5 ms·

The greatest trick Apple ever pulled was making you think it’s Your fault

28 points by zeppelin_7 15y ago

RandallBrown 15y ago
The reason people are surprised by the loud fan is because their fans are NOT loud. My Macbook fan very rarely turns on and when it does, it's not any louder than any other laptop of comparable size. If someone came to me and said "My new Macbook Pro fan is really loud" I would assume something is wrong too, because I've never thought of mine as really loud.
- whackedspinach 15y ago
  It depends what you are doing with it. Sometimes it isn't bad, but anytime I kick in the discrete graphics card everyone in the room looks at me. It picks up when I drive my external monitor. Also, I did find out that a rouge process was taking about 40% CPU consistently, and it quieted down after that.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
pacomerh 15y ago
Rather than a trick I see it as reputation, they've earned by creating cool products. But yeah one has to doubt even the best brands, not all products are perfect.
- randomdata 15y ago
  It is part reputation, but beyond that, a loud fan is normal when the user is doing extraordinary tasks. Of course the circumstances of operation are going to come into question first. If you had a flat tire, the first question is going to be what did you run over, not what manufacturing defect caused it. There's no trick here.
  - pacomerh 15y ago
    Agreed, in these cases of course, fans operate loud, but the point in case is that the brand has created people who just consider the user making mistakes, they don't even accept a failing product from apple which could be kind of arrogant.
    - randomdata 15y ago
      "they don't even accept a failing product from apple" I don't think that is true at all. - When the battery life on the iPhone was dismal, Apple was first to be blamed. Nobody even questioned user behaviour. It was Apple that was at fault full stop. - "Antennagate" was mixed, but a significant number of people immediately blamed Apple for the antenna design. - The leaky iPad screens were Apple's fault from the start. Nobody blamed the users for that one either. In this case, a loud fan most likely is a result of the user. If it were a PC made by a random vendor, the same questions would be asked first.
Derferman 15y ago
If you're laptop fan is loud then I assume either 1. you are doing some computationally heavy task or 2. your fan may be faulty Simple as that.
- lloeki 15y ago
  > 2. your fan may be faulty Quite possible culprit is thermal transfer to the heatsink too. I've seen occurrences of thermal patches badly (or not at all) applied on the die. Five of the 8 PC laptops I owned suffered from that, and a cleanup + proper thermal paste cured it on three. The two others simply had bad design and just could not get the heat out for some reason.
MJR 15y ago
Many people discussed the iPhone 3GS issues when upgraded to iOS 4 - when iOS 4 was NEW. You don't hear about it now, because the 3GS is 2 hardware versions older than the newest 4S and we're at iOS 5. If you don't hear it, I would venture complaining about 3GS phones just isn't interesting anymore, the performance issues have been accepted. As far as the responses he received to the fan noise - fan noise like he described isn't normal. If the fan is running loud it's because the machine is hot and needs both fans running at high RPM. Something must be causing that because loud fans just aren't part of an Apple product(unless you're talking about a Power Mac G4 with the mirrored driver doors - those were LOUD - like airplane loud - but I digress). I would characterize that response as normal. Since the machine shouldn't do that - my first question as well would be what are you doing on the machine? When it was pointed out that it was a Google spreadsheet in Safari I would go look at the CPU usage for Safari and see if it's pinned. If it is - it's a software issue. If it's not, it's a hardware issue. There's no blame to be placed here without that key piece of data - this is standard troubleshooting. Is this blaming the user? No - it's understanding Apple's reputation for building solid products and the experiences of their users that this scenario is not normal, which is leading them to question what is different about the situation. Overall it really seems like this was a viewpoint in search of a story, rather than an actual insight into something deeper about Apple's products.
- lloeki 15y ago
  > no one criticizing iPhone 3GS’s horrible sluggishness since iOS 4.0 > Many people discussed the iPhone 3GS issues when upgraded to iOS 4 - when iOS 4 was NEW Also it may be that it was because actually that was the iPhone 3G that was grinding, not the 3GS, which was (and still is, with iOS 5) perfectly snappy (at least in my experience, which is admittedly just as anecdotal as the author's)
