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

fanfan.rambo.codes

351–360 of 454 posts

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

#351

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…

With the introduction of M1, it's hard to find any use of paper magazines these days.

If I wait long enough, maybe I can sell my collection of 90s Wired for more than that stupid Mario 64 cart ;D

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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, the M1 feels very performant with 8gb (I have MBP and Mini 8gb variants) compared to my 16gb Intel MBP and my 32gb Hackintosh. That said - it’s not magic. 30 tabs in Chrome is a lot if you’re not using a tab suspender extension. But one thing I do notice is that when a Rosetta 2 app is running, the entire machine seems to take a hit. I would check the architecture of your apps and see if you have any x86…

Lol 30 tabs is a lot? I'm running 32 gb ram on windows i7-6700 3.4 ghz on mini ATX and currently have 883 tabs open, using marvelous suspender and few other tweaks, but still have 95 windows opens (1 tab typically alive in each window minimum excluding my suspension blacklist...). Also have photoshop, notion, and a few other apps going and am running smoothly at 40-70% cpu utilization and 85% memory...

> 883 tabs open

There cannot be a good reason to do this, I start to get anxious at 20-30

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

#353
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> plus a couple of Electron apps I’m afraid that might be your problem right there :(

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.

Teams is a horrible abomination on so many levels. fragmented apps, auth, performance, it’s all a mess. Recently they took away the ability to do :emojis:

I believe it just exists to make people suffer

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

#354

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.

Someone else in this thread was bragging about having more than 800 tabs open

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

#355

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…

That's not because of the processor. It's because the newest iPad Pro has a 120hz display and the other devices that you were comparing to have a 60hz display.

While 60hz screen refreshes are less smooth than 120hz, the small (but noticeable) of a difference due to refresh rates wouldn't be correctly describable as "stutter".

The M1 processor makes a real difference. I have both the M1 and the most recent non-M1 iPad Pro's.

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

#356
post #42

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.

What I really want is a menu bar widget that detects apps using 100% CPU for more than a minute and offers to `kill -9` them. Has anyone made that?

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

#357

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…

I feel like I am the only one who doesn't hoard browser tabs like everyone I read here. Why 20-30? Why not close the unnecessary stuff or bookmark if that's important?

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

#358
I bought an iMac Pro in 2019 merely because it had the most advanced cooling system in the Appleverse - i. e. compared to a high end maxed out regular iMac I probably spent 1000 EUR just to not be bothered by fan noises when doing audio work. Totally worth it after getting frustrated to no end when using the atrocious 2018 Macbook Pro. While the timing of my purchase probably wasn't particularly "smart", I applaud Apple for having understood and fixed this problem in their new line up. Definitely looking forward to the more fleshed out M1 laptops next year.

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

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why does linux ux feel slower?

Because in many cases, it is. Unfortunately, there isn't as much communication between the GUI people and the kernel people in the Linux community as there is between those same groups at Apple Inc. Not to mention, there are multiple competing groups of GUI people in the Linux community making coordination across these levels difficult. Also, there are many competing interests working on the kernel who might oppose k…

I never felt the UI responsive difference between Linux and MacOS but Windows (including freshly installed on powerful many-core machines when) is a different story. The number one reason I ever switched from Windows to Linux is the latter always feeling way more swift - UI responsiveness always remaining perfect and some background tasks also working much faster. And I never actually used lightweight WMs - only KDE, GNOME and XFCE. The first time I've noticed some slowness in Lunux was on RaspberryPI (4, with the default LXDE).

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

#360
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"PC" was "personal computer" years before the IBM PC. Just look at old computer magazines. The whole reason the phrase "IBM PC" existed was to differentiate it from the other PCs that already existed. "IBM" was the adjective. "PC" was the noun. Because of its success in offices, "IBM PC" became just "PC" the same way other words like "omnibus" became just "bus" because it's simpler to say.

As I recall, the most widely used term early on was "microcomputer", to distinguish the small home computers from the larger "minicomputers" (e.g. the DEC PDP-11 of blessed memory). The term "personal computer" was also in use, but the use of "PC" was not common until after the introduction of the IBM model 5150 (whose actual product name was the "IBM Personal Computer"). Since then, you might refer to any of a varie…

Lots of Apple’s print ads in the 70s used the term Personal Computer: http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/MiscAds2/1977IntroApple... http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/MiscAds2/AisFor1.jpg http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/MiscAds2/ad24.jpg
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