People generally have a priority between noise and heat vs. performance. If you don't do compute-heavy stuff then you might as well have something quiet. If you do, i.e. you're always waiting on the machine, how many of those people want to sacrifice a third of their performance to avoid having a fan?
Performance along which characteristics?
How much performance does one need locally?
At which point does heat/noise/energy cost become too much for a mobile workstation?
All of these are additional criteria that the M series laptops competes in (and in many cases wins), even amongst programmers who are some of the most compute performance sensitive consumers out there.