  - fpgeek 15y ago
    The author is referencing his own iPhone when discussing the 3GS's sluggishness: "Sometimes I benchmark my iPhone, to discover that opening the settings app takes 13 seconds." Absent significant evidence to the contrary, I expect that the author knows whether he has a 3G or a 3GS.
enko 15y ago
TL;DR: - author has a new MBP, comes from PC background - MBP experiences unusually loud fan noises - other mac users tell him there's something wrong with his computer, or maybe it's something he's doing - author gets oddly defensive and interprets these suggestions as meaning that it is "his fault" and that mac users have all been brainwashed to say that If that summary makes you say, "huh?", well that was pretty much my reaction as well. Dude, when people say it's "your fault" the fans are loud, they don't mean it's because you're a bad person and god hates you and wants your fans to be loud, it means you are perhaps running some very CPU intensive process or something.
- SquareWheel 15y ago
  I didn't get the impression he took personal offense at all. He was also clear that he was not running CPU intensive tasks, just Safari with a Google Spreadsheet open.
  - MaysonL 15y ago
    I have seen both Safari and Google Javascript do CPU intensive things at the strangest times.
    - josteink 15y ago
      You mean it is obviously anything apart from the Macbook itself maybe having a loud fan noise. I think I have read an article about this sort of behaviour and reasoning somewhere.
      - MaysonL 15y ago
        Anybody who's heard one at full blast knows that the MacBook and MBPro have loud fans - that's not in dispute. What's unknown is the proximate cause of it turning on.
- fpgeek 15y ago
  Even some Apple enthusiasts have noticed heat and fan noise issues with recent MacBook Pros: http://www.marco.org/2011/09/20/heat-and-fan-issues-with-2011-15-inch-macbook-pro http://www.marco.org/2011/09/20/heat-and-fan-issues-with-201... More generally, I think you're underlining the author's point. I'd say there are three obvious causes for the unusually loud fan noises: 1. The author is doing something that is causing the noises (e.g. running an unusually large volume of CPU intensive jobs, letting too much dust collect in and around the laptop, ...) 2. There's a manufacturing defect with his laptop (e.g. poorly applied heat sink, damaged fan, ...). 3. There's a design flaw with his laptop model that causes the fan noise. The author is saying that Apple's trick is getting people to focus on option 1 to the exclusion of options 2 and 3, exactly as you do here.
fpgeek 15y ago
Indeed. My current favorite version of this Apple "trick" has to do with the power consumption of many recent MacBook Pros. In ordinary usage (e.g. browsing the web, editing simple documents) they have good battery life, but when running flat out they can drain their battery even when plugged into the wall because Apple doesn't supply a strong enough power supply: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3182887?start=0&tstart=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3182887?start=0&tst... And here's a good example of people thinking it is their fault until they learn the truth: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2802084?start=0&tstart=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2802084?start=0&tst... I happen to have a Lenovo W520 with similar specs and I'm struck by Lenovo's approach to the same issue. Instead of letting the battery drain while plugged in, Lenovo decided to provide a heavy, strong "brick" of a power supply that can keep up with the laptop no matter what.
- kstenerud 15y ago
  Apple prefers style over reliability, which is why power cables on Apple products fray. And once again, when I went to the Apple store, one of their "geniuses" lectured me on the "proper" way to wind up an Apple power cord after I brought my broken one in for replacement (sensing a trend here?). I suggested that Apple design a proper power cord. He didn't think that was funny.
Void_ 15y ago
No, this is not a Apple trick. This is a cheap PCs trick. It's because you're used to all that cheap hardware. If something feels wrong there, yeah, the first thing you try is look for a problem between the keyboard and the chair. We, who are used to Apple hardware, are not used to problems like that, and if there's a problem like that we know it's not just 'us doing something wrong'. When my fan is on, I usually pop up Activity Monitor just to find out I left something with Flash running. ;)
angryasian 15y ago
