Any scenario where M4 MBA would be WORSE than my current laptop due to Fan-Less Design?

[kofman13]

I have crappy base model 2019 intel i5 8 gb ram MacBook Pro 13 inch. It's slow on sequoia, bad battery life, loud fan all the time. crappy keyboard. I want to upgrade to base model M4 MBA because of all the great sales. I know overall it will be faster as I have apple silicon M1 Max Mac Studio. But there I am spoiled with a cooling fan inside, and 32gb ram.

I know the M4 in the AIR is miles ahead in terms of speed of my i5 MacBook Pro but is there any use case where it would fall behind my current MacBook purely because it has no cooling fan?

 

[Bigwaff]

I know the M4 in the AIR is miles ahead in terms of speed of my i5 MacBook Pro but is there any use case where it would fall behind my current MacBook purely because it has no cooling fan?

Nope.

 

[okkibs]

Agreed. There is absolutely no chance that it will do any worse than that Intel Macbook no matter what. But if you are going for the 256GB base model you should keep in mind that the modern APFS macOS does not like to run out of storage and you want to keep a bit of storage left free for optimal performance and to make sure you can still install updates. That means unless all your apps and local data on the Mac are no bigger than 100GB I would go for a version with more space. If you don't have many bigger apps like Xcode and you don't store any local data then it works fine but even just taking local iPhone device backups or syncing iCloud might become an issue with such little storage.

Other than that the M4 Air base model is a great device and you won't find a better machine for under 1000 bucks if you don't mind the low storage spec.

Depending on what you use the Mac for you might find that the passively cooled M4 performs just as well as the M1 Max in your Studio. The main difference might even just be the memory difference and not the difference in processing power.

 

[SmOgER]

I have crappy base model 2019 intel i5 8 gb ram MacBook Pro 13 inch. It's slow on sequoia, bad battery life, loud fan all the time. crappy keyboard. I want to upgrade to base model M4 MBA because of all the great sales. I know overall it will be faster as I have apple silicon M1 Max Mac Studio. But there I am spoiled with a cooling fan inside, and 32gb ram.

I know the M4 in the AIR is miles ahead in terms of speed of my i5 MacBook Pro but is there any use case where it would fall behind my current MacBook purely because it has no cooling fan?

Even in edge cases M4 is going to be much faster. That chip is efficient enough for active cooling to be truly optional. In fact, there are no significant performance gains in benchmarks comparing that same chip in MBP with active cooling. So it really is more of them pushing it with Pros rather than compromising the chip with Air, it was designed to perform great with passive cooling.