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Am I the only one who thinks of smartphones and tablets as silent computers? Granted, they can't do what this person's high-spec workstation can do, but they d
by biztos 8y ago
Am I the only one who thinks of smartphones and tablets as silent computers?
Granted, they can't do what this person's high-spec workstation can do, but they do most of the computing tasks most people use (used) noisy fanned computers with clacking disks for and in many cases do those tasks better.
And unless I'm just losing my hearing, my smartphone is completely silent as long as I don't accidentally press the Golem Invoker, er, Siri button.
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- pmcollins 8y agoThe MacBook is (at least in theory) noiseless as well. It has an SSD and no fans.
- sokoloff 8y agoMacBook Air and Pro both have fans. I don’t know the entire Apple line of all time by heart, so there might have been another MacBook that had no fans.
- wilsonnb 8y agoA few Chromebooks fit this description as well, at least they used to. My Samsung Chromebook from 2012 has an ARM processor, solid state storage, and no fans. It is pretty slow by today's standards though. I think several companies make cases for the Intel NUC boards that radiate the heat away and have no fans, too.
- sehugg 8y agoMany of them are still fanless: https://chromebookdb.com/search.php?fanless https://chromebookdb.com/search.php?fanless My Samsung Chromebook 3 gets a touch warm but never uncomfortably so like my 2012 Retina MacBook, which lets you really feel it when your code is inefficient. (Granted, the Chromebook is a lot less powerful)
- _sdegutis 8y agoWhen I go to editfight.com on my rMBP the fans go crazy and it gets super hot. When I visit it on my iPhone it stays the same temperature and is silent. Kind of an extreme example but the principle is the same. Phones are better for sites like this.
- kccqzy 8y agoThe rMBP is very different from the MacBook.
- _sdegutis 8y agoOh I didn't know that. I thought Apple recently shifted the MacBook so that it was more "pro" and the MacBook Pro so that it was less "pro", making them a lot closer to each other, almost identical. I thought I remembered a lot of criticism over that move too, here on HN.
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- ckastner 8y agoFunnily enough, my MacBook Air 2013 produces a buzzing sound on SSD access. It's barely audible, but it's there.
- 1ris 8y agoSo does my Kingston SSD. And the switching of my switching power supply sometimes (rarely) is the loudest thing in my desktop pc.
- hobofan 8y agoMy MacBook Air 2013 is routinely the loudest machine in the room when it's compiling or similar.
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- makapuf 8y agoDoes it have fans? If not, what kind of noise is this ?
- kkylin 8y agoMBAs have fans, the 12" MacBook doesn't.
- analog31 8y agoPossibly inductors vibrating.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago"Coil whine".
- hobofan 8y agoNo, the sound comes mostly from the fans, which when at their maximum start to get loud.
- mcv 8y agoThe Macbook? My Macbook's fans are incredibly noisy. I've already replaced them once, hoping that would fix the issue, but it didn't. Macbook fans are just noisy. At least the 2011 unibody ones.
- heartbreak 8y agoThe Macbook didn't exist in 2011. You're thinking of the Macbook Air or Macbook Pro. The Macbook with no fans was released in mid-2015.
- FabHK 8y agoFirst line of the pertinent Wikipedia article: "The MacBook is a brand of notebook computers manufactured by Apple Inc. from May 2006 to February 2012, and relaunched in 2015." In Jobs' 2x2 matrix, the portable half was initially populated by iBook and PowerBook, later by MacBook and MacBook Pro.
- heartbreak 8y agoAnd yet, in a post referencing a fan-less "Macbook" it's almost certain that the "Macbook" in question is the only fan-less laptop Apple produces, which is coincidentally called simply "Macbook." It's unfortunate that Apple has confusing brand names, but the fact remains that the Macbook indeed has no fans so the original comment who hears fan noise is obviously using a different model of laptop.
- mcv 8y agoOf course there are Macbooks without fans, but the claim that "the macbook has no fans" is a bit too broad and generic to be true. Macbook Pros are also called Macbooks. Older Macbooks are still Macbooks (they seem to be pretty durable). So if you say that recent Macbooks have no fans, that may well be true. But it's not true for all Macbooks.
