The Case for a Quiet, Cooler Running, Low Powered MacBook
Charles W. Moore - 2007.11.12
The heat-generating capacity of Apple's Core Duo powered portables
is legendary, and even the middling to faster G4s like my 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4 generate plenty of
heat. This seems to bother some folks more than others, likely due to
varying tolerance levels for fan noise and hot control surfaces.
Personally, I don't mind the heat itself so much (at least for most of
the year here in Canada), but I hate noise.
My 17" PowerBook serves mostly as a desktop substitute machine, a
job it does very well, but for actual portable laptop use, I still much
prefer my two old Pismos and 12" iBook, which are quiet (I can't remember
the cooling fans cutting in on any of them since some hot days in the
summer of '06) and cool-running, which makes them a lot more pleasant
to live with hands-on (or thighs-on).
All of which inclines me to think there is a case to be made for a
relatively low-powered (in today's context) but up-to-date, cool, and
quiet-running notebook computer to be used as notebook computers were
originally conceived - as a portable ancillary to one's main computer.
Some folks still do use their portables as "electronic notebooks", and
few of us ever do high-end graphics work or video editing or other
really processor-intensive stuff on the road, so in that context, Core 2
Duo power is extreme overkill most of the time, and a G4 PowerBook or
iBook - or even an aging G3 machine - makes a more pleasant road
warrioring tool than a hot-running, noisy, MacBook or MacBook Pro.
Another aspect of this is battery runtime. With extended life
batteries and a few power conservation strategies, I can get five or
six hours out of a battery charge with my upgraded G4/550 MHz
Pismos.
The perceived need for desktop power in a notebook package is to a
degree part of the megahertz myth, and trying to squeeze more and
faster into a smaller box is in many respects counterproductive for
notebook users. It's high time manufacturers took a step back and paid
heed what the average notebook buyer really needs.
So what do we really need (or want)?
Cool Running
My first PowerBook, a 5300,
would barely get warm to the touch - just enough to be a comfort to
your left hand on chilly Nova Scotia days. With its anemic 100 MHz
Motorola 603e processor, the old 5300 just didn't have much
heat-generating capacity or any necessity for a noisy cooling fan.
Unfortunately, it didn't have a whole lot of computing power either,
and my son's 25 MHz 68LC040 PowerBook
520 could outperform and in certain contexts. The 520 didn't get
very warm either.
The first Mac laptop with a thermostatically activated internal
cooling fan was the PowerBook
3400c, which also had a 603e
chip, but a hotter one both literally and figuratively. The 3400's fan
didn't cut him very often, but it was there on standby if required.
The PowerBook G3
Series 233 MHz that replaced my 5300 had a fan, but it never spun
up during my first three-and-one-half years of ownership - until just a
few days before the G3 processor burned out on a hot midsummer day in
2002. Ever since I replaced the processor by simply swapping in a
scrounged daughter card, the fan has stayed resolutely silent, summer
and winter, and the big old WallStreet barely gets warmer to the touch
then the older 5300 did.
The same went for my 500 MHz G3 PowerBook Pismo as well, which ran
cooler with its original CPU than the WallStreet, thanks in part to a
more sophisticated internal cooling system. The Pismo's fan also
remained silent until I had a 550 MHz G4 processor upgrade and a 5400
rpm hard drive in situ, after which the fan would cycle on hotter days
during processor-intensive computing tasks. That is, until I installed
Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", after which fan activity became much more
frequent. Interestingly, the Pismo's fan has not cut in even once since
I "downgraded" to OS X 10.3.9 "Panther" last February, and its
palm rests barely get warm, not even after a couple of hours operation
in July temperatures. It seems that Tiger imposes more intensive
processor demands than Panther does. With OS X 10.3 (or else
9.2.2) the Pismo's fan remains silent almost all the time, even with
the 550 MHz G4 processor.
My 700 MHz iBook G3 runs significantly hotter than any of my older
PowerBooks. Its case feels noticeably warm - even borderline hot
sometimes - although it's internal fan never spun up during the first
two-and-one-half years I owned it, again until I installed OS X
10.4, after which the fan does cut in during hotter weather, albeit not
very often.
