Ultimately it'll be subjective, but the fans don't really spin up on my Framework 16 unless I push things. Running a game or compiling on all cores for a while will do the trick. The exact battery life, thermals and noise will be heavily dependent on the laptop; the TDP of modern laptop CPUs is probably mostly pretty comparable so a lot of it will come down to thermal design. Same for battery life and noise, depends a lot on things other than the CPU.
Our Thinkpads are definitely hotter; fans spin up routinely on the Ryzens but never does on the M1. Battery life is infinitely better on the M1.
The other thing I hate about the Thinkpads is that the build/screen/trackpad quality sucks in comparison to the Apple stuff. And for all the griping about Mac OS on this site, Windows is way worse - you can tell MS's focus is on linux in the cloud these days. All the ancillary stuff Apple is good at is underappreciated.
