So, I’d written off the whole whining issue that everyone’s been talking about on Apple’s new portables, since I’ve now had a MacBook 13″ for about a week and had heard nothing along the lines of what people had been complaining about emanating from my new white bundle of joy. Well, the same still holds true, with one minor exception: my power brick is a whiner.
That’s right, it whines. Or at least it whines as of now while my MacBook is charging. It’s not nearly as bad as some people say, but it’s there.
Now, that said, there’s a bit of fun to be had with the whine. If you go and grab SystemLoad here: http://www.bresink.de/osx/SystemLoad.html you can get your machine to whine in scales. Not sure if it grates any less, but it adds an element of entertainment to it.
I’ve done a brief recording here: http://fanplastic.org/media/mb_whine.mov
Probably most people who don’t own a G5 will have no clue what I’m talking about, and among those that do, a decent number will sigh when they hear mention of it. I’ve never gotten a full explanation on what the whole problem is, but when the power features for the G5 are enabled on a PowerMac G5 (as they are enabled by default), one will occasionally be greeted with noises like those described in this Apple support document.
Well, up until now, this has just been a minor annoyance until I stumbled upon this lovely utility while looking around MacNN’s PowerBook/MBP forums. What does it do, you might ask? It can place variable loads on the processors found in your Mac. What’s so neat that the author of this app has discovered? Apparently, you can make your power supply play scales in the chirping noises. Here’s the explanation from the help docs included with SystemLoad:
the application tries to variate the load put on the processors in a certain pattern. This pattern is equivalent to the frequencies of a C-major scale between the notes C6 and C7. For processors consuming much power this causes the current (amperage) drawn by the processors to variate in the same pattern. For a dual CPU system with PPC 970 processors for example, the total current drawn by the processors will fluctuate between 22 and 120 amps in the millisecond range. Certain components in the power supply will start to ring with the same frequencies due to the high load changes. For some power supplies these changes become audible. Similar effects can be seen with the DC/DC boards of some PowerBook models.
Very random, but also very cool. Wonder if the author would put out an API for hooking this up as a MIDI output. You could play all kinds of interesting stuff :-)
P.S.: I’ll give a try at recording this tomorrow. I don’t have any microphone around the house…
No, I’m not joining the military or anything. The boot camp I’m talking about is Apple’s new tool and firmware for booting windows natively on a new Intel Mac. Boot Camp itself is a selection of appropriate drivers for Apple hardware coupled with partition resizing and setup help software. This provides for a friendly user interface for getting things set up. In addition to this is a firmware update that adds BIOS support, allowing windows to boot on an EFI Mac. In reality, it’s the firmware that’s giving one the ability to boot windows, but Boot Camp makes it easy.
Now, there’s been more than a flurry of commentary about this in the past couple of days. Actually, I think deluge would be the appropriate term. Many have been supportive (Ryan’s post is quite good, and I pretty much agree with his sentiments), with some speculative statements about what this means for the future of whatever, but there are a few people out there who, I really think, just don’t get it. One of which is the following, from CNET. The article pretty much chalks Boot Camp up to a solution for existing Mac users to run games. He also discounts that any people will be coming over that are Windows users because of dual boot functionality. While I personally wouldn’t expect huge numbers of users to be coming over to the platform, it’ll get a lot more people to consider getting a Mac, which is a large part of the battle. I think the vast majority of Windows users that buy into this though will be the relatively tech savvy folks that kinda like OS X, but have a large base of existing investment in Windows software. These users can continue making use of Windows applications, but start building up a comfortable set of software on the Mac side of things. Couple this with virtualization solutions that are already here, with more to come, and the picture looks even sweeter from both sides of the fence.
The bottom line is that Apple is taking a gamble with this venture, but at the same time it puts the ability to run OS X (legally, and in a supported fashion) in conjunction with Windows and Linux all in one box, with virtualization for concurrently running everything at the same time. Where’s the complaint? Apple’s hardware really isn’t more expensive than comparably equipped boxes from top-tier Wintel vendors (you can find cheaper and more expensive versions, but Apple is one company, and in the business of selling quality hardware).
