25 ms·

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

843 points by spideymans 5y ago

techrat 5y ago
But... why?
- ushakov 5y ago
  hype
- Klonoar 5y ago
  Pretty sure this is a response to a joke on Twitter in the Apple dev community.
- guipsp 5y ago
  It's part of my workflow
  - spideymans 5y ago
    https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
    - w_for_wumbo 5y ago
      Came to the comments to ensure this had been posted!
- abdusco 5y ago
  I keep having some rogue apps that are burning CPU for (seemingly) no reason. When I feel some warmness, I check `htop` and there it is, IINA (a media player) is pegging the CPU again.
- root_axis 5y ago
  It's a joke that's meant to ironically allude to the fact that M1 computers don't generate fan noise.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  It was an April fools joke app, but actually works because that's much funnier https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/01/april-fools-day-2021-cybermouse-fanfan-mkbhd-mac-review/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/01/april-fools-day-2021-cybermou...
MiguelHudnandez 5y ago
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.
- megous 5y ago
  That would be useful for me today. Systemd again gone into some of those inifinite loops consuming 100% CPU in one of its daemons that try to replace what already worked before (systemd-resolved) today, while I was sitting in the train without AC. I only realized something was wrong when the pinebook got way too hot.
- canjobear 5y ago
  Hearing the disk going used to be an auditory cue too, which is now gone thanks to solid state drives.
  - reader_mode 5y ago
    Yes, I miss that calming crackle telling me that my PC didn't lock up and it's just chugging along. And the floppy boot sound. Objectively worse but still nostalgic.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      Like the demonic scream of a dot matrix printer
  - ianlevesque 5y ago
    Occasionally with catastrophic results https://www.extremetech.com/computing/239268-spotify-may-killing-ssd https://www.extremetech.com/computing/239268-spotify-may-kil... That said, I don’t miss the noise or slowness.
- dbtc 5y ago
  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.
halotrope 5y ago
It makes me a bit sad that for ten years I took it for granted that Moore’s law is dead and notebooks are constantly overheating incapable computers just to learn that the whole issue was Intel messing up their process nodes.
- mlyle 5y ago
  It's both. It's harder and harder to grind out progress (and if you compare M1 to where the 90's-early 2000's exponential progression, we're not so close). As it gets harder, it becomes more capital intensive and the probability of success on any given process node decreases. The marginal utility of a doubling of computing is likely decreasing with time, too. At some point, these factors are going to compound to slow progress. Or: exponential progressions never continue forever.
  - brokencode 5y ago
    I don’t think the marginal utility of doubling computing will diminish any time soon. As we gain more computing power, we just start doing more and more computation heavy tasks that weren’t possible before. For example, VR games are notoriously demanding on today’s hardware, especially if you want to put that hardware in the headset. And many applications get slower over time, not faster, as new features are added. This is especially true in an era of cross platform frameworks that are convenient for developers, but are much slower than native.
    - Justsignedup 5y ago
      Also old programs had to hyoeroptimize because it either is that or it's too slow. Today the speed of the computer makes it incredibly forgiving.
      - kizer 5y ago
        … Electron
    - mlyle 5y ago
danieldk 5y ago
This is funny, but I prefer my computers silent. Semi-related: I can hear the inductors on my NVIDIA GPU, which is somewhat useful. When I am training deep learning models, the coil whine follows very regular patterns. Also, the pattern changes between training and validation. So, I can literally hear when an epoch is done. (Of course, TensorBoard for the real monitoring.)
- savant_penguin 5y ago
  I can relate 100% I could literally hear the minibatches running, they sound more or less evenly spaced treek..treek.. and when it's at the end of the epoch, the larger batch for validation begins, it's a much longer treeeek
- amelius 5y ago
  Do you also hear this when your speakers/audio system are off?
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    I'm not GP, but yes: coil whine is audible as a high frequency whine/buzz, caused by power supply components (inductors) physically vibrating at high frequency.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Certainly, I was just curious if they were hearing coil whine.
      - danieldk 5y ago
        Yes, there are no speakers connected to the system.
- Scene_Cast2 5y ago
  Do you do anything special for cooling the GPUs? I mounted a giant CPU heatsink to my gtx 1080, and it still has to turn on the fans when running ML workloads.
gchamonlive 5y ago
Just like the turn signal clicking for cars
- radley 5y ago
  Or more like fake engine sounds for electric cars.
habibur 5y ago
Reminds me, 10 years back, battery cars suddenly seemed so much silent, that they added engine noise played on speaker to alert pedestrians.
- Someone 5y ago
  In both the USA and the EU, that’s more or less (doesn’t have to be engine sounds, I think, but sounds are required) by law. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sound....
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  "suddenly" was because that's when they started existing in noticeable numbers.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    No, it's because vehicles before then were not required to meet minimum sound requirements by law. Check the spec sheets of HEV/PHEV/EV vehicles made before then -- they don't have acoustic alerting systems. Now they all do (in the jurisdictions that require it).
    - CaptainMarvel 5y ago
      The law didn’t exist until there were enough electric cars to care about this. The cause and effect starts with the number of quiet cars.
      - kube-system 5y ago
        Yes, but it wasn’t their mere existence that caused automakers to add noise. People who buy these vehicles like that they are quiet. The noise generators were added only because regulatory action was taken.
mortenjorck 5y ago
Guilherme Rambo's famed skills at discovering unannounced features and products may be a thorn in Apple‘s side, but this is inadvertently the best ad he’s ever made for them.
traspler 5y ago
This means I can finally upgrade, thanks! Not having the fans to scream against during my Teams calls was a real dealbreaker for me ;)
akraut 5y ago
This reminds me of the old Nullsoft Beep. Some of it was just fun, but the hum based on cpu usage was unexpectedly useful. Archived here: https://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/ https://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/
