

The greatest trick Apple ever pulled was making you think it’s Your fault - zeppelin_7
http://roee.co/2011/12/30/the-greatest-trick-apple-ever-pulled-was-making-you-think-its-your-fault/

======
enko
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.

~~~
fpgeek
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-201...](http://www.marco.org/2011/09/20/heat-and-fan-issues-
with-2011-15-inch-macbook-pro)

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.

~~~
MaysonL
Also potentially he's running some buggy software: I've had fairly common
experiences with Safari and/or Flash pegging a core and causing the fan to
kick in.

~~~
josteink
Let's repeat what the nice mister said;

"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."

~~~
kstenerud
And that mentality goes all the way too the top. Remember Steve's flippant
response of "You're holding the phone wrong"?

------
RandallBrown
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
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.

------
bradleyland
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.

~~~
jlouis
An interesting tidbit is that my 3 year old Lenovo is less noisy than my
MacBook Pro when running full steam ahead both of them. That and the miserable
keyboard is my primary woes against it.

OSX is also funny because today it isn't that far ahead. Rather, compared to
my Ubuntu there are several places where it is utterly behind. Yes, there are
more glitches in Ubuntu _currently_ but looking at from where they came, this
is a deep and major improvement. There are also places where the UX of Ubuntu
outright beats OSX. There is also the whole part about the App Store and the
want for my credit card, but that is another story.

The touchpad and multitouch features of OSX/MacBook hardware is awesome
though. I really like that.

~~~
bradleyland
At full whir, the MBP is loud. Maybe it's fan design, maybe it's the solid
aluminum casing (dense materials transmit sound more readily), but I don't
really intend to dispute that.

The author has interpreted other people's troubleshooting questions as user
hostile, and then attributed this as some sort of Mac-exclusive cultural
phenomenon. An assertion at which I laugh aloud... from the belly.

I think Lenovo laptops are great hardware. They continue to be some of the
best engineered machines on the planet. IBM was putting roll cages in
ThinkPads when Apple was still building Mac laptops out of plastic and tin.
The new unibody Macs are an incredible design amongst many.

As you've observed though, you don't have to fall in to one camp or the other.
It's perfectly fine to like both without vilifying the other.

------
fpgeek
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&tst...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3182887?start=0&tstart=0)

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&tst...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2802084?start=0&tstart=0)

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
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.

------
MJR
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
> _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 3G _S_ , 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
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.

~~~
kstenerud
I also have a 3GS, and some of the apps (ESPECIALLY the settings app) are
incredibly slow. 15-20 second delays loading tables in the settings app are
regular fare.

My downloaded apps run fine; it's just the built-in ones that are slow.

------
bryanlarsen
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...

------
angryasian
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.

------
ajma
Page seems to be down. Here's the google cache link

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-
ab&...](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)

------
Void_
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. ;)

------
pacomerh
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
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
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
_"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
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
> _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.