- heartbreak 8y ago
- RachelF 8y agoThe Dell XPS 13 should also be noiseless when the fan is not on, but many models also suffer from coil whine. I find coil whine a worse background sound than the lower frequency fan hum.
- fredsted 8y agoCan confirm the 12" MacBook is totally noiseless. It's a neat little thing.
- ficklepickle 8y agoI bought an Asus "zenbook" ux305 for this reason. It uses an Intel core M processor, which idle around 800mHz but turbo boost to around 2gHz, which I believe have been discontinued. I was worried about performance, but it has been very acceptable. It depends what you need it for, but I can run 2 monitors, a Linux VM and atom all while streaming HD video. Or I can do light web browsing for 10 hours on battery[1]. I love it. On the rare occasions I need more power, I spin up a spot instance. [1] If you use Linux on a laptop, install "tlp". It optimizes battery life without a noticeable reduction of performance.
- nwah1 8y agoSure, but most mobile OSes don't support a full desktop experience well, and you're limited to bluetooth peripherals only. Unless you have a rare phone that comes with a docking station.
- cestith 8y agoI have an OTG USB hub with Ethernet. Mouse, keyboard, and external drive can plug in all at once, and if I have a place to plug the other end of the cable I get wired network too. It even has power input to drive the peripherals. Add something like GNURoot with the Debian chroot and it's nearly desktop Linux on a tiny screen. It's more of a pain to set up during a meeting than a dedicated docking station would be. It also doesn't currently charge the phone (although there are ways to modify it to do that). It's nice for novelty but a little unwieldy. Using an OTG cable with a keyboard with a built-in hub reduces some of the cable clutter. Some of the Chromebooks and such have no moving parts. I'm probably taking my Pinebook to the next conference I attend.
- chrisper 8y ago>Unless you have a rare phone that comes with a docking station. Can't you just use any USB-C Dockingstation?
- nwah1 8y agoGood point. I guess few people use those since phone OSes don't scale well for desktop use.
- svnsets 8y agoThe latest MacBook is essentially mobile hardware with desktop peripherals and software. Seems like the right way to go rather than bloating a smartphone with desktop software given that the amount of people who want their smartphone to be their only interface to everything is likely a very small minority.
- snops 8y agoNot all phones support all the alternate modes of USB-C, especially display port or HDMI, so display output is often a hurdle.
- saagarjha 8y ago> my smartphone is completely silent as long as I don't accidentally press the Golem Invoker, er, Siri button You can get rid of that sound as well: just flip the switch on the left side of the phone.
- heywire 8y agoI use a Dell Latitude 7370 which is completely silent. It's not the fastest machine, but works fine for running several VMs, Visual Studio, etc.
- gcbw2 8y agocorrect. which makes the top comment pointless (or missing the point?) Under-performant computers can and have been silent for a while. A phone falls into that category. The trouble is making a good performance computer silent. And even the case the article advertises, is pure garbage. I had the smaller ones (and the author should really have bought the black anodized one!). It works fine while underpowered. But as soon as you hit the 5h compile/rendering levels of workload, that thing cannot move heat away without airflow. period.
- greglindahl 8y agoMy desktop is a terminal. A Mac mini makes a great silent terminal.
- TruthSHIFT 8y agoA better title for the article would be "Completely Silent Gaming PC"
- richdougherty 8y ago> ...this system is not meant for gaming...
- grimgrin 8y agoIt still kinda is. They didn’t skimp any more than they had to > Even though this system is not meant to be a gaming rig, there’s no harm in putting in the best GPU you can without blowing the thermals.
- zingmars 8y agoThese days with GPGPU (and crypto) becoming increasingly popular having a good GPU does not automatically imply gaming.
- Dylan16807 8y ago0% of people do (non crypto) GPGPU at home, and the post is lamenting crypto miners for driving prices up.
- whywhywhywhy 8y ago3D artists/motion graphics/video editors do. Check out Octane Render, Redshift, Realflow, After Effects, Premier etc for use cases.
- Dylan16807 8y agoDo those reach 1% of home users with GPUs?
- nsxwolf 8y agoMy iPhone 7 Plus has some crazy coil whine. In a quiet room you can hear it. I can hear incoming notifications being processed before the alert goes off!
