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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

#331

Post by NathanielK »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #301
tomxor wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annecdata: I've never had a desktop or laptop fan fail on me, and I'm the kind of person who keeps them for a decade. Spinning HDDs (Toshiba bearings), keyboards and hinges on the other hand have all failed on me multiple times, in macs. but the fans kept going. The keyboards were the last thing to fail in the 2009 design, they last about 10 years. Also while were at it, mechanical failure isn't always the biggest co…

I bought a cheap M1 Air model (only the ram is upgraded to 16gb) at $1030 Apple-refurbished. My intent is to try and sell it a bit before the 1 year mark. For some of the reasons you mentioned (specially the last paragraph), but also the battery and the general non-reparability. It almost feels like a consumable item, compared to my previous Thinkpad. Here's the thing: all the other laptops I was looking at cost at l…

> Here's the thing: all the other laptops I was looking at cost at least twice the price. High-end Thinkpads, my second choice, almost 3 times.

It shouldn't be this way, but most of the big enterprise retailers have ridiculous sticker prices. Unlike Apple, volume buyers get steep discounts, and individuals are expected to wait for a discount.

Ask around online and you'll find it's fairly simple to get fancy Thinkpads for half-off.

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

#332

Post by NathanielK »

tomxor wrote: post #145
zitterbewegung wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most likely thing to break on a computer is the fan itself. Apple has revised the display hinge and the keys have been redesigned. I don't know of any reports of the Speakers breaking or a Taptic Engine (other than people using Bootcamp on Intel MacBook Pros but that isn't an option anymore) but since there is no long term data on all of those components the only thing that I would question would be the redesigne…

Annecdata: I've never had a desktop or laptop fan fail on me, and I'm the kind of person who keeps them for a decade. Spinning HDDs (Toshiba bearings), keyboards and hinges on the other hand have all failed on me multiple times, in macs. but the fans kept going. The keyboards were the last thing to fail in the 2009 design, they last about 10 years. Also while were at it, mechanical failure isn't always the biggest co…

Fan life really depends on usecase. The bearings roughly have a certain number of cycles, and most consumers just don't push them that hard.

For example a tiny 1000 RPM server fan running 24/7 rotates 5 billion times per year. My desktop spends most of it's time off, but if I game on it 10% of the time it's big fans might be at 1000RPM. This is only 50 million cycles per year.

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

#333

Post by lathiat »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #319
lukevp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Recently I visited the Apple store and compared the latest 11 inch iPad Air (A14 processor) and iPad Pro (M1 processor) models side-by-side. I loaded up Apple’s website in Safari and scrolled. The Pro is noticeably butter-smooth, while the Air stutters. My iPhone also stutters in the same way, but it’s never bothered me before. It’s only after looking at the performance of the M1-driven iPad Pro that I knew to look f…

Yeah you really don’t notice 60Hz scrolling until you try 120Hz scrolling. It’s a bit like you didn’t notice Retina displays until you tried one then looked at a pre-retina display. It’s crazy how you adapt to perceive things once you see something better/different.

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

#334

Post by theevilsharpie »

smoldesu wrote: post #236
halotrope wrote: post #5

It makes me a bit sad that for ten years I took it for granted that Moore’s law is dead and notebooks are constantly overheating incapable computers just to learn that the whole issue was Intel messing up their process nodes.

That's not entirely true: Intel's year-over-year gains weren't particularly great, but that's because they tended to use more refined manufacturing processes on older, cheaper nodes. Lo and behold, when Apple decides to go all-in on the 5nm process, the entire world's semiconductor distribution network screeches to a halt, and we get the worst silicon drought in decades. It's a bit of a moot-point. I prefer AMD proce…

> Until Apple can find a way to challenge their single-core performance, Intel will still be leading a class of their own.

M1's single-core performance beat out all but the highest-end AMD and Intel desktop chips at the time of its release.

