Yup, this was my main reason for choosing the Air over the Pro. The touch bar is so unfortunate -- Apple could probably do something interesting with it, but ultimately they've basically left it untouched since they released it.
I suspect the only reason for its continued existence is to look cool in marketing photos.
The next upgrade that puts apple chip in the 4 port pro would be the ideal version to purchase without a Touch Bar impacting usability and battery life.
You say this like it's a negative thing. For me, personally, computer fan noise is uniquely aggravating. I wanted to buy the 2015 Macbook specifically because it was fanless, but decided against it because a x86 CPU trying to run in that fanless form factor essentially made it a $1K netbook. Now that we're seeing the M1 MacBook Air rival the 16-inch MacBook Pro from last year in an extended CineBench test (even through Rosetta!), it's a different story entirely.
I'm not saying active cooling doesn't help, obviously the Air is going to thermal throttle in cases the Pro wouldn't. But I am saying that the new chipset needs active cooling a lot less than the old one did; not just cause it's RISC vs CISC but its also 'cause it's TSMC's 5nm process vs Intel's 14nm one.
Also, I'd give up on the hope that they'd get rid of their stupid meme bar on the Pro. They seem committed to it.
I'm actually not sure about that. Did the MacBook Air ever have a Touch Bar? It seems like this particular MBP has one mostly because they used the exact same case and keyboard and screen and webcam and ports and etc from the previous MBP. Every review I've seen says other than the processor, it's exactly the same.
So there's a chance that this MBP has a Touch Bar merely because the previous one had it and they did not change the case for the M1, which would mean they could still make the change whenever they come out with a new case.
The active cooling might not make as big a difference as you think… in The Verge’s benchmarks, literally the only place they saw a significant difference in speed was a multicore benchmark involving 30 solid minutes under full load. https://www.theverge.com/21569603/apple-macbook-air-m1-revie...
The results are excellent and give me hope they will be able to keep the chips from throttling with active cooling under the most stressful loads.
My current work laptop is a the 16 inch 2019 Macbook Pro with 8-Core Intel Core i9 at 2.3 GHz, and using the Intel Power Gadget, the form factor can not achieve the max frequency of 3.6ghz on a single core. I have the machine elevated on a stand with the maximum air flow, even with no external monitors connected, it still throttles.
