| Monday, March 15, 2004 |
22:53 - What? What? I can't hear you!
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Mac OS X 10.3.3 is out, and it contains the following feature:
* Improves Fan Control system function for Power Mac G5 computers.
Know what that means? It means that where once upon a time the G5's fan system would run at a barely-audible breathy, musical whir, and would periodically spin up for increased cooling on demand whenever the CPUs had extra work to do-- now, instead, presumably for Improved Functionality™, the fans just spin at medium-high speed all the time. They've gone constant-speed. Why, I can only guess-- but if the "idle" G5 fan noise level (on a scale of 0 to 100) was about a 15, and the "panic" mode (when you open up the case and take off the plastic baffle dividing the airflow regions) is like 85, now it floats along at roughly 54.8, sounding like nothing so much as your average, random Dell.
What the hell?
C'mon, Apple! What'd you do, give up? Whatever problem you were having getting those fans to behave, couldn't you have made it software-controllable or something-- so we could go back to the old behavior if we so chose?
This isn't as bad as the When Macs Attack G5 fan levels, but it's still likely to be audible while I try to sleep. I guess I'll probably be able to get used to it, but... I am not a happy Brian. No, precious. Not happy at all.
UPDATE: Hmm. Well, actually the fans seem to have spun back down to their accustomed whisper-quiet level sometime during the night. Okay, I officially don't understand.
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Brian Tiemann
