That isn't what I'm comparing though. My use case is obviously different. For me, I'm working on software, I'm compiling software. On an ARM machine with no moving parts, this is a silent activity. On every other machine, this is far from silent.
I brought up the Air mostly because I didn't know what the noise was when he started the game. I thought that the Air didn't have any moving parts. In fact, I'm still debating getting one, but a machine that's silent at 250 that can do what I want it to is a much faster decision than one that is ~1000.
I know my use case isn't typical, but it is the one I rely on when deciding what to get for myself, and silent is good for my needs, and how much noise the computer makes when I've got all cores running on a compile is a factor, for your needs it may not be, or you may not do the same type of work.
The point I'm getting at is that no matter what I do on a machine with no moving parts, it's going to be silent. An older laptop on eBay may be more useful for some people, and I'll never fully move away from a workhorse machine until ARM performance is on par, but it's still nice to have when she's sleeping and I'm still mulling over a fix.
I understand your point that it's silent. I just don't see how comparing the another laptop to the Chromebook by talking about something that the Chromebook won't run (eg WoW). Personally, apart from 3D gaming I haven't noticed any noise at all from my Air (from compiling, rendering video, etc).
You said yourself that you're not in a position to fully change to something ARM-based because of performance issues, and that's precisely my point: what's the point of saying the Chromebook is superior in it's silence? I might as well say that a piece of paper has superior battery life to my laptop because I can use it for 24 hours without charging. They do different things.
(On a tangent, what are the options for actually developing software using ChromeOS, my understanding of it was there was little to no access to local filesystems for that sort of thing? Or are you talking about installing some other OS on it?
Edit: Read your post a bit further down about putting Gentoo on it. Still curious if there's much scope for developing in ChromeOS itself... did a bit of searching but not a lot of the hits sounded practical or were native.)
The newest Air uses a different type of fan (as does the retina MBP). It's quieter (perceptibly so) and is nothing like the traditional "whining" fan; it sounds more like white noise. In my rMBP, I'll intentionally max out the fans when playing a game (to reduce heat on my hands) and the sound isn't really noticeable at all. It sounds like the ambient noise from my air conditioner or the highway near my house; in fact it's so close that I literally can't hear the laptop if I'm sitting on my balcony.
That said, I think you're significantly overstating the noise of a modern Mac in the first place. Some of the non-retina MBPs run pretty warn, but my last-gen Air was silent unless I tried to play games on it. Even when writing code. I could build a ~500 file Java project in IntelliJ and it wouldn't even get warm, let alone kick on the fans.
The only Mac experience I have personally is a core duo version (one of the first intel MacBook Pro) and then listening to the coworker's air. I'm glad to hear that newer ones are quieter, and that's definitely going to weigh in on my next "workhorse" laptop.
Cool. FWIW, my retina MBP idles around 45 deg C, goes up to about 65 when watching a Flash video (maybe 55 for HTML5 video), and as high as 90 deg C when playing XCOM in Parallels (at which point I manually crank up the fans because OS X tends to prefer heat over noise and I do not).
I brought up the Air mostly because I didn't know what the noise was when he started the game. I thought that the Air didn't have any moving parts. In fact, I'm still debating getting one, but a machine that's silent at 250 that can do what I want it to is a much faster decision than one that is ~1000.
I know my use case isn't typical, but it is the one I rely on when deciding what to get for myself, and silent is good for my needs, and how much noise the computer makes when I've got all cores running on a compile is a factor, for your needs it may not be, or you may not do the same type of work.
The point I'm getting at is that no matter what I do on a machine with no moving parts, it's going to be silent. An older laptop on eBay may be more useful for some people, and I'll never fully move away from a workhorse machine until ARM performance is on par, but it's still nice to have when she's sleeping and I'm still mulling over a fix.