Do Apple products usually work great, or is it thats what they would have you believe ? You can look at the forums and find plenty of complaints. Would they be known for their outstanding customer service with hardware, if things usually work great ? Is it really great, or have you convinced yourself its great because you paid a premium and in order to soothe your ego that the premium is worth it you tell everyone else how great it is and ignore its deficiencies ? the reality is macs and other pc's all pretty much run commodity hardware. The rates of failure are probably comparable, but they would just have believe they are more reliable. There have always been one design issue or another with MBP's that similarly exist in other laptop lines. Its the reality of hardware.
bryanlarsen 15y ago
That reminds me of this rule of thumb: "If your OS crashes and you're on Windows, you have a software problem. If your kernel dumps and you're using Linux, you have a hardware problem." It's a good rule of thumb because it's usually true, but when it isn't you can waste a lot of time and/or money. I do know that part of Windows' poor reputation comes from people blaming it when they actually have hardware problems...
bradleyland 15y ago
Sorry, Roee, but that's a load of crap. There's a ton of bias and falacious thinking going on here. Right off the bat, you wear your bias on your sleeve. > So at the risk of letting my soul get sucked into the fanboi dark side, I bought the cheapest MacBook Pro and started working with it as my main machine. So if you buy a Mac, there's some kind of inherent risk that you'll become a "fanboi"? > What’s so amazing about this story is that when people are confronted with a problem in an Apple product, in most cases they assume it’s the user’s fault. I've done my time in the trenches of end-user support. There's a reason that most people capable of solving computer problems start with the user; because it's most frequently the user. This is true of Macs, PCs, phones, microwaves, VCRs, you name it. You always start by verifying that the user isn't doing something unexpected. That is a problem to be solved in and of itself, but it's not unique to Mac culture. > I hear many people criticizing Android’s responsiveness etc, but no one criticizing iPhone 3GS’s horrible sluggishness since iOS 4.0. I cannot think of a worse example. The 3GS was introduced in 2009. When people criticize Android's responsiveness, those complaints are levied against brand new devices. Roee, I can tell you exactly why your brand new MacBook Pro was screaming like a jet fighter, and it's not your fault. OS X has a few background processes that can eat up your CPU cycles causing high load and therefore high fan speeds. The primary culprit is Spotlight. There are a set of Spotlight indexing processes (mds, I'm looking at you) that will push the CPU at 100% for extended periods. IMO, Apple could do a few things to remedy this: * Throttle the Spotlight indexing service (and other background-only services) based on CPU temperature. Apple controls the entire hardware/software stack, so they can consistently rely on this information. It sounds silly, but when I make large changes to my filesystem, I see the same issue, and it can be really annoying to listen to my MBP whir loudly on my desk. Other users find it downright concerning. * Provide an "Advanced Options" button in the Spotlight preferences where we can use a slider control balance the speed of updates and CPU usage. This slider should start out somewhere lower than "update Spotlight at all costs, even if the system load is at 3.99". * Update Activity Monitor to include a more user friendly view of what's using the most system resources by CPU, memory, and disk activity. The process list is great for geeks, but my mom has no idea what launchd, SystemUIServer or mds are. Disk activity has no transparency beyond ops per second and throughput. There is no user facing method of determining what application is making orders of magnitude more file system requests than anything else on the system. If Apple did any of the above, they'd be doing 10x more than anyone else in the industry. Hell, Soluto is in the business of providing exactly this kind of information. Roee, how about you look in to providing these kinds of details through Soluto for Mac? I'd recommend you to everyone inside my network.
ajma 15y ago
Page seems to be down. Here's the google cache link http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Aroee.co%2F2011%2F12%2F30%2Fthe-greatest-trick-apple-ever-pulled-was-making-you-think-its-your-fault%2F&pbx=1&oq=cache%3Aroee.co%2F2011%2F12%2F30%2Fthe-greatest-trick-apple-ever-pulled-was-making-you-think-its-your-fault%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=11221l11844l0l12045l6l4l0l0l0l2l168l439l2.2l4l0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...

