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An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

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Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#61

Post by ianlevesque »

canjobear wrote: post #35
MiguelHudnandez wrote: post #4

That's pretty hilarious. Until recently I didn't think of the CPU fan as an auditory cue for how hard your system is working. But now I can remember times that excessive fan noise has prompted me to investigate the cause of excessive usage.

Hearing the disk going used to be an auditory cue too, which is now gone thanks to solid state drives.

Occasionally with catastrophic results https://www.extremetech.com/computing/239268-spotify-may-kil...

That said, I don’t miss the noise or slowness.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#62

Post by enlyth »

alisonkisk wrote: post #57
enlyth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of a tangent but I am quite impressed how Apple's marketing campaign was so effective that they've managed to redefine what PC (personal computer) means

PC originally meant "IBM PC desktop clone". Apple was different because it's hardware wasn't compatible with PC software (for mainstream users).

The only reason I mentioned it is because OP's usage caught me off guard. Most of the time in colloquial usage I've seen PC used as an acronym to mean "computer with Windows installed as the OS", especially when being compared to Apple's products.

But in this case it was used as "desktop computer", which sounded strange to me as I consider laptops, however portable, to be personal computers.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#63

Post by function_seven »

bentcorner wrote: post #28
akmarinov wrote: post #22

No troll, the fan shutting off was how I knew my app had compiled and I could start debugging. With the M1, I now have to check the cpu usage history occasionally.

Honestly I believe that as developers we don't use audible feedback enough in our tooling. Imagine diagnosing your app health like you could diagnose your connection speed of a dial-up modem.

Agreed. I usually laugh at TV shows and movies that use a bunch of beeps and boops in their computer scenes.[1]

But sometimes I actually want that! Like, if there was a switch I could flip to turn on audio cues every time a window's contents are updated, or new lines appear in a terminal window. And every window update would be tagged with a different sound for error, warning, info, success, etc.

I know you can configure your terminal to play a BEL sound, but I'm looking for something system-wide. I want it like the movies, so I can pay attention to something else and not have to check in on the progress of my compilation or transcoding or long download.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#64

Post by [deleted] »

enlyth wrote: post #62
alisonkisk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC originally meant "IBM PC desktop clone". Apple was different because it's hardware wasn't compatible with PC software (for mainstream users).

The only reason I mentioned it is because OP's usage caught me off guard. Most of the time in colloquial usage I've seen PC used as an acronym to mean "computer with Windows installed as the OS", especially when being compared to Apple's products. But in this case it was used as "desktop computer", which sounded strange to me as I consider laptops, however portable, to be personal computers.

[deleted]

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#65

Post by lukevp »

RandomWorker wrote: post #45
jmkni wrote: post #25

Pre M1, I've always preferred a PC. When I'm using a laptop, especially doing real work, they heat up, the fans go crazy, the laptop is hot to the touch and everything slows down. It almost makes you anxious. You're wondering if it's about to crash or go on fire. I've always kept a Desktop PC on the go for this reason, a well cooled desktop just doesn't have these issues. With a laptop, I always feel like I'm comprom…

Same here, it’s like a freaky experience. I run mostly from the browser but have a couple of things going at the same time. One thing I noticed is the blazing fast typing on the Mac. There is an ever so small lag on windows in perceptible when using it. But, when you type on the Mac you notice it, and the brain just feels good using it. I have no idea if this is a real thing, but it’s similar with scrolling, you touc…

One of the reasons iOS feels smoother than Android is because the render loop of the OS is decoupled from the app. The apps aren’t allowed to introduce jank, so if you’re scrolling a webpage and stuff is loading simultaneously, iOS will be way smoother. I think this is also why they can have such low latency on inputs, for example with the Apple Pencil which is much lower latency than the surface pen or the android stylus. I had a 120hz android phone for over a year, and while the frame rate when scrolling is slightly worse on iOS, overall the OS feels more fluid to me. On a 120hz iPad it’s no comparison.

I am speculating here as I don’t know for sure, but I remember iOS started as a derivation of OSX so this may be the case for macOS as well. So I think it’s not your imagination, it’s a different input and render architecture than windows or android.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#66

Post by MiguelHudnandez »

dbtc wrote: post #42
MiguelHudnandez wrote: post #4

That's pretty hilarious. Until recently I didn't think of the CPU fan as an auditory cue for how hard your system is working. But now I can remember times that excessive fan noise has prompted me to investigate the cause of excessive usage.

I had a habit of touching the strip of metal above the keys on my old macbook air, since that heats up before the fan becomes audible. The sensible approach, of course, is to add a load monitor to the menu bar; now with my new m1 macbook, I can simply make the appropriate noises myself, as necessary. This is the UNIX way.

"MenuBar Stats" has a versatile collection of widgets to add to the menu bar. I'd prefer something open source though, if anyone has recommendations, please share.

Once you're running a tool like that, it is interesting to see the efficiency cores often saturated and the performance cores usually sleeping.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#67

Post by zitterbewegung »

jedberg wrote: post #43

This is funny. For the last ten years I've used Mac laptops as my primary machine. Of course the fan noise was a great auditory clue to tell me to check out Activity Monitor/top for rogue processes and help me optimize which tasks took too many resources. I didn't realize how much I relied on that cue until I temporarily switched to a Mac desktop machine during the pandemic when I didn't need to travel. The desktop f…

I remember using hard disk drive sounds for disk usage and or capacitor noises to debug issues. But, I really like the MacBook Air M1 because its so quiet and it helps me concentrate much better and if you are talking to others or recording a talk it is silent. The other thing is that it has no moving parts so it should be very durable.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#68

Post by pasc1878 »

stephencanon wrote: post #39
jheriko wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jesus wept. are your builds that slow, or your inability to add notifications that real? not sure if programmer, or just troll...

The fan _was_ their notification. Why would they have wasted time adding another?

Because the fan will continue for some time after the compile finishes. So you can do work before the fan stoos

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#70

Post by hollerith »

enlyth wrote: post #62
alisonkisk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC originally meant "IBM PC desktop clone". Apple was different because it's hardware wasn't compatible with PC software (for mainstream users).

The only reason I mentioned it is because OP's usage caught me off guard. Most of the time in colloquial usage I've seen PC used as an acronym to mean "computer with Windows installed as the OS", especially when being compared to Apple's products. But in this case it was used as "desktop computer", which sounded strange to me as I consider laptops, however portable, to be personal computers.

I agree with all of that -- and regret the recent trend of using "PC" to mean desktop as opposed to laptop -- but what does any of that have to do with Apple's marketing?

You don't think Apple's marketing is behind the aforementioned recent trend; do you?

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