akmarinov 5y ago
No troll, the fan shutting off was how I knew my app had compiled and I could start debugging. With the M1, I now have to check the cpu usage history occasionally.
- bentcorner 5y ago
  Honestly I believe that as developers we don't use audible feedback enough in our tooling. Imagine diagnosing your app health like you could diagnose your connection speed of a dial-up modem.
  - jareklupinski 5y ago
    i stick the OS's equivalent of `bell` at the end of long-running scripts :)
    - bangonkeyboard 5y ago
      && say 'All done, come get some'
      - lucb1e 5y ago
        For the Linux users && espeak "job's done"
  - function_seven 5y ago
    Agreed. I usually laugh at TV shows and movies that use a bunch of beeps and boops in their computer scenes.[1] But sometimes I actually want that! Like, if there was a switch I could flip to turn on audio cues every time a window's contents are updated, or new lines appear in a terminal window. And every window update would be tagged with a different sound for error, warning, info, success, etc. I know you can configure your terminal to play a BEL sound, but I'm looking for something system-wide. I want it like the movies, so I can pay attention to something else and not have to check in on the progress of my compilation or transcoding or long download.
jmkni 5y ago
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 compromising a bit. I got an M1 Macbook Pro recently and it just doesn't have these issues, I fire up my whole dev environment and get busy, and it's still quiet and (mostly) cool, and I can't notice anything slowing down. I don't care so much about the architecture differences, x64 vs ARM etc, but the fact that I can finally use a laptop like a desktop is massive.
- rambambram 5y ago
  Must be nice, using a fresh machine that's so silent. I recently switched from a powerful desktop PC with noisy fans to a passively cooled RPi4 running Ubuntu Mate. I just feel my productivity and focus going up now I don't hear the equivalent of a small fighter jet taking off. The RPi4 is still a fighter though, very quick and powerful for it's size, price and specs.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    I like my 15” MBP, but the fans are extremely annoying. I had to switch IntelliJ to power save mode so I can hear what I’m thinking. It’s quite surreal the big Xeon server (an actual server, with optional rackmounts) with lots of spinning rust under the desk is still much less distracting.
    - rsfinn 5y ago
      You might want to look into [Turbo Boost Switch](http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com), which in my experience does a pretty good job of keeping the CPU cool enough that the fans stay pretty quiet, with a minor impact on performance. (It's easy to turn it on and off from the menu bar, in case you need to turn the knob up to 11 and are willing to hear the fans again.)
cowmix 5y ago
https://www.motor1.com/news/520409/ford-mustang-mache-gasoline-fragrance/ https://www.motor1.com/news/520409/ford-mustang-mache-gasoli...
jheriko 5y ago
how about an actual fan to improve performance? :)
hackathonguy 5y ago
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 - "close all tabs" in Chrome - can take 50 seconds to execute. Is anyone else experiencing the same?
- LASR 5y ago
  Yes. The M1 is not magic. Or at least it has limits.
- dstick 5y ago
  > plus a couple of Electron apps I’m afraid that might be your problem right there :(
  - hirako2000 5y ago
    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.
    - lukevp 5y ago
      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 technologies, it’s just the current implementation that was needed to make everything work on our existing platforms. Mac will be a holdout because they heart native but hopefully will concede at some point because more and more people are going to deploy apps this way from here on out. It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies.
bangonkeyboard 5y ago
Fan noise and hard drive clicks were very useful indicators of processes doing things they shouldn't.
rbanffy 5y ago
Not quite as useful as this, but https://github.com/rbanffy/selectric-mode https://github.com/rbanffy/selectric-mode also makes your computer sound more serious.
jedberg 5y ago
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 fans pretty much stay at 1200rpm all the time. I think I've seen them spike once. I'd forgotten how much better desktops can be for some things. Now I'm looking for a better remote access solution so I can consider sticking with a desktop at home and then maybe just an iPad for travel with good remote access and file sync.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  is it better to have rogue processes silently wasting energy and creating heat?
  - lukevp 5y ago
    I think this is a case where the meaning of the parent can be taken multiple ways, and one of the HN rules is to take the more generous case. My interpretation is that they are saying they see the purpose of needing some type of cue when CPU usage is high, but didn’t realize that they were using the fan speed as a proxy for CPU utilization until this was posted, at which time, they put 2 and 2 together. That’s not saying that the product is bad or not, just an anecdote.
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  I remember using hard disk drive sounds for disk usage and or capacitor noises to debug issues. But, I really like the MacBook Air M1 because its so quiet and it helps me concentrate much better and if you are talking to others or recording a talk it is silent. The other thing is that it has no moving parts so it should be very durable.
  - philistine 5y ago
    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.
CapriciousCptl 5y ago
This is useful! Every so often Docker acts up or a Youtube video hidden in a tab somewhere or some silly mistake opens tons of Postgres connections on my M1. Previously the only cue was hitting the critically low power (10%?) at 6 hours instead of 12. Now there's this app. Thank you!
uniqueid 5y ago
Does it have an option permanently to scramble the video a month after the warranty runs out?
blunte 5y ago
Haha! I sort of need this. It's amazing how the only time I realize I have a runaway process is if my laptop heats up. It's truly incredible how much serious heavy work I do on a "little" M1 Air. MySQL and Postgres, Redis, Sidekiqs, Mailcatcher (small, but still), a couple of Rails apps, Spotify, Spark mail app, Firefox with dozens of tabs, Safari, Calendar, Photos in the background hopefully identifying faces, etc. etc. I do three times as much on this machine as I could do on my 32GB i7 Dell. There's some magic in here. I still cannot build some older versions of libraries. So I do a little of my work on an old Intel Mac. But that's not the architecture problem, that's a problem of fragile builds.
- sgt 5y ago
  Makes me want to replace my i7 MBP sooner than I was planning!
  - blunte 5y ago
    I thought this Air would be a placeholder until the M1 MBP, but unless you need a real GPU, I find this more than good enough. I won’t need to upgrade.