Unfortunately, not so with my 1.33 GHz 17" PowerBook G4. Running
OS X 10.4.6, the BigAl's fan runs perhaps half of the time when
the weather is warm up here in Nova Scotia, even with the PowerBook
sitting on a Road Tools Podium
CoolPad. And interestingly, the surface of its aluminum case
doesn't feel hot, or even more than lukewarm most of the time, not
nearly as warm as the little iBook's tactile surfaces get, which
indicates that the large expanse of metal case surface does an
efficient job of dissipating heat through passive radiation.
However, the processor itself gets quite torrid. According to the
Temperature Monitor utility, the fan cuts in when the processor
bottomside reaches about 58°C, and I've never seen it register more
than 58.5°, which is more than hot enough by my likes, but
relatively tepid compared with temperatures being reported with the
Intel Core Duo MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
Going Intel - or Not
I've been holding out on buying an Intel-powered 'Book, partly
because I'm getting excellent service from my present fleet of PowerPC
'Books, although Leopard may prove the catalyst that gets me moving
toward buying my first Macintel.
In the meantime, as noted, my present PowerBook runs plenty hot for
my liking, indeed hotter than I find satisfactory, even sitting on a
Road Tools CoolPad, the processor
reads out at 54-59° C during normal use (the fan kicks in at
58.5°), which is 15-20° cooler than some MacBook owners have
reported. The PowerBook's fan usually brings the CPU temperature down
quickly, but it cycles on and off pretty regularly through the summer
months, which is the only thing I really dislike about this
computer.
By contrast, the 550 MHz G4 Pismo PowerBooks and 700 MHz G3 iBook
remain a pleasure to use, getting only moderately warm (none of them
supports a temperature readout, so I can't provide hard figures).
For word processing, email, web surfing, working with images in
Photoshop Elements 4.0 and other graphics programs, and scanning using
VueScan, as well as other light to
medium-duty tasks, and especially on my literal lap top or lying down
with the 'Book on my Laptop Laidback
stand, these older machines are comfortable, delightfully quiet, and
only get mildly warm to the touch.
I also love the big 17-incher, although the heat and fan noise are
aggravating - ants at an otherwise pleasant picnic. The incessant fan
cycling and tactile heat sensation, not to mention mediocre battery
runtime, make this machine feel "compromised" in mobile mode compared
with my cool-running and quiet older 'Books. It's such a beautiful
machine in most other aspects, but I find the heat and noise
enervating.
Nevertheless, the time will come - and is probably not that far off
- when Intel compatibility will become a practical necessity, and at
this point there is no Intel-based true laptop Mac computer. Apple long
ago stopped referring to its 'Books as laptops and explicitly warns
against using them on one's lap. Not a satisfactory state of affairs,
and it is to be hoped that Intel will be able to produce a modern CPU
for portables that runs relatively cool and doesn't require batteries
with the potency of nuclear fission to power it. That all seems at
least thinkable.
On the other hand, for those of us who use notebooks as our primary
computers, largely as desktop substitutes, and demanding
desktop-equivalent performance, the prospects of cool and quiet
computing look pretty dim for the near-term future at least.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there will be some breakthrough
on the heat issue. If none is forthcoming, one has to wonder if
portable computers are not encountering a "glass ceiling" of sorts in
terms of performance advancement.
Apprehensions that were widely voiced back in 1988 when the G3
Series PowerBooks debuted about potentially shortened service life due
to the G3 processor's higher operating temperatures seem a bit quaint
now, since the WallStreets were cool runners compared with the
Macintels and faster G4s, and the G3 Series turned out to be one of the
more long-lived and dependable PowerBook models ever.
Nevertheless, one must presume that there are physics limits that
obtain at some point, and excessive heat can't be good for electronic
components. You have to wonder how long these blistering hot
Intel-powered 'Books are going to last, running at Internal
temperatures high enough to fry eggs. Intel rates the Core Duo for
service up to 100° C, so the MacBooks' processors are well within
tolerance, but what about the other internal components?
It seems that processor performance is running up against the laws
of physics that dictate that if you put a heat-generating object inside
a small, inefficiently ventilated space, it's going to get hotter. The
heat problem with today's portable computers is a combination of faster
processor speeds, fashion, demand for thin form factors, more RAM,
faster, higher capacity hard drives, and operating systems and other
software that place ever greater demand on processor power.
