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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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171–180 of 454 posts

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

#171
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I'm sorry, I have an Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra with 120mhz. Using my girlfriends iPhone 12 makes me dizzy.

120hz is something you don't notice much when you enable it, but you definitely notice when it's gone.

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

#172
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I confirm. Embedded nodes each take a few hundreds of megabyte. It looked cool when we had 2 electron apps out there, now with so many of them good by ram.not mentioning apps developed in a few months rather than years, packed with features to become more memory hungry than the OS. MS Team is a particular offender.

Evergreen webviews baked into the OS are the next frontier of desktop app development. They can share a renderer and have much lower memory usage per app as a result - see the changes in Windows 11. Couple that with a lighter weight desktop compatibility shim to break out of the sandbox conditionally (like Tauri does in Rust) and this architecture can be totally fine. The issue isn’t the concept of using web technolo…

This will never be the same as Electron due to differences in the various rendering engines (e.g, Webkit2/WKWebView/WebView2 all have subtle differences), and this isn't accounting for version differences.

The reason people ship Electron is because Electron is literally the same thing wherever you shove it. You can search on this very forum for comments from the dev who migrated Slack from per-platform-WebViews to Electron.

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

#173
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what made apple give the iPad Pro such an awful screen though, considering all the software optimisations that they do. I got the M1 iPad a month ago, and the screen has absolutely horrendous ghosting issues, like, what is this? An LCD from 2001? Just open the settings app, and quickly scroll the options up and down - white text on the black background leaves such a visible smudge, it bothers me massively wh…

Edit: the parent commenter does not have a miniLED iPad. If you have the 12.9” M1 iPad, the ghosting is likely due to the new miniLED backlight which was introduced with that model. This backlight is not static, but tracks to content in order to increase effective contrast (similar to FALD backlights on higher end LCD TVs). If the backlight does not track the LCD content fast enough, there can be ghosting. In additio…

I’m guessing it must be an issue with those new miniLED screens, or some other significant generational problem. I have two older 12.9” iPad Pros, one 1st generation and one 2nd generation (the first with the 120hz display). They are both excellent displays with no such issues with motion or ghosting.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. I've always thought it was more of a result of our current display technology? Digital displays buffer an entire frame before they display it. Sometimes several frames. And the refresh rate is usually 60 Hz so each buffered frame adds a delay of 16 ms. CRTs on the other hand have basically zero latency because the signal coming in directly controls the intensity of the beam as it draws the picture. Anyway, is it…

I don't think that LCD buffer anything. I've experienced screen tearing which should not happen with buffering. Most applications implement some kind of vsync which introduces buffering and related delays indeed. Best option is to use adaptive sync and get rid of vsync. But support for this technology is surprisingly not mature, it works mostly in games.

Screen tearing happens when the software swaps buffers on the GPU while the GPU is in the middle of reading out a buffer to send to the monitor. That tearing has nothing at all to do with whatever buffering is or isn't happening in the display itself, because the discontinuity is actually present in the data stream sent to the display.

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

#175
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'm also trying to figure out a solution for remote access/file sync. I've been using resilio sync to sync my files between my laptop and desktop. It works great, but it destroys battery life on my laptop, so I've been looking for solutions. Syncthing is next on my to try list, but its very similar to resilio sync so I don't have high hopes. iCloud drive/dropbox/etc have issues with syncing git repos, so not sure abo…

MEGA has been working pretty nicely for me also with Git. I use it on a macOS desktop and a Linux laptop. Only thing is the mobile app isn’t the most polished compared to Apple’s Files for example, but I don’t need it often.

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the render loop of the OS is decoupled from the app Can you elaborate on this? If you do too much work on the main thread in iOS, it's going to hang the UI. Isn't the main thread the "render thread"? Do scroll views have some kind of special escape hatch to get off the main thread for continuing to scroll if the main thread is blocked with loading the content?

I believe the point is that the "main thread" for your iOS application, is not the main thread of the OS. They're totally decoupled.

Err, same with Android? And every OS ever. That's just standard process isolation. Or am I misunderstanding something?

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

#177
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evergreen webviews baked into the OS are the next frontier of desktop app development. They can share a renderer and have much lower memory usage per app as a result - see the changes in Windows 11. Couple that with a lighter weight desktop compatibility shim to break out of the sandbox conditionally (like Tauri does in Rust) and this architecture can be totally fine. The issue isn’t the concept of using web technolo…

>It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies. Programmers have ported Emacs to the native GUIs for MacOS, Windows and Linux (and 80% of respondents to a recent Emacs survey prefer to use one of those GUIs rather than Emacs's TTY interface), so "largest of the large companies" is going a little too far.

> Programmers have ported Emacs to the native GUIs for MacOS, Windows and Linux

That doesn't mean it would be commercially worthwhile to employ them to do so; volunteers do lots of things that wouldn't worthwhile to employ people to do. OTOH, wanting volunteers doesn't make it happen.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> Or I’m docked and the fact that it’s a laptop isn’t meaningful. You might be underestimating the value in that. I’ve been working off of MacBooks since 2011, and for almost all of that time I’ve had them docked and hooked up to multiple monitors, and working just like a desktop. But if I ever need to go anywhere, meet a client, travel, go to another room/office, I just unplug and go. If power goes, I don’t lose any…

My primary home computer for several years was a docked laptop. Overall I was disappointed and went back to a full desktop.

> If power goes, I don’t lose anything, the laptop is still running.

What kind of monster doesn’t use a UPS!? =P

I mostly work in games and VR. Maybe someday there will be a laptop that doesn’t suck for game development. Sadly that day has not yet come.

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

#179

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…

Nope. Got the 8gb too. I have xcode, firefox, safari, mail and a lot more. No issues, apart from xcode because it sucks, and has sucked for years.

Chrome is your problem.

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

#180

The M1 line up seems great but... I'm very surprised by all the comments from people discovering what a quiet computer is like in 2021. I've been running PCs so quiet they're inaudible since, what, nearly two decades now!? (since basically the first consumer SSDs started hitting the market: don't remember when that was but it was a long time ago) An ultra quiet PSU, a gigantic CPU heatsink, a huge CPU fan running so…

So you’re comparing what sounds like a hand rolled custom build with a no brainer laptop that’s a third of an inch though.
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