28 points by zeppelin_7 15y ago

The reason people are surprised by the loud fan is because their fans are NOT loud. My Macbook fan very rarely turns on and when it does, it's not any louder than any other laptop of comparable size. If someone came to me and said "My new Macbook Pro fan is really loud" I would assume something is wrong too, because I've never thought of mine as really loud.

whackedspinach 15y ago
It depends what you are doing with it. Sometimes it isn't bad, but anytime I kick in the discrete graphics card everyone in the room looks at me. It picks up when I drive my external monitor. Also, I did find out that a rouge process was taking about 40% CPU consistently, and it quieted down after that.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

pacomerh 15y ago

Rather than a trick I see it as reputation, they've earned by creating cool products. But yeah one has to doubt even the best brands, not all products are perfect.

randomdata 15y ago
It is part reputation, but beyond that, a loud fan is normal when the user is doing extraordinary tasks. Of course the circumstances of operation are going to come into question first. If you had a flat tire, the first question is going to be what did you run over, not what manufacturing defect caused it. There's no trick here.
- pacomerh 15y ago
  Agreed, in these cases of course, fans operate loud, but the point in case is that the brand has created people who just consider the user making mistakes, they don't even accept a failing product from apple which could be kind of arrogant.
  - randomdata 15y ago
    "they don't even accept a failing product from apple" I don't think that is true at all. - When the battery life on the iPhone was dismal, Apple was first to be blamed. Nobody even questioned user behaviour. It was Apple that was at fault full stop. - "Antennagate" was mixed, but a significant number of people immediately blamed Apple for the antenna design. - The leaky iPad screens were Apple's fault from the start. Nobody blamed the users for that one either. In this case, a loud fan most likely is a result of the user. If it were a PC made by a random vendor, the same questions would be asked first.

Derferman 15y ago

If you're laptop fan is loud then I assume either 1. you are doing some computationally heavy task or 2. your fan may be faulty Simple as that.

lloeki 15y ago
> 2. your fan may be faulty Quite possible culprit is thermal transfer to the heatsink too. I've seen occurrences of thermal patches badly (or not at all) applied on the die. Five of the 8 PC laptops I owned suffered from that, and a cleanup + proper thermal paste cured it on three. The two others simply had bad design and just could not get the heat out for some reason.

MJR 15y ago

Many people discussed the iPhone 3GS issues when upgraded to iOS 4 - when iOS 4 was NEW. You don't hear about it now, because the 3GS is 2 hardware versions older than the newest 4S and we're at iOS 5. If you don't hear it, I would venture complaining about 3GS phones just isn't interesting anymore, the performance issues have been accepted. As far as the responses he received to the fan noise - fan noise like he described isn't normal. If the fan is running loud it's because the machine is hot and needs both fans running at high RPM. Something must be causing that because loud fans just aren't part of an Apple product(unless you're talking about a Power Mac G4 with the mirrored driver doors - those were LOUD - like airplane loud - but I digress). I would characterize that response as normal. Since the machine shouldn't do that - my first question as well would be what are you doing on the machine? When it was pointed out that it was a Google spreadsheet in Safari I would go look at the CPU usage for Safari and see if it's pinned. If it is - it's a software issue. If it's not, it's a hardware issue. There's no blame to be placed here without that key piece of data - this is standard troubleshooting. Is this blaming the user? No - it's understanding Apple's reputation for building solid products and the experiences of their users that this scenario is not normal, which is leading them to question what is different about the situation. Overall it really seems like this was a viewpoint in search of a story, rather than an actual insight into something deeper about Apple's products.