wrboyce 5y ago
Currently sat in my home-office, mid British heatwave, and my trashcan Mac Pro has been the primary noise for days; I wish I needed this.
dpedu 5y ago
I don't want to download it, is there a clip of the sound anywhere?
- latexr 5y ago
  > I don't want to download it In case what you mean is that you don’t want to run it, an alternative: right-click the app, followed by “Show Package Contents”, and navigate to Contents/Resources. You’ll find a couple of WAV files. Don’t expected pleasant woosh noises, they sound like rough recordings of computer fans.
casey 5y ago
This is awesome! I built a similar open source version a few years ago for a friend with a fanless Air, but it foolishly used system notifications and a menu bar icon instead of sound: https://github.com/caseymrm/notafan https://github.com/caseymrm/notafan
post_break 5y ago
Whats funny is I had an app crash in the background taking up 80% of my cpu on my M1 macbook pro, and only noticed because I happened to launch activity monitor for something unrelated. You can't do that with any other laptop.
yoz-y 5y ago
Hm. How about a nice colored Touch Bar widget that would change depending on temperature and load? At least it would make the bar useful.
- mlajtos 5y ago
  I don't get the hate for TouchBar. I have the one with the physical Esc key and it proved useful number of times. Fast-forwarding ads on YouTube was nice until I discovered good adblock. Screenshot shortcut always ready. Emoticons ditto. Shortcut to format my code or comment a line of code in Xcode? Yup, thank you.
  - yoz-y 5y ago
    That was the promise and I was bullish on it. Sadly Apple did nothing to improve on it. A Taptic Engine underneath would go a long way for example. Another thing would be an external keyboard with it. As for the shortcuts, turns out that keyboard ones work as well. And are easier to hit while looking at the screen. Personally I spend a lot of time in vim, web based IDEs, qtcreator and orthodox file managers. All of these use F-keys most of the time. Cmd-/ is quite universal for comments, and I’ve remapped ctrl/cmd/shift+prtscr to various print screen shortcuts.
    - mlajtos 5y ago
      I believe that they want to include Taptic Engine. Maybe redesigned Pro will have it. Either that or they will kill it.
bsharitt 5y ago
Outside of work provided computers, I've not been a Mac user for many years, but the M1 Macbook Air brought me back and it's been great. It's basically the laptop I've been waiting years for, silent with no moving parts and very little in the way of compromises(I don't personally have any need for super long running CPU intensive tasks). It's weird to see it compile code or encode video without fans ramping up, and even if does start to throttle toward the end of the longer tasks, it still beats my fairly recent i7 work MacBook Pro and my Ryzen 7 4700U Windows laptop most of the time.
sachamps 5y ago
I’ll wait for the Pro… But honestly - the last Airs and Pros are a joke especially while using a second Monitor. The Pro has a known bug and can get pretty slow. The Air - unresponsive as hell if a second monitor is used and u are in a virtual conference with screencast and cam on. We must always look at the price value tag and at that point Apple really disappointed recently. Don’t get me wrong… I am a Dev and i appreciate the same things as you do. But I am not hyped by the M1… I just think at that price point apple should get things sorted out finally and if the M1 works out… Well, than thanks Apple and thanks for let me buying all this expensive crap upfront ;)
- seumars 5y ago
  I’ve been using the Mini for 7 months without a single hiccup – daily routine requires several Adobe apps running simultaneously and a couple of dev node servers plus browsers, mail and the like, on a 4k/5k double monitor setup.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  Strange... I frequently dock my M1 Air to a 3840x2160 display and it can easily run my 30+ track Logic Pro session without any perceivable throttling.
  - foobarbaz33 5y ago
    I believe he's referring to the previous generation of Air's, not the M1 version.
ashdev 5y ago
Nice idea. You can also have a CPU usage monitor in your app bar.
varispeed 5y ago
In 10 years' time we gonna get an app that simulates the battery going off.
shrimpx 5y ago
The temperature of the laptop is an accurate enough replacement for fan noise (if you use it normally, not in clamshell mode). I notice that I've become far more sensitive to subtle temperature changes in my M1 than I used to be in prior fan-cooled laptops. Probably because the fan tends to come on before the machine heats up to the touch, so temperature was a weak, secondary cue.
hesk 5y ago
Just say no.
subroutine 5y ago
One of my fav macOS apps is iStat. It lets you keep track of all types of stuff from the menu bar... https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/ https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/
- crazygringo 5y ago
  Or for the free open source equivalent, I like and use Stats: https://github.com/exelban/stats https://github.com/exelban/stats (Though I really wish it had a more Googleable name...)
TacticalCoder 5y ago
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 slow you can read what's written on the blades, a passively cooled GPU (ofc not working if you do GPU heavy stuff) and that's it. Now it's great if, at last, it's coming to beefy laptops too. But a quiet computer ain't anything new.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  Quiet computers, not new, quiet high performance laptops however...
- atonse 5y ago
  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.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  Computers like the "HUAWEI MateBook X" are fanless with a powerful CPU (10th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-10210U Processor, 1.6 GHz 4 cores, Turbo up to 4.2 GHz). https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-x-2020/specs/ https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-x-2020/specs... I have used also a Surface Pro for a long time, and not being modern as this new Apple laptop, it is a full-fledged Windows 10 machine that can run any programming IDE, virtual machines, etc. and completely silent. Can someone explain why the down-votes for TacticalCoder for just stating facts? I really don't get, unless it is pure Apple fandom and that would be just silly.
  - foobarbaz33 5y ago
    I didn't downvote. But I assume it's because he's focusing on heat mitigations which are old, while the point of the matter is the M1's produces less heat in the first place. There's some obvious advantages to avoiding the creation of heat. Advantages that mitigation does not realize.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
I've long thought an auditory cue would be helpful when my computer is chewing on something. Maybe it could hum tunelessly, or breath harder when it was working hard. Or get excited and sigh when it finished. Something human.
maxdo 5y ago
