Friend of mine has laptop with Intel Ultra 9 185h. It is always plugged because when you don't plugin in, it is crawling (like even struggles to open Word). Fans are always spinning and it is loud.

For doing any kind of work that requires focus it is an absolute nightmare.

But she need a laptop to occasionally take it to Uni.

Sounds like my macbook 16" with the Intel i9. Just about anything, full screen video call, backups, patching, etc it sounds like a hair dryer. I'm not surprised there's various docks, stands, etc that include supplemental cooling.

I'm jealous of the m series macbooks, fast, quiet, and cool on wall or battery.

> Intel Ultra 9 185h

The CPU in itself should be pretty good by modern standards: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+Ultra+9+...

> (like even struggles to open Word).

Her issue is not the form factor. Is it the RAM ? did she activate all the marketing apps ? Is a bitcoin farmer running in the background ? I don't know, but it's worth looking into it.

For comparison, I have at hand a Surface Pro 8 that should be 3x slower than hers on sheer CPU benchmarks, and I can throw any run of mill task at it (do the taxes with 3~4 word documents, Excel, dozens of tabs in firefox and a call session in the background) and it's fine. It will burn trough battery life within an two or three hours under that load, and yes the fans will be running, but I have no issue of having it crawl when unplugged.