lloeki 15y ago
> no one criticizing iPhone 3GS’s horrible sluggishness since iOS 4.0 > Many people discussed the iPhone 3GS issues when upgraded to iOS 4 - when iOS 4 was NEW Also it may be that it was because actually that was the iPhone 3G that was grinding, not the 3GS, which was (and still is, with iOS 5) perfectly snappy (at least in my experience, which is admittedly just as anecdotal as the author's)
- fpgeek 15y ago
  The author is referencing his own iPhone when discussing the 3GS's sluggishness: "Sometimes I benchmark my iPhone, to discover that opening the settings app takes 13 seconds." Absent significant evidence to the contrary, I expect that the author knows whether he has a 3G or a 3GS.

enko 15y ago

TL;DR: - author has a new MBP, comes from PC background - MBP experiences unusually loud fan noises - other mac users tell him there's something wrong with his computer, or maybe it's something he's doing - author gets oddly defensive and interprets these suggestions as meaning that it is "his fault" and that mac users have all been brainwashed to say that If that summary makes you say, "huh?", well that was pretty much my reaction as well. Dude, when people say it's "your fault" the fans are loud, they don't mean it's because you're a bad person and god hates you and wants your fans to be loud, it means you are perhaps running some very CPU intensive process or something.

SquareWheel 15y ago
I didn't get the impression he took personal offense at all. He was also clear that he was not running CPU intensive tasks, just Safari with a Google Spreadsheet open.
- MaysonL 15y ago
  I have seen both Safari and Google Javascript do CPU intensive things at the strangest times.
  - josteink 15y ago
    You mean it is obviously anything apart from the Macbook itself maybe having a loud fan noise. I think I have read an article about this sort of behaviour and reasoning somewhere.
    - MaysonL 15y ago
      Anybody who's heard one at full blast knows that the MacBook and MBPro have loud fans - that's not in dispute. What's unknown is the proximate cause of it turning on.
fpgeek 15y ago
Even some Apple enthusiasts have noticed heat and fan noise issues with recent MacBook Pros: http://www.marco.org/2011/09/20/heat-and-fan-issues-with-2011-15-inch-macbook-pro http://www.marco.org/2011/09/20/heat-and-fan-issues-with-201... More generally, I think you're underlining the author's point. I'd say there are three obvious causes for the unusually loud fan noises: 1. The author is doing something that is causing the noises (e.g. running an unusually large volume of CPU intensive jobs, letting too much dust collect in and around the laptop, ...) 2. There's a manufacturing defect with his laptop (e.g. poorly applied heat sink, damaged fan, ...). 3. There's a design flaw with his laptop model that causes the fan noise. The author is saying that Apple's trick is getting people to focus on option 1 to the exclusion of options 2 and 3, exactly as you do here.

fpgeek 15y ago

Indeed. My current favorite version of this Apple "trick" has to do with the power consumption of many recent MacBook Pros. In ordinary usage (e.g. browsing the web, editing simple documents) they have good battery life, but when running flat out they can drain their battery even when plugged into the wall because Apple doesn't supply a strong enough power supply: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3182887?start=0&tstart=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3182887?start=0&tst... And here's a good example of people thinking it is their fault until they learn the truth: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2802084?start=0&tstart=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2802084?start=0&tst... I happen to have a Lenovo W520 with similar specs and I'm struck by Lenovo's approach to the same issue. Instead of letting the battery drain while plugged in, Lenovo decided to provide a heavy, strong "brick" of a power supply that can keep up with the laptop no matter what.

kstenerud 15y ago
Apple prefers style over reliability, which is why power cables on Apple products fray. And once again, when I went to the Apple store, one of their "geniuses" lectured me on the "proper" way to wind up an Apple power cord after I brought my broken one in for replacement (sensing a trend here?). I suggested that Apple design a proper power cord. He didn't think that was funny.

