I challenge you to find a laptop that can do what my macbook air m1 with 8gb of ram does at the $899 it was through the education store. No fan, awesome battery life, good trackpad and keyboard, the ability to not get hot while using it.
I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. My new model is way faster than my macbook air though, but the old model was technically newer than the air. Obviously the comparisson isn't completely fair since we run a lot of corporate enterprise stuff on our laptops, but still.
I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. Looking at the laptop market now, I can't see what you'd buy. A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time.
Whether you run OS/X or Asahi, I really can't see what you'd buy other than these. At least if you actually use it on your lap and don't just have it sit in a dock on a table.
Then again, I'm the sort of person who would buy the pink neo because it would fuck with the perception people have of my mid 40 Scandinavian conservativeish dad look. So maybe it is just about the message?
Are there any laptops where the cooling is handled by the screen backside?
A Framework isn't loud at all. I regularly do simulations on mine and it works perfectly without noise.
I think if you just compare cost then yes the Mac is a good deal but there is more than cost that matters. I think flexibility, reparibility and so on matter.
Mine (11th gen framework 13) is.
I have to keep it in battery saver mode or the fans just spin up when it's idle. They come up anyway (and irregularly) when watching a movie, loud enough to be heard over the movie -- though that may also be partly the fault of the milquetoast speakers that also inexplicably point down (so if you're watching something in bed you'll need to find a hard surface to put it on so that the sound isn't completely muffled).
That said, i have a macbook pro for work and macOS infuriates me, i would not trade my framework for any apple device under any circumstances. I love my framework more than any laptop I've ever owned. I just wish the hardware was more polished.
> $899 it was through the education store
Comparing a subsidised computer for children to one that isn't isn't exactly a fair comparison, is it?
> No fan,
You know why Macbooks don't need a fan? It's because they aren't powerful enough to draw heat in the first place. A month ago, for the same price as a $1700 Macbook Pro (before the recent increase) I got a laptop with a CPU that is literally twice as fast on parellelisable workloads, has a 5070 Ti vs. nothing at all, and 32GB RAM. A superior screen, keyboard, and I can install my own choice of OS on it, too. Now that same dingy Macbook Pro costs $2000, or $2400 if you want 32GB RAM. Apple's greatest coup was convincing people that paying twice as much for half the hardware was a killer feature, and now everyone goes on and on about how Macbooks are the most premium hardware money can buy because they're so weak they don't need a fan to keep them cool. It's truly remarkable how susceptible people are to status-culture-based marketing.
Username related.
This comment is untethered from reality. Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads using a fraction of the power draw. Exceptions exist but usually those cases are break even or close calls.
It trails GPU workflows on the high end but wins on the low end. It still wins on efficiency.
It falls over on storage and RAM prices (well, for about 6 months it was competitive here).
I say this as someone who over the last year has done the majority of my competition on PC hardware running Linux.
You may be looking at this as a status game but it has clouded your vision. It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status. If believing that makes you feel superior, well, enjoy the rush.
> Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads
[citation needed]
> It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status.
People still pay a massive premium for blood diamonds over physically indistinguishable lab diamonds. You underestimate how wildly irrational the market is when it comes to status perception.
Can you recommend me a non apple fanless laptop with similar power/battery life characteristics?
If you want a macbook, go for it. I wouldn’t presume to know your needs more than you. I want something that I can easily run OpenBSD on and is amd64. And none of the apple laptop fits the bill.
I don't own or want anything apple. But I want no fan and maximum possible power/battery life. So I am really looking, but they do seem to offer the best hardware.
Obvious massive asterisk that benchmarks are not always realworld use:
Apple M5, Single core Geekbench: ~4,200 (https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2025)
Apple M5 Pro (15-core, lower core version), multicore: ~26,000 (https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18535781)
compare this to the top of the line Intel Panther Lake chips, which have comparable battery life. I cherry picked a 16" Dell XPS machine, which has the best thermal headroom, for its best score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18390748
Single core: ~2,900 Multicore (16-cores): 16,900
Geekbench is bursty, so we can look at more sustained test, Cinebench 2024:
https://nanoreview.net/en/laptop-compare/dell-xps-16-2026-vs...
Single core:
XPS 16 (2026): 111 MacBook Pro 16 (M5, 2026): 203
Multicore: XPS 16 (2026): 613 MacBook Pro 16 (M5, 2026): 2065
on GPU, https://spylab.ai/seo/v5/C54a/
"Despite the XPS 16's discrete Nvidia RTX 4070 laptop GPU, the MacBook Pro M4 Pro's unified memory architecture outpaced the Dell in 4K video export and machine learning inference benchmarks by 22 percent on average."
For GPU, this is not comprehensive. It depends heavily on whether it needs raw grunt, where Nvidia discrete chips will win. When the processes uses the NPUs on Apple's chips, it will often win. They trade blows.
Efficiency I think is close to a wash on the latest machine, but before Panther Lake, Apple's win handily. My Framework 13 on AMD would last me about 2 hours doing regular work; my Macbook Pro doing the same workload would last over 10 hours. Thank goodness Intel caught up here.
I do scientific computing where Apple has some disadvantages. Matrix math heavy things lose out to discrete GPUs, as do -- I'm told -- things depending on 512-bit extensions (e.g., AVX).
Until last week, prices on Framework/Dell vs. Apple were similar. I think Apple is probably 10-20% expesnive at this point, but adjusting for performance, Apple still comes out ahead.
Apple's displays used to have a huge advantage. Now that you can get OLED displays on performant, efficient Panther Lake machines, this is far less of an Apple advantage.
The upshot is that the new Panther Lake machines caught up considerably to Apple, but they're still about 20-30% slower (sometimes more) in most workloads, and IMO the build quality is still not quite as good. I think many of them actually have better displays. Battery life is comparable on better equipped PCs. IMO once you can work an entire day and a little more unplugged, you're good to go.
It's not hard to find this data and evaluate it objectively.
Apple education store isn't subsidized or "for children."
A strange retort. "Yeah well, your CHILD'S COMPUTER is better, but that's for CHILDREN. We're talking adult computers here!"