It's like when person drive tesla, it drives fast, but no ugly vibration and noise that most of the people used to associate with performance car. But some people crave for these sounds. I saw some modes doing that lol :) Kind of cargo cult. They pray for uncomfortable attributes but not actual speed.
- spacedcowboy 5y ago
  Not sure about that. The ride I took in a model X was pretty uncomfortable for a $100k car. Turned me off Tesla as an option.
panda88888 5y ago
Is there a version with engine sound instead? :)
deepkerenl 5y ago
This is a joke, right? I've had my M1 for almost a month, and I have zero complaints about the LACK of sound from the fans.
ranrotx 5y ago
I mean, how else are we supposed to know the CPU is busy?
seanalexander 5y ago
The latest Macs already have this, at least some of them do. The audio output gets distorted the more CPU load is going on. Really fun on video calls.
rbanffy 5y ago
An app that makes the sound of a hard disk seeking during disk IO would also be quite useful.
jaimex2 5y ago
How did I know this would be full of "My new M1 with everything freshly installed is better than my cheaper 5 year old PC"
fossuser 5y ago
This would be funny for remote dev. I’d gotten used to the fan spinning up when building on my MacBook Pro (Intel), and after switching to building code on remote servers I realized I used the fan sound as an indicator that stuff was working. Playing the fan sound based on remote server cpu would be a fun hack.
kaimorid 5y ago
lol i wish this wasn't so inevitably the best
noduerme 5y ago
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 machine still works... but yeah, that fan noise is really a great subconscious reminder that you're using it too hard. Also a good way to know if your code just entered an infinite loop, long before any other warning comes up... and occasionally that clue gives you enough time to cancel a process before the input freezes. [edit] Just had a cool idea, since this discussion is heading towards how subtly useful auditory cues have been in our workflow. What if different processes played fans at different pitches, so the total volume still added up? That could actually be really useful out-of-band state information.
- wyclif 5y ago
  SE Asian humidity was brutal on those older Intel-based MBPs. Even with A/C, it's still so damned hot and humid that you don't have to push the rig too hard before the fans start spinning. And heat is the enemy of Li-ion batteries.
  - dkdbejwi383 5y ago
    The humidity in the region was also a problem for earlier iPhones, the indicator stickers used to check if the phone had been dropped in water could change colour just from the ambient humidity https://www.cultofmac.com/13571/the-tropics-may-be-too-humid-for-apples-iphone/ https://www.cultofmac.com/13571/the-tropics-may-be-too-humid...
- frogcoder 5y ago
  With the introduction of M1, it's hard to find any use of paper magazines these days.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    If I wait long enough, maybe I can sell my collection of 90s Wired for more than that stupid Mario 64 cart ;D
soheil 5y ago
There are many people mentioning how the lack of fan is so strange and looks to them that something's wrong. I'd like to point out also that the introduction of the fan in the first place was probably the thing that should have looked very strange. Just pause for a moment and think how odd it is that there is a very high correlation between heavily using one's computer and a noise being emitted from its inside. It seems pretty random that a fan spinning faster and faster should be the thing that happens when I start up Photoshop. But then again how many things like this we take for granted, just the way it is until it's gone, just because we have no other reference point to compare them to when they're initially introduced?
c-smile 5y ago
Do we have same thing but for Tesla & Co ? Cycling side by side with silent EVs is quite dangerous.
- maximus-decimus 5y ago
  EVs make artificial sound outside at low speed for that reason. I'm not sure but I would assume this is government mandated. This is different though, this here is for the user to be able to judge how much the cpu/motor is working. And yes, not only do some EVs offer you fake indoor noises, a lot of gas cars also do it as engines get more silent/sound worse to meet modern regulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lQPc9VXBzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lQPc9VXBzk
innagadadavida 5y ago
Is there a similar app that mimics disk noise of yore? That was a great feature to tell you how busy the is subsystem was.
todotask 5y ago
There is no sound without heat.
jinsiang 5y ago
Oh, okay, so this is just a app that bring your fan in the Mac running? ... cool, but, why?
ronenlh 5y ago
Excellent idea. Adding audible feedback to the runtime is an effortless way to know what’s going on under the hood. I submitted a post about this concept last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808113 In it I add midi sounds to the system handlers from nodejs’ event loop.
beermonster 5y ago
This reminds me of the artificial noise they create on some quiet electric motorbikes as a safety measure.
fab1an 5y ago
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.
TalonTheDragon 5y ago
I love apps like this that sonify different data about your computer and your usage. I wrote something similar for Windows. It lets you listen to the different parameters like CPU usage, disk usage and RAM usage in realtime.[0] [0] https://www.iamtalon.me/charm https://www.iamtalon.me/charm
davidjytang 5y ago
This is like fake noise for electric cars.[1] [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/1/20676854/electric-cars-artificial-safety-noise-low-speeds-european-union-rules-2019-2021 https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/1/20676854/electric-cars-art...
iampivot 5y ago
And maybe an app with v.56 modem sounds when you use the web browser?
Symmetry 5y ago
Back when I was a solder monkey at the Media Lab we had some literal fans overhead in our workspace that would turn on to reflect network load. https://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/pinwheels https://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/pinwheels
steerablesafe 5y ago
Borderline off-topic: Sometimes I wish electric stove tops made the sound of gas burners.
emodendroket 5y ago
My car has fake engine noises piped in over the speakers (this is actually pretty common now), so maybe you're on to something. Though I doubt I'd miss fan noise myself.
DantesKite 5y ago
I didn’t think a discussion about a toy app would be so interesting, but it turned out to bring a lot of great anecdotes.
Shorel 5y ago
I prefer to read a graph, also another one for memory, another one for GPU, another one for network out, and another one for network in. This is in Ubuntu 20.04 with Gnome whatever. Honestly, this fan sound seems to give much less information than what I am used to.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
This is like rumbling, muscle car, sound effects for your electric vehicle?