Void_ 15y ago

No, this is not a Apple trick. This is a cheap PCs trick. It's because you're used to all that cheap hardware. If something feels wrong there, yeah, the first thing you try is look for a problem between the keyboard and the chair. We, who are used to Apple hardware, are not used to problems like that, and if there's a problem like that we know it's not just 'us doing something wrong'. When my fan is on, I usually pop up Activity Monitor just to find out I left something with Flash running. ;)

angryasian 15y ago

Do Apple products usually work great, or is it thats what they would have you believe ? You can look at the forums and find plenty of complaints. Would they be known for their outstanding customer service with hardware, if things usually work great ? Is it really great, or have you convinced yourself its great because you paid a premium and in order to soothe your ego that the premium is worth it you tell everyone else how great it is and ignore its deficiencies ? the reality is macs and other pc's all pretty much run commodity hardware. The rates of failure are probably comparable, but they would just have believe they are more reliable. There have always been one design issue or another with MBP's that similarly exist in other laptop lines. Its the reality of hardware.

bryanlarsen 15y ago

That reminds me of this rule of thumb: "If your OS crashes and you're on Windows, you have a software problem. If your kernel dumps and you're using Linux, you have a hardware problem." It's a good rule of thumb because it's usually true, but when it isn't you can waste a lot of time and/or money. I do know that part of Windows' poor reputation comes from people blaming it when they actually have hardware problems...

bradleyland 15y ago

Sorry, Roee, but that's a load of crap. There's a ton of bias and falacious thinking going on here. Right off the bat, you wear your bias on your sleeve. > So at the risk of letting my soul get sucked into the fanboi dark side, I bought the cheapest MacBook Pro and started working with it as my main machine. So if you buy a Mac, there's some kind of inherent risk that you'll become a "fanboi"? > What’s so amazing about this story is that when people are confronted with a problem in an Apple product, in most cases they assume it’s the user’s fault. I've done my time in the trenches of end-user support. There's a reason that most people capable of solving computer problems start with the user; because it's most frequently the user. This is true of Macs, PCs, phones, microwaves, VCRs, you name it. You always start by verifying that the user isn't doing something unexpected. That is a problem to be solved in and of itself, but it's not unique to Mac culture. > I hear many people criticizing Android’s responsiveness etc, but no one criticizing iPhone 3GS’s horrible sluggishness since iOS 4.0. I cannot think of a worse example. The 3GS was introduced in 2009. When people criticize Android's responsiveness, those complaints are levied against brand new devices. Roee, I can tell you exactly why your brand new MacBook Pro was screaming like a jet fighter, and it's not your fault. OS X has a few background processes that can eat up your CPU cycles causing high load and therefore high fan speeds. The primary culprit is Spotlight. There are a set of Spotlight indexing processes (mds, I'm looking at you) that will push the CPU at 100% for extended periods. IMO, Apple could do a few things to remedy this: * Throttle the Spotlight indexing service (and other background-only services) based on CPU temperature. Apple controls the entire hardware/software stack, so they can consistently rely on this information. It sounds silly, but when I make large changes to my filesystem, I see the same issue, and it can be really annoying to listen to my MBP whir loudly on my desk. Other users find it downright concerning. * Provide an "Advanced Options" button in the Spotlight preferences where we can use a slider control balance the speed of updates and CPU usage. This slider should start out somewhere lower than "update Spotlight at all costs, even if the system load is at 3.99". * Update Activity Monitor to include a more user friendly view of what's using the most system resources by CPU, memory, and disk activity. The process list is great for geeks, but my mom has no idea what launchd, SystemUIServer or mds are. Disk activity has no transparency beyond ops per second and throughput. There is no user facing method of determining what application is making orders of magnitude more file system requests than anything else on the system. If Apple did any of the above, they'd be doing 10x more than anyone else in the industry. Hell, Soluto is in the business of providing exactly this kind of information. Roee, how about you look in to providing these kinds of details through Soluto for Mac? I'd recommend you to everyone inside my network.

ajma 15y ago

Page seems to be down. Here's the google cache link http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Aroee.co%2F2011%2F12%2F30%2Fthe-greatest-trick-apple-ever-pulled-was-making-you-think-its-your-fault%2F&pbx=1&oq=cache%3Aroee.co%2F2011%2F12%2F30%2Fthe-greatest-trick-apple-ever-pulled-was-making-you-think-its-your-fault%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=11221l11844l0l12045l6l4l0l0l0l2l168l439l2.2l4l0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...