger slower moving fan. Well, other than the perception of thick as heavy and thus bad.

I think it is market forces. Fanless laptops can be made, but the bulk of the market seeks reasonable performance at the best price.

I think it doesn't matter much, as you can take a standard laptop and restrict the clock speed, and the fan will never turn on.

If a user manages to get the temps high enough to throttle its going to be a very bad user experience if they aren't savvy, the device is going to be hot and slow.

My work laptop is one of those macbook air style super light Windows ones, I thought it was fanless until I watched a teardown, the fan hardly turns on and I have to put my ear to hit to hear when it does.

Yeah, I am disappointed that fanless devices have been on the retreat these past several years. My wife's previous laptop was a Lenovo Yoga 710, with a fanless Intel Core m3-6Y30 (Skylake, 2 cores with HT). Performance was more than adequate for her work as a scientist. My current laptop is a Xiaomi Mi Air 12.5, with the same CPU installed. It's powerful enough for everything I do on the go. If I were to replace it, there's just no up to date fanless device available except for the Macbook Air - which will have to have decent GNU/Linux support before I can/will consider buying it.

But it's not just laptops that lose their fanlessness (which I appreciate both due to noise and reliability concerns), but also NUCs - almost every single NUC-like device that has entered the market and managed to come to my attention over the last months has had a fan installed. I wonder why that is - TDPs do not seem to have gone up, at least not when looking at data sheets... maybe it's just cheaper to make stuff that way.