Apple struggled for several years trying to make the G5 PowerPC chip
work tolerably well in a notebook form factor and failed. The switch to
Intel was purported to be the answer to the laptop advancement
roadblock, and so it has been to a considerable degree, but not really
a panacea.
Can this dilemma be overcome? We'll have to wait and see.
It seems that the Core Duo
MacBooks typically run in the low-to-mid 70s C. Low End Mac's
Andrew J. Fishkin reports that his
hit 85°C and typically hovers around 77°C, while the highest
temperature he ever noted with his 12" G4 PowerBook was 68°C. This
is a lot hotter than any of my 'Books has ever gotten, but Andrew lives
in California. I guess owners of recent Apple laptops who reside in
warm climates are obliged to live with a serenade of howling cooling
fans most of the time, a prospect which does not enchant me in the
slightest. I guess there is an upside after all to the sort of chilly
whether we get here in Atlantic Canada ten months of the year.
Quiet, Please
I absolutely detest fan racket, and being afflicted with multiple
chemical sensitivity is, the fact that hot plastics off-gas chemical
vapors more profusely is problematical well.
One of the aspects of using laptop computers that has traditionally
appealed to me has been their relative silence. During the first ten
months I owned the PowerBook 5300, I used to run most of the time from
a RAM disk, which allowed me to keep the hard drive spun down and
eliminate even that noise distraction. One of the things that would
theoretically appeal to me about flash-memory-based laptops is the
absence of hard drives grinding away in the background, but with the
contemporaneous reality of cooling fan running most of the time anyway
in order to keep the CPU from self-immolating, the peace of flash
memory would be largely canceled out.
It certainly gives one pause. The relentless fan cycling is just
about the only thing I really dislike about my 17-inch PowerBook, but I
dislike that a lot. Doesn't augur well for my level of content with a
MacBook, and I have to say that it's a great relief to sit down with
the Pismo or iBook knowing that I'm not going to be subjected to fan
cacophony with a few minutes of running time, and these machines can be
still used as actual, literal laptop computers.
Something's Burning
However, curmudgeonly impatience with noise pollution aside, there
is a more do objective and potentially hazardous issue in play here as
well. In recent years there have been a few highly publicized incidents
of laptop computers spontaneously catching fire, notably an Apple iBook
in the US Midwest and a Dell laptop at a trade show in Japan. There
were no injuries in either case, but there was some property damage
(aside from the computers themselves), and one shudders at the thought
of something like that occurring aboard an aircraft in flight.
Last year, the Toronto Globe and Mail's Alex Dobrota
reported that there had been as many as 43 laptop fires reported in
the United States since 2001, according to statistics compiled by the
US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Not a happy thought. A
commentary piece in response from John Bowman of the rival CBC
pooh-poohs the Globe story as borderline sensationalism, noting:
"given that there are an estimated 60 million laptops in the US, that's
a pretty good ratio of non-exploding units to exploding units."
However, I don't think the average laptop user has up until recently
apprehended that there is a statistical risk of fire inherent, however
small.
There is always the potential for blowing this sort of thing out of
proportion, especially, it seems, when Apple Computer is involved. One
of the most enduring urban myths in laptop computer folklore is that of
the spontaneously combusting PowerBook 5300, which probably did more to
brand that computer as a "failure" than any of its actual shortcomings.
The facts are that one very early production 5300 caught fire in an
Apple test lab after its Lithium Ion battery overheated. Apple
immediately recalled the 5300s that had been released into the
distribution pipeline and replaced the LiIon battery units with Nickel
Metal Hydride batteries, which proved completely dependable. As far as
I have been able to determine, no PowerBook 5300 ever caught fire in
the hands of a consumer.
Fast and Simple
Over the OS X era, I have daydreamed from time to time about how
much more speedy and efficient OS X might be with a bare-bones
simple GUI like System 6 had. Personally, I would happily live without
the eye candy and gimmicky stuff if that would mean snappy performance
with more modest power that didn't require fan-forced cooling, and I
could be content with thicker case profiles as well.
Or perhaps there will be a technology breakthrough that will result
in quiet laptops than can officially be called "laptops" again without
courting litigation from someone whose thighs get roasted. Here's
hoping.
