We get laptops with annoying cooling fans because we keep buying them

I don’t like laptops with loud cooling fans in them. Quite a controversial position, I know.

But really, they do suck. A laptop can be great to use, have a fantastic keyboard, sharp display, lots of storage and a fast CPU, and all of that can be ruined by one component: the cooling fan.

Laptop fans are small, meaning that they have to run faster to have any meaningful cooling effect, which means that they are usually very loud and often have a high-pitched whine to them, making them especially obnoxious. Sometimes it feels like a deliberate attack on one of my senses.

Fans introduce a maintenance burden. They keep taking in dust, which tends to accumulate at the heat sink. If you skip maintenance, then you’ll see your performance drop and the laptop will get notably hot, which may contribute to a complete hardware failure.

We’ve seen tremendous progress in the world of consumer CPU-s over the last decade. Power consumption is much lower while idle, processors can do a lot more work in the same power envelope, and yet most laptops that I see in use are still actively cooled by an annoying-ass cooling fan.¹

And yet we keep buying them.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

My colleagues that have switched to Apple Silicon laptops are sometimes surprised to hear the fan on their laptop because it’s a genuinely rare occurrence for them. Most of the time it just sits there doing nothing, and when it does come on, it’s whisper-quiet. And to top it off, some models, such as the Macbook Air series, are completely fanless. Meanwhile, those colleagues that run Lenovo ThinkPads with Ryzen 5000 and 7000 series APU-s (that includes me) have audible fans and at the same time the build times for the big Java monolith that we maintain are significantly slower (~15%) compared to the fan-equipped MacBooks.²

We can fix this, if we really wanted to.

As a first step, you can change to a power saving mode on your current laptop. This will likely result in your CPU and GPU running more efficiently, which also helps avoid turning the cooling fan on. You will have to sacrifice some performance as a result of this change, which will not be a worthwhile trade-off for everyone.

If you are OK with risking damaging your hardware, you can also play around with setting your own fan curve. The CPU and GPU throttling technology is quite advanced nowadays, so you will likely be fine in this area, but other components in the laptop, such as the battery, may not be very happy with higher temperatures.

After doing all that, the next step is to avoid buying a laptop that abuses your sense of hearing. That’s the only signal that we can send to manufacturers that they will actually listen to. Money speaks louder than words.

What alternative options do we have? Well, there are the Apple Silicon MacBooks, and, uhh, that one ThinkPad with an ARM CPU, and a bunch of Chromebooks, and a few Windows tablets I guess.

I’ll be honest, I have not kept a keen eye on recent developments, but a quick search online for fanless laptops pretty much looks as I described. Laptops that you’d actually want to get work done on are completely missing from that list, unless you like Apple.³

In a corporate environment the choice of laptop might not be fully up to you, but you can do your best to influence the decision-makers.

There’s one more alternative: ask your software vendor to not write shoddily thrown together software that performs like shit. Making a doctor appointment should not make my cooling fan go crazy. Not only is slow and inefficient software discriminatory towards those that cannot afford decent computer hardware, it’s also directly contributing to the growing e-waste generation problem by continuously raising the minimum hardware requirements for the software that we rely on every day.

Written on a Lenovo ThinkPad X395 that just won’t stop heating up and making annoying fan noises.