10 ms·
Tell HN: MacOS turns off the fans when Siri is listening
This is something that struck me a few moments ago, because it's very logical but completely unexpected. I have a Macbook Pro that's doing some hard work with the fans on loud, and calling Siri turns the fans off the period that Siri is listening.
It's pretty amazing someone thought of that.
- ianbertolacci 10y agoIs there a timeout?
- vorotato 10y agoand thus an exploit was born.
- ianbertolacci 10y agoYa, I cant imagine that they'd forget something like that. Certainly on my iPhone Siri stops listening, which should on the PC restart the fan. I would be very entertained if you could melt chips with an overly patient Siri.
- mikeash 10y agoI'd assume it wouldn't be a timeout, but a higher temperature threshold. If the machine is on the verge of melting already then you wouldn't want to turn off the fans at all.
- ianbertolacci 10y agoThats a good point, and I hope thats what they do. Im not Mac OS familiar, can other applications ask Siri to listen in? If they pause fans regardless of temperature, then it would be interesting to see if damage could be caused by an app running hot then repeatedly going to Siri. I bet theres a way to test their cutoff mechanism. Maybe someone could run some serious bench-marking apps (maybe more CPU bound ones) and see if Siri still kills the fan at high temperatures. Could someone potentially damage their very expensive machine to satisfy my curiosity?
- burke 10y agoIf the machine is on the verge of melting already, it's likely just going to hard-shutdown below the OS level. All this could really open them up to is a hard-shutdown, and I imagine they would have implemented this as a higher threshold, not a complete disable -- at least, it seems like a really easy problem to foresee and circumvent.
- mikeash 10y agoGreat point. You might make it shut off, but you should never be able to damage anything, no matter how clever the OS tries to be.
- DigitalJack 10y agoyes. I've got 3 cores pegged now, fan shuts off for a few seconds and if I don't say anything it bails and the fans come back. just takes about 10 seconds. edit: I was able to keep activating siri and have the fans off while 4 cores pegged for quite a while. I don't know if CPU throttling kicked in or not, not sure how to check.
- ianbertolacci 10y agoWe were also wondering about existing temperature conditions. For example, I might be running some super benchmark that pegs the core temperature high. What happens when Siri turns on? If it still shuts down the fan thats bad. I could potentially keep prompting Siri (to turn off the fan) and drive the temperature a bit higher.
- DigitalJack 10y agoI don't have an app for monitoring cpu temps right now, and don't know if there is a CLI way to do it. I was able to keep the fan off for probably a minute before I stopped. I am interested to find out if intel's cpu throttling kicked in. edit: installed Intel Power Gadget. with 4 cores pegged (4 actual cores), the CPU was turbo-boosted (3.0GHz on my laptop). As I prevented the fans from running via Siri, the cpu throttled back to normal rated speed. Temperature varied by a few degrees C hovering around 99C. I did this for approximately a minute or so. It didn't go below the rated speed (2.5GHz on my laptop). edit2: I did it again with 4 cores pegged and 4 HT cores pegged. It didn't throttle below 2.5, but I did see that the "yes" processes were throttled back. when I glanced before stopping, they were all at 80% instead of 95+%
- burke 10y agoThere's no default utility for this. There's some sysctl values for the CPU and the GPU but they don't actually give you a temperature. There's an API for this in IOKit. Easiest way I've found to get at it on the CLI is: gem install istats istats cpu temp | awk '{gsub(/[^0-9\.]/,"",$3);print $3}'
- sudhirj 10y agoSiri itself has a timeout, at which point it tells you it can't hear you and goes back to sleep.
- bdcrazy 10y agoMy car does this when doing voice commands for radio or Phone.
- crymer11 10y agoAnd only if you're using the internal microphone. I was trying to test this and couldn't reproduce it until I realized I was using headphones with a mic. Unplugged the headphones, activated Siri and the fan instantly turned off.
- AstralStorm 10y agoI wonder how they prevent their CPUs from burning up when they do this and there happens to be some kind of heavy load in the background... Is someone up for a free warranty Macbook replacement? ;)
- jlawer 10y agoThe intel CPUs have pretty good thermal management. I suspect what will happen is the CPU will just start throttling itself to cool down if you kept making the OS spin down the fans. Even back in the P4 days there were videos of people ripping Heat sinks off intel chips while running and the system throttling down and speeding back up as the heat sink is replaced.
- kstenerud 10y agoThey have to. Any time my MBP is working really hard, say, compiling, or talking on skype, or watching a video, or loading a web page, or browsing the filesystem, the fan ramps up like a turbine. It gets so bad that the microphone can't accurately pick up my voice.
- alexbock 10y agoAre you using an older model that hasn't been cleaned in a while? I use an early 2013 15" MBP and the only time I ever hear the fans is when I'm doing compilation with 8 threads (100% CPU usage on all four cores).