843 points by spideymans 5y ago

techrat 5y ago

But... why?

ushakov 5y ago
hype
Klonoar 5y ago
Pretty sure this is a response to a joke on Twitter in the Apple dev community.
guipsp 5y ago
It's part of my workflow
- spideymans 5y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
  - w_for_wumbo 5y ago
    Came to the comments to ensure this had been posted!
abdusco 5y ago
I keep having some rogue apps that are burning CPU for (seemingly) no reason. When I feel some warmness, I check `htop` and there it is, IINA (a media player) is pegging the CPU again.
root_axis 5y ago
It's a joke that's meant to ironically allude to the fact that M1 computers don't generate fan noise.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wlesieutre 5y ago
It was an April fools joke app, but actually works because that's much funnier https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/01/april-fools-day-2021-cybermouse-fanfan-mkbhd-mac-review/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/01/april-fools-day-2021-cybermou...

MiguelHudnandez 5y ago

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.

megous 5y ago
That would be useful for me today. Systemd again gone into some of those inifinite loops consuming 100% CPU in one of its daemons that try to replace what already worked before (systemd-resolved) today, while I was sitting in the train without AC. I only realized something was wrong when the pinebook got way too hot.
canjobear 5y ago
Hearing the disk going used to be an auditory cue too, which is now gone thanks to solid state drives.
- reader_mode 5y ago
  Yes, I miss that calming crackle telling me that my PC didn't lock up and it's just chugging along. And the floppy boot sound. Objectively worse but still nostalgic.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    Like the demonic scream of a dot matrix printer
- ianlevesque 5y ago
  Occasionally with catastrophic results https://www.extremetech.com/computing/239268-spotify-may-killing-ssd https://www.extremetech.com/computing/239268-spotify-may-kil... That said, I don’t miss the noise or slowness.
dbtc 5y ago
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.

halotrope 5y ago

It makes me a bit sad that for ten years I took it for granted that Moore’s law is dead and notebooks are constantly overheating incapable computers just to learn that the whole issue was Intel messing up their process nodes.

mlyle 5y ago
It's both. It's harder and harder to grind out progress (and if you compare M1 to where the 90's-early 2000's exponential progression, we're not so close). As it gets harder, it becomes more capital intensive and the probability of success on any given process node decreases. The marginal utility of a doubling of computing is likely decreasing with time, too. At some point, these factors are going to compound to slow progress. Or: exponential progressions never continue forever.
- brokencode 5y ago
  I don’t think the marginal utility of doubling computing will diminish any time soon. As we gain more computing power, we just start doing more and more computation heavy tasks that weren’t possible before. For example, VR games are notoriously demanding on today’s hardware, especially if you want to put that hardware in the headset. And many applications get slower over time, not faster, as new features are added. This is especially true in an era of cross platform frameworks that are convenient for developers, but are much slower than native.
  - Justsignedup 5y ago
    Also old programs had to hyoeroptimize because it either is that or it's too slow. Today the speed of the computer makes it incredibly forgiving.
    - kizer 5y ago
      … Electron
  - mlyle 5y ago

danieldk 5y ago

This is funny, but I prefer my computers silent. Semi-related: I can hear the inductors on my NVIDIA GPU, which is somewhat useful. When I am training deep learning models, the coil whine follows very regular patterns. Also, the pattern changes between training and validation. So, I can literally hear when an epoch is done. (Of course, TensorBoard for the real monitoring.)

savant_penguin 5y ago
I can relate 100% I could literally hear the minibatches running, they sound more or less evenly spaced treek..treek.. and when it's at the end of the epoch, the larger batch for validation begins, it's a much longer treeeek
amelius 5y ago
Do you also hear this when your speakers/audio system are off?
- HPsquared 5y ago
  I'm not GP, but yes: coil whine is audible as a high frequency whine/buzz, caused by power supply components (inductors) physically vibrating at high frequency.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Certainly, I was just curious if they were hearing coil whine.
    - danieldk 5y ago
      Yes, there are no speakers connected to the system.
Scene_Cast2 5y ago
Do you do anything special for cooling the GPUs? I mounted a giant CPU heatsink to my gtx 1080, and it still has to turn on the fans when running ML workloads.

gchamonlive 5y ago

Just like the turn signal clicking for cars

radley 5y ago
Or more like fake engine sounds for electric cars.

habibur 5y ago

Reminds me, 10 years back, battery cars suddenly seemed so much silent, that they added engine noise played on speaker to alert pedestrians.

Someone 5y ago
In both the USA and the EU, that’s more or less (doesn’t have to be engine sounds, I think, but sounds are required) by law. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sound....
alisonkisk 5y ago
"suddenly" was because that's when they started existing in noticeable numbers.
- kube-system 5y ago
  No, it's because vehicles before then were not required to meet minimum sound requirements by law. Check the spec sheets of HEV/PHEV/EV vehicles made before then -- they don't have acoustic alerting systems. Now they all do (in the jurisdictions that require it).
  - CaptainMarvel 5y ago
    The law didn’t exist until there were enough electric cars to care about this. The cause and effect starts with the number of quiet cars.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      Yes, but it wasn’t their mere existence that caused automakers to add noise. People who buy these vehicles like that they are quiet. The noise generators were added only because regulatory action was taken.

mortenjorck 5y ago

Guilherme Rambo's famed skills at discovering unannounced features and products may be a thorn in Apple‘s side, but this is inadvertently the best ad he’s ever made for them.

traspler 5y ago

This means I can finally upgrade, thanks! Not having the fans to scream against during my Teams calls was a real dealbreaker for me ;)

akraut 5y ago

This reminds me of the old Nullsoft Beep. Some of it was just fun, but the hum based on cpu usage was unexpectedly useful. Archived here: https://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/ https://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/

akmarinov 5y ago

No troll, the fan shutting off was how I knew my app had compiled and I could start debugging. With the M1, I now have to check the cpu usage history occasionally.

