7 Oct
2011
7 Oct
'11
6:59 p.m.
What was the deal with Jobs and fans anyway - none in the Apple ]['s,
the Apple /// (I've now heard of 3 of them going on fire this year
alone) --- The Mac and the iCube... what the heck?!?!?
Fans aren't THAT damned loud for crying out loud... Jobs being Jobs -
you'd think he would've reinvented the fan to make it silent and
accommodate his needs.
Toby Thain wrote:
On 07/10/11 9:11 PM, Josh Dersch wrote:
On 10/7/2011 5:08 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
None of our Cubes overheated. Perhaps you are in a different climate.
On 07/10/11 12:59 PM, Josh Dersch wrote:
He may have been right in theory (and where the available technology
supported it) but he was incorrect in practice. Passive cooling works
where passive cooling is sufficient. (And the G4 Cube definitely
overheated.) ... The fan controller(s) in the first Macbook
Pro were set to almost *never* turn them on. The fans ran at extremely
low speeds even when the machine was baking your pants to your legs. I
picture this as another case of Jobs' "ideals vs. engineering" (see
also: Apple III, G4 Cube) -- "This thing needs to be silent!" ...
On the whole, he was right. Passive cooling was sufficient for the
Lisa, the original classic Mac, and the G4 Cube.
Where it isn't sufficient, it doesn't
work and you get
laptops that are uncomfortable to use like the MacBook Pro in my
example.
Fans are only theoretically replaceable. In practice, at least in the
PC and laptop world, nobody replaces them until the expensive part to
which they are attached, dies.
And people still hate fans. Apart from the noise,
a 20c fan frequently
kills a $1000 computer or a $200 video card (thanks China!)
So... buy a better fan? It'll last longer and be quieter! Fans are
replaceable, a laptop that has suffered thermal component failure due to
poor design, less so.
>
> When critical cooling components can fail and destroy expensive parts
> without warning, that's a serious design error.
(This is the rule, not the exception.)
When critical cooling components are left out for aesthetic reasons,
that's a serious design error.
And where they are not: It's a design success.
--Toby
- Josh
--Toby