- DigitalJack 10y agoI've got a 2015 15" mbpr, and it doesn't take much for the fans to reach noisy speeds. one core pegged will do it after a few seconds. I run into this a lot with the new docker daemon. edit: just timed it (yes > /dev/null), it takes about 60 seconds of one core pegged to ramp up the fan to audible. And I'm used to silent so audible is noisy to me. Two cores pegged gets loud.
- givinguflac 10y agoHonestly it sounds like you may want to get your fans checked out. Or perhaps you work in a totally silent environment? Loud is of course subjective, but my rMBP has the quietest laptop fans I've ever used.
- DigitalJack 10y agoOh, by far this is the quietest laptop I've used. Most of the time. If I'm playing a game or docker pegs a cpu, that changes. It may still be better than other laptops, I don't know anymore, but once the fans get about 3k they start to get pretty loud. Below that I don't really hear them.
- jrowley 10y ago
- jxy 10y agoDoes it stop the CPU hungry process too?
- carlosfvp 10y agoGood point, otherwise the hardware might damage with constant usage of Siri, or is this the actual plan of Apple?
- n1000 10y agoWhenever the CPU gets too hot the Macbooks throttle. So I would say so.
- jxy 10y agoWhy the down votes? Isn't it important? If I'm running some CPU intensive processes, I would hope it could send a SIGSTOP to the process so it wouldn't burn itself. Throttling CPU frequency would help, but I expect siri needs some CPU too.
- stuaxo 10y agoThey probably thought of it because they were getting unexpectedly bad results using the internal microphone. I guess it ramps the priority of everything else down as well.
- mnovaes 10y agoHopefully not for long enough to fry your circuitry. :)
- n1000 10y agoIt's been around for a while already. The dictation feature in OS X 10.10 already knows that trick. The thought of the little thinks is what still makes me stick with OS X.
- hashkb 10y ago> The thought of the little [things] is what still makes me stick with OS X. This rubs me the wrong way because it's a vicious (positive, I guess) cycle. You keep buying iPhones, they stockpile billions in cash, and they can "think of the little things" (which is really just "How can we make OS X more like iOS and less suitable for power users?"). It's sad... but I can't imagine anyone taking the time to hack this together on their *nix laptop, and even if they did, it's not likely to be portable until a handful of other tinkerers donate their time. This will bring the downvotes, but the way we're stuck on Apple these days is far worse than the MS lock-in we revolted about in the 90s.
- throwanem 10y agoCan it really be called "lock-in" when it's an effect of changes which to many people make the product more desirable for its own sake? Microsoft in the 90s wasn't really known for such behavior, to say the very least.
- AstralStorm 10y agoThe alternate, Aldous Huxley version of lock-in, instead of the George Orwell version of lock-in.
- throwanem 10y agoDo you think it's possible that such comparisons grow dull with overuse?
- tedunangst 10y agoHow dare a company make a product people like!
- jsonau 10y agoWould noise cancelling(ANC) help in this case, even if the mic and fan are near each other?
- AstralStorm 10y agoYes, a lot. This is a simple case for a noise canceller. Stationary known wideband source of noise.
- DiabloD3 10y agoMy MBPr 13" (Late 2012) turns off the left fan and left speaker when the microphone (which is on the left side) is in use. This is entirely in software, and Windows 10 does not also do the same. OSX has done this since 10.8, which came with the MBPr.
- Unklejoe 10y agoI guess Windows is at a disadvantage here since it doesn't know the physical layout of the components on the hardware it's running on. It would be up to the laptop manufacturers to include a driver to do such.
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago> It would be up to the laptop manufacturers to include a driver to do such. Which means it's not going to happen, and if it does, it's not going to work right. The "IBM Compatible" or "Wintel" commodity hardware platform has proven to be a powerful force for making computers less expensive and easier to use, but there's something to be said for vertical integration.
- yuhong 10y agoI once wondered what would happen if Intel bought Compaq in 1991, and eventually AMD does something similar in the early 2000s (it was in 2006 that they bought ATI for example). It would not quite be vertical integration, but the point is that it would be still a step forward.
- fractal618 10y agoSo, can I overheat my friends laptop, by saying "Siri" and proceeding to read war and peace?
- wingerlang 10y agoIf they thought about turning it off to increase the clarity of the speech, they probably thought of turning them on in case the computer is about to explode.
- nikolay 10y agoIt's kinda stupid - instead of intelligently filtering the noise (it knows the acoustics, the RPM of the fan, etc).
- sclangdon 10y agoSince when were simple solutions considered stupid? If filtering audio (which will probably only work the CPU, and thus the fan, more) is smarter than stopping a fan, I must be as dumb as bricks.
- nikolay 10y agoIt's a simple non-solution as noise is not coming only from the fan. Yes, you're reducing one that's easy to eliminate, but the problem still exists.
- p333347 10y agoNever used a Mac but this seems more like a workaround for the noise filtering problem.
- nom 10y agoYes agreed, it really sounds like a workaround. They improve the detection rate by reducing the noise floor. I find it interesting that they took the time to implement it, it must have cost a considerable amount of work that they could have put into filter algorithms instead. Fan noise sounds like an artifact that is easy to filter, but I'm probably wrong.