bentcorner 5y ago
Honestly I believe that as developers we don't use audible feedback enough in our tooling. Imagine diagnosing your app health like you could diagnose your connection speed of a dial-up modem.
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  i stick the OS's equivalent of `bell` at the end of long-running scripts :)
  - bangonkeyboard 5y ago
    && say 'All done, come get some'
    - lucb1e 5y ago
      For the Linux users && espeak "job's done"
- function_seven 5y ago
  Agreed. I usually laugh at TV shows and movies that use a bunch of beeps and boops in their computer scenes.[1] But sometimes I actually want that! Like, if there was a switch I could flip to turn on audio cues every time a window's contents are updated, or new lines appear in a terminal window. And every window update would be tagged with a different sound for error, warning, info, success, etc. I know you can configure your terminal to play a BEL sound, but I'm looking for something system-wide. I want it like the movies, so I can pay attention to something else and not have to check in on the progress of my compilation or transcoding or long download.

jmkni 5y ago

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 compromising a bit. I got an M1 Macbook Pro recently and it just doesn't have these issues, I fire up my whole dev environment and get busy, and it's still quiet and (mostly) cool, and I can't notice anything slowing down. I don't care so much about the architecture differences, x64 vs ARM etc, but the fact that I can finally use a laptop like a desktop is massive.

rambambram 5y ago
Must be nice, using a fresh machine that's so silent. I recently switched from a powerful desktop PC with noisy fans to a passively cooled RPi4 running Ubuntu Mate. I just feel my productivity and focus going up now I don't hear the equivalent of a small fighter jet taking off. The RPi4 is still a fighter though, very quick and powerful for it's size, price and specs.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I like my 15” MBP, but the fans are extremely annoying. I had to switch IntelliJ to power save mode so I can hear what I’m thinking. It’s quite surreal the big Xeon server (an actual server, with optional rackmounts) with lots of spinning rust under the desk is still much less distracting.
  - rsfinn 5y ago
    You might want to look into [Turbo Boost Switch](http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com), which in my experience does a pretty good job of keeping the CPU cool enough that the fans stay pretty quiet, with a minor impact on performance. (It's easy to turn it on and off from the menu bar, in case you need to turn the knob up to 11 and are willing to hear the fans again.)

cowmix 5y ago

https://www.motor1.com/news/520409/ford-mustang-mache-gasoline-fragrance/ https://www.motor1.com/news/520409/ford-mustang-mache-gasoli...

jheriko 5y ago

how about an actual fan to improve performance? :)

hackathonguy 5y ago

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 - "close all tabs" in Chrome - can take 50 seconds to execute. Is anyone else experiencing the same?

LASR 5y ago
Yes. The M1 is not magic. Or at least it has limits.
dstick 5y ago
> plus a couple of Electron apps I’m afraid that might be your problem right there :(
- hirako2000 5y ago
  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.
  - lukevp 5y ago
    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 technologies, it’s just the current implementation that was needed to make everything work on our existing platforms. Mac will be a holdout because they heart native but hopefully will concede at some point because more and more people are going to deploy apps this way from here on out. It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies.

bangonkeyboard 5y ago

Fan noise and hard drive clicks were very useful indicators of processes doing things they shouldn't.

rbanffy 5y ago

Not quite as useful as this, but https://github.com/rbanffy/selectric-mode https://github.com/rbanffy/selectric-mode also makes your computer sound more serious.

jedberg 5y ago

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 fans pretty much stay at 1200rpm all the time. I think I've seen them spike once. I'd forgotten how much better desktops can be for some things. Now I'm looking for a better remote access solution so I can consider sticking with a desktop at home and then maybe just an iPad for travel with good remote access and file sync.

alisonkisk 5y ago
is it better to have rogue processes silently wasting energy and creating heat?
- lukevp 5y ago
  I think this is a case where the meaning of the parent can be taken multiple ways, and one of the HN rules is to take the more generous case. My interpretation is that they are saying they see the purpose of needing some type of cue when CPU usage is high, but didn’t realize that they were using the fan speed as a proxy for CPU utilization until this was posted, at which time, they put 2 and 2 together. That’s not saying that the product is bad or not, just an anecdote.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
I remember using hard disk drive sounds for disk usage and or capacitor noises to debug issues. But, I really like the MacBook Air M1 because its so quiet and it helps me concentrate much better and if you are talking to others or recording a talk it is silent. The other thing is that it has no moving parts so it should be very durable.
- philistine 5y ago
  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.

CapriciousCptl 5y ago

This is useful! Every so often Docker acts up or a Youtube video hidden in a tab somewhere or some silly mistake opens tons of Postgres connections on my M1. Previously the only cue was hitting the critically low power (10%?) at 6 hours instead of 12. Now there's this app. Thank you!

uniqueid 5y ago

Does it have an option permanently to scramble the video a month after the warranty runs out?

blunte 5y ago

Haha! I sort of need this. It's amazing how the only time I realize I have a runaway process is if my laptop heats up. It's truly incredible how much serious heavy work I do on a "little" M1 Air. MySQL and Postgres, Redis, Sidekiqs, Mailcatcher (small, but still), a couple of Rails apps, Spotify, Spark mail app, Firefox with dozens of tabs, Safari, Calendar, Photos in the background hopefully identifying faces, etc. etc. I do three times as much on this machine as I could do on my 32GB i7 Dell. There's some magic in here. I still cannot build some older versions of libraries. So I do a little of my work on an old Intel Mac. But that's not the architecture problem, that's a problem of fragile builds.

sgt 5y ago
Makes me want to replace my i7 MBP sooner than I was planning!
- blunte 5y ago
  I thought this Air would be a placeholder until the M1 MBP, but unless you need a real GPU, I find this more than good enough. I won’t need to upgrade.

