[mayama]

I disable turbo boost in cpu on linux. Fans rarely start on the laptop and the system is generally cool. Even working on development and compilation I rarely need the extra perf. For my 10yr old laptop I cap max clock to 95% too to stop the fans from always starting. YMMV

[just6979]

This is a big reason. Apple tunes their devices to not push the extreme edges of the performance that is possible, so they don't fall off that cliff of inefficiency. Combined with a really great perf/watt, they can run them at "90%" and stay nice and cool and sipping power (relatively), while most Intel/AMD machines are allowed to push their parts to "110%" much more often, which might give them a leg up in raw performance (for some workloads), but runs into the gross inefficiencies of pushing the envelope so that marginal performance increase takes 2-3x more power.

If you manually go in and limit a modern Windows laptop's max performance to just under what the spec sheet indicates, it'll be fairly quiet and cool. In fact, most have a setting to do this, but it's rarely on by default because the manufacturers want to show off performance benchmarks. Of course, that's while also touting battery life that is not possible when in the mode that allows the best performance...

This doesn't cover other stupid battery life eaters like Modern Standy (it's still possible to disable it with registry tweaks! do it!), but if you don't need absolute max perf for renders or compiling or whatever, put your Windows or Linux laptop into "cool & quiet" mode and enjoy some decent extra battery.

It would also be really interesting to see what Apple Silicon could do under some Extreme OverClocking fun with sub-zero cooling or such. Would require a firmware & OS that allows more tuning and tweaking, so it's not going to happen anytime soon, but could actually be a nice brag for Apple it they did let it happen.