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

#335

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

lathiat wrote: post #333
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I visited the Apple store and compared the latest 11 inch iPad Air (A14 processor) and iPad Pro (M1 processor) models side-by-side. I loaded up Apple’s website in Safari and scrolled. The Pro is noticeably butter-smooth, while the Air stutters. My iPhone also stutters in the same way, but it’s never bothered me before. It’s only after looking at the performance of the M1-driven iPad Pro that I knew to look f…

Yeah you really don’t notice 60Hz scrolling until you try 120Hz scrolling. It’s a bit like you didn’t notice Retina displays until you tried one then looked at a pre-retina display. It’s crazy how you adapt to perceive things once you see something better/different.

Maybe I should hold off on the iPad Pro until I can get 120Hz on all my devices.

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

#336

Post by wyclif »

noduerme wrote: post #286

Funny. I spent a summer in 2009 in Vietnam, working on one of those old unbeatable Powerbook silver models, in an apartment without air conditioning. The fan would run at full power constantly, and finally gave up the ghost. There was no way to repair it where I was. So what I used to do was keep a bunch of Wired Magazines in the freezer, and put them under the laptop, changing them out every 20 minutes or so. The ma…

SE Asian humidity was brutal on those older Intel-based MBPs. Even with A/C, it's still so damned hot and humid that you don't have to push the rig too hard before the fans start spinning. And heat is the enemy of Li-ion batteries.

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

#337

Post by f1refly »

SilverRed wrote: post #317
f1refly wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively you can always use a voip client which doesnt need half your systems resources. Picking audio channels was a normal feature decades ago.

>Alternatively you can always use No I can't. The IM platform is decided for me already so I can not pick something else. And the company will pick the platform with the most features / integrations which is currently Teams. MacOS drawing a line in the RAM sand at 16GB with most on 8GB will likely encourage programs to be more efficient rather than be a burden to the user. As we have seen with mobile platforms, progr…

> The IM platform is decided for me already so I can not pick something else

then i am not sorry for you.

> And the company will pick the platform with the most features / integrations which is currently Teams.

The company will pick whatever is best suited for the task at hand. my employer in europe chose mattermost on company premises. i can use it with the matterhorn ncurses client and it's a joy to watch it consume 0% cpu time and a negligible amount of memory.

Besides, this was originally about discord, which hopefully no company uses to manage internal communications(?) When not working you are totally free to choose whatever communication infrastructure you want and are not bound to whatever your employer thinks is best.

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

#338

Post by mimsee »

maxioatic wrote: post #307
dbtc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can do this with xbar [0] (which is also just a super cool app). Looks like someone even made one specifically for checking the CPU throttling speed [1] [0] - https://xbarapp.com/docs/plugins/System.html [1] - https://xbarapp.com/docs/plugins/System/cpu-thermal-throttle...

[1] seems to use 'pmset -g therm' behind the scenes and it seems to not work on my M1 Air.

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

#339

Post by ronenlh »

Excellent idea. Adding audible feedback to the runtime is an effortless way to know what’s going on under the hood. I submitted a post about this concept last week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808113

In it I add midi sounds to the system handlers from nodejs’ event loop.

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

#340

Post by SilverRed »

f1refly wrote: post #337
SilverRed wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Alternatively you can always use No I can't. The IM platform is decided for me already so I can not pick something else. And the company will pick the platform with the most features / integrations which is currently Teams. MacOS drawing a line in the RAM sand at 16GB with most on 8GB will likely encourage programs to be more efficient rather than be a burden to the user. As we have seen with mobile platforms, progr…

> The IM platform is decided for me already so I can not pick something else then i am not sorry for you. > And the company will pick the platform with the most features / integrations which is currently Teams. The company will pick whatever is best suited for the task at hand. my employer in europe chose mattermost on company premises. i can use it with the matterhorn ncurses client and it's a joy to watch it consum…

This is besides the point anyway. The average user does not need more than 8GB of memory to do their average tasks. Everything they do is possible in 8GB which is proven by the fact mobile OSs and ipados do it just fine. The only reason for the average user to have 32gb of ram is because most desktop apps are insanely bloated. If Apple caps the platform at 16gb but most users use 8gb, it means developers will make their platform efficient enough to run well on 8GB since all users and the developers have that amount of ram.

If MS teams does not work properly on the 16GB macbook then you report a bug and they will fix it but if it doesn't work on a regular PC it is more likely they will tell you to just get one with more ram.

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