- krrrh 8y agoIs this only when it’s plugged in? Could be a bad cable or charger. I had an iPhone 5 that had a super touch digitizer when plugged in, and I finally narrowed it down to cheap third party cables. Otherwise I think I would be doing a sit-in at the nearest Apple Store until they replaced it, that would drive me nuts.
- cptskippy 8y agoThe transceiver powering up is actually noisy. I had a Nokia 2100 series in the late 90s that generated enough emi to distort a CRT if it was sitting next to it. You could hear the whine from across the room a few seconds before a call would ring through.
- bigiain 8y agoHeh - same sort of timeframe - probably a Nokia 8210 though - I could reliably have my Apple hockey puck mouse "crash" if my phone got an incoming call while it was sitting on my desk in a loop of the usb cable for the mouse. It'd just stop working, and need unplugging/replugging to get it working again. It was clearly electromagnetically "noisy", but I do't recall ever having heard any on my phones make any unexpected audio noise... (My old-and-abused rock concert and motorcycle weary ears probably can't get up as high as inverter whine any more though...)
- Moru 8y agoWe had four computers on a LAN-party that didn't have the shielding on the computer. On phonecalls, all four computers got bluescreens.
- hvidgaard 8y ago
- gameswithgo 8y agosilent yes, computers, no.
- aphextron 8y agoThere are plenty of silent/fanless Coffee Lake based industrial NUCs, too. https://ark.intel.com/products/series/129705/Intel-NUC-Kit-with-8th-Generation-Intel-Core-Processors https://ark.intel.com/products/series/129705/Intel-NUC-Kit-w...
- linsomniac 8y agoI was kind of excited about this build but then I saw your comment and remembered that was a much better option. 4-6 months ago I built a new workstation for work. I had used one of those Corsair closed loop water coolers with the prior build, so I set one up on this guy. A month or so later my workstation was running really sluggishly, and I realized it was drastically throttling the CPU because of heat. I installed some software to spin up the fans on the cooler to keep it down under 100C, but now it'll get kind of loud when I run much heavy CPU. Now, this is a pretty heavy duty workstation, 64GB of RAM and 3 displays. But, if I were doing a new machine for home to be quiet, I think it'd be a NUC. Then I'll put the box that has the 6 drive ZFS array in a closet and call it good.
- aidenn0 8y agoIf you want something slightly more modifiable, Compulab makes passively-cooled screwdriver-openable boxes at basically all levels that it makes sense. Their highest end is available with ECC ram and a discrete graphics card: https://fit-iot.com/web/product/airtop2-build-to-order/ https://fit-iot.com/web/product/airtop2-build-to-order/ And the lowest end fitlet2 can be configured with an atom in a reasonable configuration for around $300 (it's $130-$200 for case/cpu/motherboard depending on which CPU you configure).
- jankotek 8y agoI bet water circulation is broken. Check pump. You may have some air in pipes, turn your PC upside down and back (no joke).
- linsomniac 8y agoI had looked at the NUCs a few months ago, and just remembered how hard it is in their product page to find something that will support 3 monitors. Looks like only the highest end models will do. I'd be tempted to build my own again, especially for my home office where I can put it in a closet next to my desk. The NUC product page lets you select requirements and then seems to give you a list of products that don't match. Gigabyte also has their BRIX products, which are similar to the NUC. I was at a hotel this weekend and at check-in they had a monitor with a "ThinkVantage slotted in the back of the monitor, that might be a nice setup.
- kkylin 8y agoI'm sometimes nostalgic for clacking disks. It's sometimes useful to know when the machine is swapping because some process has gone awry and used up all the memory...
- samplatt 8y agoI could tell what phase of booting/loading Windows my 486 was at, from the sounds of the HDD.
- apk17 8y agoFun story: A long time ago I was on the phone with someone, and typed some commands. For some reason tab completion made ticking noises in the phone. Then it dawned on me: I was currently logged in on the machine on his desk.
- schindlabua 8y agoThat's funny. My mother sometimes laments over the fact that modern washing machines are too quiet and she doesn't know when the laundry is done. This is like the IT guy equivalent!
