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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

#361

Post by gberger »

SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #253
tbrock wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont understand why they sell the pro. The touchbar is rubbish and the air has 99% the same performance. Yeah the pro can go faster for longer without throttle but its heavier and doesnt have those physical f-keys. Its more expensive too… not sure why anyone would buy it over the air. Two more usb-c but you can only hook in one external monitor! Also 200 more nits on screen but… is it really that important? I cant…

Obviously, to people who choose to pay for it. I produce video news and the Touch Bar is integral to my workflow. Just because something is not useful to you doesn’t mean it’s useless.

I'm curious, how is the touch bar used in your workflow?

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

#362

Post by samplatt »

laurent92 wrote: post #197
thelopa wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I replaced all my spinning disks with SSDs and fans with ultra quiet ones I realized just how much I relied on fan noise to signal things. E.g. if my computer isn’t visibly on, the fan/disk noise tells me whether I need to power it on or just wake it. I’ve had to start changing my habits as a result.

And it dates back from 1988 for me. I’d always rely on the nice scratching sound of the HDD and the LED to know whether my computer had crashed or was just loading. There was no need for a spinning wheel when you could hear the data getting loaded ;)

I could tell what boot phase my 386 + 486 desktops were at by listening to the ticking of the HDD heads. When I installed Win95 on the 486 (the poor thing), the time until the o/s was finished with the drive quadrupled.

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

#363

Post by mszcz »

bjoli wrote: post #341
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…

My old clevo laptop has an i7 in it with fans that sound like hair dryers. It never throttles. I would never buy a laptop where throttling was a presumed solution to thermal issues, because I want to get work done. Pre-m1 macbooks were awful. Even worse than top of the line dell laptops. I have always felt like a minority for expecting a 2k laptop to actually be able to get work done. If I would ever be able to run L…

If you're looking for a PC that's not a headache to put together, is semi-mobile, powerful and quiet have a look at AMD-based gaming PCs.

I got a Lenovo Legion with 4800H(8/16)/32GB/2T/GTX1650/144Hz a couple of months ago. That's a really sufficiently cooled system. It almost never spins up the fans, it's powerful, has a lot of space, no RGBs and has a super boring, tasteless, anti-theft design that never goes out of style (but the last one is more of a personal preference ;) It's been great.

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

#364

Post by jcelerier »

sooheon wrote: post #300
heavyset_go wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing macOS on M1 does very cleverly is scheduling threads on cores. IIRC all UI threads run on high-power cores, while all background tasks run on low-power ones. So they never interfere with each other. iOS probably does the same; Android probably does none of this. This feature has been in the Linux kernel for ages[1]. Android and ChromeOS are based on the Linux kernel, and have had this feature for quite so…

So why does linux ux feel slower?

On the exact same hardware linux always felt much faster to me, I remember doing stuff like resizeing finder windows vs KDE's dolphin, finder would be all janky and laggy and KDE wouldn't miss a frame

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

#365

Post by nathancahill »

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…

I did this in the Sonoran desert with my 15" MBP when the temperature was pushing 50C. Had a stack of those giant ice packs from some meal delivery service. Worked with the laptop sitting on the ice pack and a towel until it was completely thawed after 4-5 hours.

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

#366

Post by drevil-v2 »

quenix wrote: post #345
bjoli wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My old clevo laptop has an i7 in it with fans that sound like hair dryers. It never throttles. I would never buy a laptop where throttling was a presumed solution to thermal issues, because I want to get work done. Pre-m1 macbooks were awful. Even worse than top of the line dell laptops. I have always felt like a minority for expecting a 2k laptop to actually be able to get work done. If I would ever be able to run L…

FYI, the one M1 MacBook which throttles under heavy load is the MacBook Air, which is actually a 1k laptop ($999). The MacBook Pro has fans and basically never throttles as I understand from others.

Absolutely untrue. My M1 Air does not skip a beat at all even under sustained load. Barely gets warm.

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

#367

Post by saint-loup »

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…

About the "sonification" of computer processes there is this experiment, recently shared on HN:

What Does the Event Loop Sound Like? https://medium.com/att-israel/what-does-the-event-loop-sound...

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

#368

Post by rbanffy »

mthoms wrote: post #280
rsfinn wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to look into [Turbo Boost Switch]( http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com ), which in my experience does a pretty good job of keeping the CPU cool enough that the fans stay pretty quiet, with a minor impact on performance. (It's easy to turn it on and off from the menu bar, in case you need to turn the knob up to 11 and are willing to hear the fans again.)

This worked well for me also.

Thanks for the tip, folks. I passed it to my IT department for checking (PII, sensitive client data, etc) and, hopefully, approval.

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

#369

Post by sprafa »

gberger wrote: post #361
SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, to people who choose to pay for it. I produce video news and the Touch Bar is integral to my workflow. Just because something is not useful to you doesn’t mean it’s useless.

I'm curious, how is the touch bar used in your workflow?

Final Cut Pro most likely.

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

#370

Post by yoz-y »

mlajtos wrote: post #186
yoz-y wrote: post #79

Hm. How about a nice colored Touch Bar widget that would change depending on temperature and load? At least it would make the bar useful.

I don't get the hate for TouchBar. I have the one with the physical Esc key and it proved useful number of times. Fast-forwarding ads on YouTube was nice until I discovered good adblock. Screenshot shortcut always ready. Emoticons ditto. Shortcut to format my code or comment a line of code in Xcode? Yup, thank you.

That was the promise and I was bullish on it. Sadly Apple did nothing to improve on it. A Taptic Engine underneath would go a long way for example. Another thing would be an external keyboard with it.

As for the shortcuts, turns out that keyboard ones work as well. And are easier to hit while looking at the screen. Personally I spend a lot of time in vim, web based IDEs, qtcreator and orthodox file managers. All of these use F-keys most of the time. Cmd-/ is quite universal for comments, and I’ve remapped ctrl/cmd/shift+prtscr to various print screen shortcuts.

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