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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

#141

Post by detaro »

lucb1e wrote: post #139
Animats wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yes. This has been an ongoing problem with "sleep mode", which users think means "off", but isn't really. Some Windows docs for hardware makers indicated that "sleep mode" should stop the fans, to maintain the illusion that the machine is "off". Some machines do that, and some stick to temperature-based fan control, so the fans continue to turn if the machine is warm. Some users then complain that sleep mode does…

Wait, why would the device get warm during suspend? Or do you mean a different kind of sleep mode? I'm thinking of the state where it just refreshes DRAM to keep its contents (this does not produce much heat at all) and everything else is off: that definitely does not require the cpu fan to run because the cpu is not processing any instructions during that state.

I assume not get warm, still is warm from running beforehand.

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

#142

Post by freeone3000 »

skavi wrote: post #138
porknubbins wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a hardware nerd I always kind of like that moment when the CPU starts really working and you hear fans spin way up. The auditory feedback is like a throwback to a more mechanical age, like a manual transmission vehicle where you can judge when to shift by engine speed.

I like it if the laptop only starts the fan up when the device actually is working. Not constantly turning it on and off during like light web browsing. My 2018 MBP 13” and the Surface Laptop I’ve tried did that well. An XPS 15 I’m currently using does not.

Web browsing isn't a light activity anymore. Web pages consume more memory and more CPU than my text editor

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

#143

Post by skavi »

ajconway wrote: post #120
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…

This is not entirely accurate. iOS indeed uses a client-server UI model, kind of similar to X11. Along with submitting “widget” hierarchy updates, it also supports submitting “animations”. The downside is that the animation states are not truly accessible by the actual app after it submits them. The scrolling animation is 99.9% of the time implemented as a client-side animation timer submitting non-animated hierarchy…

> Along with submitting “widget” hierarchy updates, it also supports submitting “animations”.

Is that how all these third party iOS apps all have completely consistent “pop” animations on long press?

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

#145

Post by tomxor »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #129
philistine wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use one too and there are still some moving parts. The keyboard keys, the speakers, the display hinge and the Taptic Engine. Those are the parts I'm looking at intently as the ones that will fail on me, especially the hinge.

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 concern these days, Apple has had nVidia GPU issues (soldier and fab issues) in the past where they ended up underclocking them in a firmware patch in order to push failures out of warrantee.

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

#146

Post by johnebgd »

marcosdumay wrote: post #140
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…

Is this a "hardware have gotten fast enough" situation? My latest laptop (Ryzen 7) takes a lot of beating before putting the fans at an audible speed. I've never seen this happen in laptops before either. (But well, my last one didn't slow down either, it just started making some noise.)

My Core i9 laptop has fans on just about as soon as it boots.

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

#147

Post by lucb1e »

detaro wrote: post #141
lucb1e wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, why would the device get warm during suspend? Or do you mean a different kind of sleep mode? I'm thinking of the state where it just refreshes DRAM to keep its contents (this does not produce much heat at all) and everything else is off: that definitely does not require the cpu fan to run because the cpu is not processing any instructions during that state.

I assume not get warm, still is warm from running beforehand.

Hmm if that were necessary, then all power states should keep the fan on for a while after running, so a device that was shut down would also keep the fans on and there would be no need to put in a requirements document that the fans must turn off to give the illusion of having shut down? To my understanding though, if no new heat is created (usually mainly by processors like CPU or GPU), keeping the fans on is not necessary in regular laptops or desktops.

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

#148

Post by forrestthewoods »

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.

The problem is now my work desktop is a 32-core Threadripper w/ huge GPU and way too much ram.

It’s kinda nice knowing that if my computer ever slows down it’s because of bad programming and not having a too slow computer.

I want to like laptops. I really really do. But they’re slower, have bad keyboards, and have tiny screens. Or I’m docked and the fact that it’s a laptop isn’t meaningful.

That said, I can’t fricken wait to see Apple build a beast of a desktop with their silicon. I just really really hope the GPU doesn’t suck. Lack of good GPU on Mac is a huge problem for certain lines of work.

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

#149

Post by leppr »

ryanSrich wrote: post #119
hackathonguy wrote: post #32

Wondering if it's just me: I bought an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, based on reports saying that RAM management is much more effective than with Intel CPUs. Ever since, I'm really struggling with load management. I typically have Chrome open with 20-30 tabs, plus a couple of Electron apps (Notion, Slack, Google Calendar), and my MacBook frequently slows down to a crawl or gets stuck entirely. Simple commands - "cl…

Can anyone explain to me the psychology of having 30 tabs open? Why not just bookmark the URLs to an ephemeral folder or something? Having more than 10 tabs open is beyond stressful for me, and honestly I can’t see how having more open would make anyone more productive. Really curious to learn about other workflows and excessive tab use is one I’m morbidly curious about.

Tabs are like temporary bookmarks. I use 1 window per task and usually open links in new tabs. I don't need to do anything to pause a task: simply minimize the window and the tab unloader extension does the work of automatically keeping my RAM from overflowing.

When returning to the task, I just focus the window and instantly have a picture of my previous progression. In case of a computer crash or restart, it's been years since the Firefox session restore function ever failed me. That step in booting up the computer is quite painful though, the browser can take a good 60 seconds to restore the previous session.

When I'm done with a task for good, I just close the window. Workspaces help in keeping my Taskbar and Alt+Tab workflow clean as well. I often have 1000+ tabs "open".

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