wrboyce 5y ago

Currently sat in my home-office, mid British heatwave, and my trashcan Mac Pro has been the primary noise for days; I wish I needed this.

dpedu 5y ago

I don't want to download it, is there a clip of the sound anywhere?

latexr 5y ago
> I don't want to download it In case what you mean is that you don’t want to run it, an alternative: right-click the app, followed by “Show Package Contents”, and navigate to Contents/Resources. You’ll find a couple of WAV files. Don’t expected pleasant woosh noises, they sound like rough recordings of computer fans.

casey 5y ago

This is awesome! I built a similar open source version a few years ago for a friend with a fanless Air, but it foolishly used system notifications and a menu bar icon instead of sound: https://github.com/caseymrm/notafan https://github.com/caseymrm/notafan

post_break 5y ago

Whats funny is I had an app crash in the background taking up 80% of my cpu on my M1 macbook pro, and only noticed because I happened to launch activity monitor for something unrelated. You can't do that with any other laptop.

yoz-y 5y ago

Hm. How about a nice colored Touch Bar widget that would change depending on temperature and load? At least it would make the bar useful.

mlajtos 5y ago
I don't get the hate for TouchBar. I have the one with the physical Esc key and it proved useful number of times. Fast-forwarding ads on YouTube was nice until I discovered good adblock. Screenshot shortcut always ready. Emoticons ditto. Shortcut to format my code or comment a line of code in Xcode? Yup, thank you.
- yoz-y 5y ago
  That was the promise and I was bullish on it. Sadly Apple did nothing to improve on it. A Taptic Engine underneath would go a long way for example. Another thing would be an external keyboard with it. As for the shortcuts, turns out that keyboard ones work as well. And are easier to hit while looking at the screen. Personally I spend a lot of time in vim, web based IDEs, qtcreator and orthodox file managers. All of these use F-keys most of the time. Cmd-/ is quite universal for comments, and I’ve remapped ctrl/cmd/shift+prtscr to various print screen shortcuts.
  - mlajtos 5y ago
    I believe that they want to include Taptic Engine. Maybe redesigned Pro will have it. Either that or they will kill it.

bsharitt 5y ago

Outside of work provided computers, I've not been a Mac user for many years, but the M1 Macbook Air brought me back and it's been great. It's basically the laptop I've been waiting years for, silent with no moving parts and very little in the way of compromises(I don't personally have any need for super long running CPU intensive tasks). It's weird to see it compile code or encode video without fans ramping up, and even if does start to throttle toward the end of the longer tasks, it still beats my fairly recent i7 work MacBook Pro and my Ryzen 7 4700U Windows laptop most of the time.

sachamps 5y ago

I’ll wait for the Pro… But honestly - the last Airs and Pros are a joke especially while using a second Monitor. The Pro has a known bug and can get pretty slow. The Air - unresponsive as hell if a second monitor is used and u are in a virtual conference with screencast and cam on. We must always look at the price value tag and at that point Apple really disappointed recently. Don’t get me wrong… I am a Dev and i appreciate the same things as you do. But I am not hyped by the M1… I just think at that price point apple should get things sorted out finally and if the M1 works out… Well, than thanks Apple and thanks for let me buying all this expensive crap upfront ;)

seumars 5y ago
I’ve been using the Mini for 7 months without a single hiccup – daily routine requires several Adobe apps running simultaneously and a couple of dev node servers plus browsers, mail and the like, on a 4k/5k double monitor setup.
wildrhythms 5y ago
Strange... I frequently dock my M1 Air to a 3840x2160 display and it can easily run my 30+ track Logic Pro session without any perceivable throttling.
- foobarbaz33 5y ago
  I believe he's referring to the previous generation of Air's, not the M1 version.

ashdev 5y ago

Nice idea. You can also have a CPU usage monitor in your app bar.

varispeed 5y ago

In 10 years' time we gonna get an app that simulates the battery going off.

shrimpx 5y ago

The temperature of the laptop is an accurate enough replacement for fan noise (if you use it normally, not in clamshell mode). I notice that I've become far more sensitive to subtle temperature changes in my M1 than I used to be in prior fan-cooled laptops. Probably because the fan tends to come on before the machine heats up to the touch, so temperature was a weak, secondary cue.

hesk 5y ago

Just say no.

subroutine 5y ago

One of my fav macOS apps is iStat. It lets you keep track of all types of stuff from the menu bar... https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/ https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

crazygringo 5y ago
Or for the free open source equivalent, I like and use Stats: https://github.com/exelban/stats https://github.com/exelban/stats (Though I really wish it had a more Googleable name...)

TacticalCoder 5y ago

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 slow you can read what's written on the blades, a passively cooled GPU (ofc not working if you do GPU heavy stuff) and that's it. Now it's great if, at last, it's coming to beefy laptops too. But a quiet computer ain't anything new.

breakfastduck 5y ago
Quiet computers, not new, quiet high performance laptops however...
atonse 5y ago
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.
Hokusai 5y ago
Computers like the "HUAWEI MateBook X" are fanless with a powerful CPU (10th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-10210U Processor, 1.6 GHz 4 cores, Turbo up to 4.2 GHz). https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-x-2020/specs/ https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-x-2020/specs... I have used also a Surface Pro for a long time, and not being modern as this new Apple laptop, it is a full-fledged Windows 10 machine that can run any programming IDE, virtual machines, etc. and completely silent. Can someone explain why the down-votes for TacticalCoder for just stating facts? I really don't get, unless it is pure Apple fandom and that would be just silly.
- foobarbaz33 5y ago
  I didn't downvote. But I assume it's because he's focusing on heat mitigations which are old, while the point of the matter is the M1's produces less heat in the first place. There's some obvious advantages to avoiding the creation of heat. Advantages that mitigation does not realize.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

I've long thought an auditory cue would be helpful when my computer is chewing on something. Maybe it could hum tunelessly, or breath harder when it was working hard. Or get excited and sigh when it finished. Something human.

