This paragraph by Scharon Harding at Ars Technica made me do a double take.

Regardless of what I put it through, the Spectre stayed surprisingly cool for its size. After an hour-long stress test, for example, the only part of the chassis that was too hot to touch comfortably was its underside, although the keyboard was borderline.

At first I was convinced I must have misread it, because who would write what is effectively the review version of “This is Fine” with a straight face? After rereading it several times at this point, I am certain I read it correctly and I am mostly sure it was written with a straight face. The only remaining question is “how?” What mindset is required to frame a laptop getting too hot to sit atop one’s lap as “surprisingly cool”? John Gruber called it a form of Stockholm’s Syndrome.

The phrase “Stockholm Syndrome” gets overused, but I think PC hardware reviewers are in a deep state of denial as to how high Apple silicon has raised the bar for performance-per-watt, in day-to-day practical terms.

I agree, but don’t think PC reviewers are the only ones with Stockholm Syndrome. I think it’s most laptop users. When changing jobs last fall, I pushed for and got an M1-based Macbook Pro from my new employer and strongly advised others in my position to do the same. Since joining this company, I’ve also been telling new colleagues with older Macs to push for an upgrade. In both cases, I evangelized how Apple Silicon based Macs run silent and cool all while outperforming their Intel-based counterparts. In most cases, my evangelism was met with a sort of shrug. It’s not because these folks didn’t care. They acknowledged that hot laptops and fan noise are bad, but they’ve so internalized those trade offs as inherent to using a laptop that they’ve dismissed the notion that one could run cool and silent for their needs.

I’ve long felt that Apple sometimes gets too brand focused in its advertising, and have more recently been thinking they need to be more aggressive in touting their performance-per-watt advantage. Give me an ad with a mic’ed up PC loudly running several Chrome tabs before cutting to a MacBook running silent. Give me another comparing temperature readings between the the two devices.

Apple’s advantage right now is so unbelievable that it has to be seen to be believed, and so Apple should be doing everything in its power to make sure everyone sees that a hot and loud laptop is no longer fine.