Except the M1 Air has no fan and will be dead silent doing that.
The framework won’t.
Once you get used to an inaudible laptop you really don’t want to go back. There’s nothing wrong with a fan you literally can’t hear without putting your head up against the laptop.
I would do anything to get rid of the hairdryers in my life pretending to be laptops.
Does Asahi actually maintain the Macbook's performance and battery advantage when running Linux though?
The performance is great, and now there's a fully stable userspace graphics driver stack. Peripherials basically work. The battery life under load (i.e. development) is serviceable, not terrible, but in my (limited, "I turn on my laptop after some amount of time" testing) it's not even close to macOS especially when turned off. This is with a 13" M2 Air.
It's a really good Linux laptop if you can find a M2 somewhere, IMO.
That the Framework 12 is not extremely lagging behind the M4 (subjective comparison) might lead one to believe that it would be competitive with an five year old M1 Air. Taking a quick look at "Cinebench R23" from 2020 [0], Macbook Air M1 comes in at 1,520 and 7,804, which compares favorably to 2025's "Cinebench R23" in which the Framework 12's i5-1334U scores 1,474 and 4,644.
The answer is it isn't competitive performance-wise. Given the M1 seems to have some native Linux support through Ashai, the Framework's advantages over the 5 year old MBA M1 seem to be user accessible hardware changes, touchscreen and longer hinge throw.
0. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-the-ap...