maxdo 5y ago

It's like when person drive tesla, it drives fast, but no ugly vibration and noise that most of the people used to associate with performance car. But some people crave for these sounds. I saw some modes doing that lol :) Kind of cargo cult. They pray for uncomfortable attributes but not actual speed.

spacedcowboy 5y ago
Not sure about that. The ride I took in a model X was pretty uncomfortable for a $100k car. Turned me off Tesla as an option.

panda88888 5y ago

Is there a version with engine sound instead? :)

deepkerenl 5y ago

This is a joke, right? I've had my M1 for almost a month, and I have zero complaints about the LACK of sound from the fans.

ranrotx 5y ago

I mean, how else are we supposed to know the CPU is busy?

seanalexander 5y ago

The latest Macs already have this, at least some of them do. The audio output gets distorted the more CPU load is going on. Really fun on video calls.

rbanffy 5y ago

An app that makes the sound of a hard disk seeking during disk IO would also be quite useful.

jaimex2 5y ago

How did I know this would be full of "My new M1 with everything freshly installed is better than my cheaper 5 year old PC"

fossuser 5y ago

This would be funny for remote dev. I’d gotten used to the fan spinning up when building on my MacBook Pro (Intel), and after switching to building code on remote servers I realized I used the fan sound as an indicator that stuff was working. Playing the fan sound based on remote server cpu would be a fun hack.

kaimorid 5y ago

lol i wish this wasn't so inevitably the best

noduerme 5y ago

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 machine still works... but yeah, that fan noise is really a great subconscious reminder that you're using it too hard. Also a good way to know if your code just entered an infinite loop, long before any other warning comes up... and occasionally that clue gives you enough time to cancel a process before the input freezes. [edit] Just had a cool idea, since this discussion is heading towards how subtly useful auditory cues have been in our workflow. What if different processes played fans at different pitches, so the total volume still added up? That could actually be really useful out-of-band state information.

wyclif 5y ago
SE Asian humidity was brutal on those older Intel-based MBPs. Even with A/C, it's still so damned hot and humid that you don't have to push the rig too hard before the fans start spinning. And heat is the enemy of Li-ion batteries.
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  The humidity in the region was also a problem for earlier iPhones, the indicator stickers used to check if the phone had been dropped in water could change colour just from the ambient humidity https://www.cultofmac.com/13571/the-tropics-may-be-too-humid-for-apples-iphone/ https://www.cultofmac.com/13571/the-tropics-may-be-too-humid...
frogcoder 5y ago
With the introduction of M1, it's hard to find any use of paper magazines these days.
- noduerme 5y ago
  If I wait long enough, maybe I can sell my collection of 90s Wired for more than that stupid Mario 64 cart ;D

soheil 5y ago

There are many people mentioning how the lack of fan is so strange and looks to them that something's wrong. I'd like to point out also that the introduction of the fan in the first place was probably the thing that should have looked very strange. Just pause for a moment and think how odd it is that there is a very high correlation between heavily using one's computer and a noise being emitted from its inside. It seems pretty random that a fan spinning faster and faster should be the thing that happens when I start up Photoshop. But then again how many things like this we take for granted, just the way it is until it's gone, just because we have no other reference point to compare them to when they're initially introduced?

c-smile 5y ago

Do we have same thing but for Tesla & Co ? Cycling side by side with silent EVs is quite dangerous.

maximus-decimus 5y ago
EVs make artificial sound outside at low speed for that reason. I'm not sure but I would assume this is government mandated. This is different though, this here is for the user to be able to judge how much the cpu/motor is working. And yes, not only do some EVs offer you fake indoor noises, a lot of gas cars also do it as engines get more silent/sound worse to meet modern regulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lQPc9VXBzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lQPc9VXBzk

innagadadavida 5y ago

Is there a similar app that mimics disk noise of yore? That was a great feature to tell you how busy the is subsystem was.

todotask 5y ago

There is no sound without heat.

jinsiang 5y ago

Oh, okay, so this is just a app that bring your fan in the Mac running? ... cool, but, why?

ronenlh 5y ago

Excellent idea. Adding audible feedback to the runtime is an effortless way to know what’s going on under the hood. I submitted a post about this concept last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808113 In it I add midi sounds to the system handlers from nodejs’ event loop.

beermonster 5y ago

This reminds me of the artificial noise they create on some quiet electric motorbikes as a safety measure.

fab1an 5y ago

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.

TalonTheDragon 5y ago

I love apps like this that sonify different data about your computer and your usage. I wrote something similar for Windows. It lets you listen to the different parameters like CPU usage, disk usage and RAM usage in realtime.[0] [0] https://www.iamtalon.me/charm https://www.iamtalon.me/charm

davidjytang 5y ago

This is like fake noise for electric cars.[1] [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/1/20676854/electric-cars-artificial-safety-noise-low-speeds-european-union-rules-2019-2021 https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/1/20676854/electric-cars-art...

iampivot 5y ago

And maybe an app with v.56 modem sounds when you use the web browser?

Symmetry 5y ago

Back when I was a solder monkey at the Media Lab we had some literal fans overhead in our workspace that would turn on to reflect network load. https://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/pinwheels https://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/pinwheels

steerablesafe 5y ago

Borderline off-topic: Sometimes I wish electric stove tops made the sound of gas burners.

emodendroket 5y ago

My car has fake engine noises piped in over the speakers (this is actually pretty common now), so maybe you're on to something. Though I doubt I'd miss fan noise myself.

DantesKite 5y ago

I didn’t think a discussion about a toy app would be so interesting, but it turned out to bring a lot of great anecdotes.

Shorel 5y ago

I prefer to read a graph, also another one for memory, another one for GPU, another one for network out, and another one for network in. This is in Ubuntu 20.04 with Gnome whatever. Honestly, this fan sound seems to give much less information than what I am used to.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

This is like rumbling, muscle car, sound effects for your electric vehicle?