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoSame, some feedback that something is happening is great. This is what annoys me the most about macbooks, they give 0 feedback when they're off. It's always a bit of a spincter squeezing moment on monday mornings when I open the macbook, sometimes it went out of power and shut down completely, but there's no indication that it's on or off or working or whatever. Black screen, and you kinda have to push the button for an arbitrary amount of time and wait for an arbitrary amount of time until there's any feedback. Whereas on a normal computer, a light goes on and the fans start spinning, not because it's useful but just to indicate that it's on now. It's a miracle.
- nkkollaw 8y agoNo, but a smartphone is not a computer. Smartphones are capable of computing and are sometimes very powerful, but the analogy is totally out of wack in my opinion. If you can live without using an actual computer, it means you don't really need computers. You can check your email and browser the web on a Kindle, on your TV, or even your car. Everything is a computer, then. I think a computer is a productivity tool. Smartphones (and I'd definitely say tablets, too) are to consume content, not produce it. Some companies (most notably Apple I think) believe otherwise, but I think they'll have to come to realize that smartphones and tablets are horrible to produce most kinds of content.
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- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoCertainly in the rough sense of 'Turing machine' a smartphone is clearly a computer. And, even in other senses, I can connect a keyboard to my S5, open up Termux, run ffmpeg, open up Emacs --- all on the smartphone itself, not through ssh or anything. But it's hardly as productive as a regular laptop or desktop, of course, but that's largely due to screen size, lack of keyboard (or lacklustre keyboard), and weakness of processing capacity compared to a desktop/laptop.
- nkkollaw 8y agoTotally agree. That's where the line is drawn I think. Otherwise everything is a computer.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoI can’t check my email on my Kindle or my car. Maybe cut to the chase: what specific capability is an iPhone lacking that every “real computer” has?
- nkkollaw 8y agoIf a keyboard (and a decent-sized screen) can be added, definitely a mouse and a mouse-centric interface. I have tried using an iPad Pro for productivity, and it's living hell.
- cptskippy 8y agoI can hear a high pitched whine emitted from most electronics. Granted for smartphones the display or transceiver has to be powered up and it has to be a quiet room with no white noise. It's a lot better than it used to be, I knew I was getting a call or text from my old Nokia 5160 before it did just from the whine.
- tomthehero 8y agoInteresting.. I hear that from CRT televisions, but not from other electronics.
- samstave 8y agoThe noisiest computer is the person constantly telling you how silent their machine is.
- ToFab123 8y agoAm I the only one that wonders how anyone can thinks of comparing a phone with to a high-end desktop system and claim they can fore fill the same need?
- eanzenberg 8y agoThe iphone x is getting close to mbp performance and its just a matter of time before it surpasses it
- Xylakant 8y agoMere physics says it won’t. It’s always possible to pack more performance in a larger package, even if it’s just because you can more easily dissipate heat on a larger surface. iPhones are amazingly powerful and might just be sufficiently powerful for everyday computing soon or even right now, but they’ll never surpass anything that can accommodate a larger die.
- davedx 8y agoPhysics doesn't drive CPU development, it just sets the absolute limits. Apple have put faster chips in their smartphones than in their laptops. http://bgr.com/2017/09/14/iphone-x-vs-iphone-8-a11-bionic-benchmarks-macbook-pro/ http://bgr.com/2017/09/14/iphone-x-vs-iphone-8-a11-bionic-be...
- Xylakant 8y agoGeekbench scores are interesting, but not necessarily translate straight into real-world performance. Intel CPUs have a much richer instruction set for example. Peak performance vs sustained performance is another issue. GPU performance, disk size and speed, available RAM, battery time at a certain usage etc. are other performance factors. Apple could decide to put faster CPUs into its macbooks at the cost of less battery time. This is all alluded to in the article and the macrumors post that the article is based upon, here are some quotes: > "Sure, that doesn’t mean the A11 Bionic can do all the things a desktop CPU does." > "Though the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 offer impressive Geekbench scores, how that translates to real world performance remains to be seen." There's no question that the iPhone chips deliver amazing performance, but there's a reason people still lug Macbooks around.
- discordance 8y agoMacBook 12" have no fans and are completely silent.
- radicaldreamer 8y agoThe 12" MacBook is a silent computer as well.
- snambi 8y agoYes you are right. Cellphones and tablets are totally silent. It is the desktops and laptops that make noise, ummm waste too much energy ( heat ).