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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

This is funny. For the last ten years I've used Mac laptops as my primary machine. Of course the fan noise was a great auditory clue to tell me to check out Activity Monitor/top for rogue processes and help me optimize which tasks took too many resources.

I didn't realize how much I relied on that cue until I temporarily switched to a Mac desktop machine during the pandemic when I didn't need to travel. The desktop fans pretty much stay at 1200rpm all the time. I think I've seen them spike once. I'd forgotten how much better desktops can be for some things.

Now I'm looking for a better remote access solution so I can consider sticking with a desktop at home and then maybe just an iPad for travel with good remote access and file sync.

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I remember using hard disk drive sounds for disk usage and or capacitor noises to debug issues. But, I really like the MacBook Air M1 because its so quiet and it helps me concentrate much better and if you are talking to others or recording a talk it is silent. The other thing is that it has no moving parts so it should be very durable.

I use one too and there are still some moving parts. The keyboard keys, the speakers, the display hinge and the Taptic Engine. Those are the parts I'm looking at intently as the ones that will fail on me, especially the hinge.

The most likely thing to break on a computer is the fan itself. Apple has revised the display hinge and the keys have been redesigned. I don't know of any reports of the Speakers breaking or a Taptic Engine (other than people using Bootcamp on Intel MacBook Pros but that isn't an option anymore) but since there is no long term data on all of those components the only thing that I would question would be the redesigned hinge and the keyboard.

Annecdata: I've never had a desktop or laptop fan fail on me, and I'm the kind of person who keeps them for a decade.

Spinning HDDs (Toshiba bearings), keyboards and hinges on the other hand have all failed on me multiple times, in macs. but the fans kept going. The keyboards were the last thing to fail in the 2009 design, they last about 10 years.

Also while were at it, mechanical failure isn't always the biggest concern these days, Apple has had nVidia GPU issues (soldier and fab issues) in the past where they ended up underclocking them in a firmware patch in order to push failures out of warrantee.

I bought a cheap M1 Air model (only the ram is upgraded to 16gb) at $1030 Apple-refurbished. My intent is to try and sell it a bit before the 1 year mark.

For some of the reasons you mentioned (specially the last paragraph), but also the battery and the general non-reparability. It almost feels like a consumable item, compared to my previous Thinkpad.

Here's the thing: all the other laptops I was looking at cost at least twice the price. High-end Thinkpads, my second choice, almost 3 times.

All of the sudden Apple became the budget choice for my use case. In one year hopefully when I sell this one there will be competitors to the M1 chip (or maybe the M1X?), and I'll have more options.

M1 is a complete SOC and discrete nvidia graphics from nvidia were so bad that Apple switched to AMD permanently.

That was just one example, one that affected me and millions of others. There are also plenty of other chip level failures in newer apple hardware as quite well documented by Louis Rossmann. Not all GPU/CPU issues either, there are many other chips that go wrong due to cheap component choices.

The GPU issues were both nVidia's _and_ Apple's fault due to assembly with low quality unleaded solder. In either case their attitude to customers was unforgivable, they replaced old broken boards with new broken boards until people just gave up or were pushed out of warrantee... and for the masses that couldn't be bothered to go through the pain of browbeating an Apple store employee into submission - they got firmware patches to push it out of warrantee.

Component failure, solid state or otherwise is not unique to Apple and is an inevitability, it will happen again - complete disrespect for their users by continually lying to their face on the other hand... That is something Apple is uniquely skilled at.

> Here's the thing: all the other laptops I was looking at cost at least twice the price. High-end Thinkpads, my second choice, almost 3 times.

It shouldn't be this way, but most of the big enterprise retailers have ridiculous sticker prices. Unlike Apple, volume buyers get steep discounts, and individuals are expected to wait for a discount.

Ask around online and you'll find it's fairly simple to get fancy Thinkpads for half-off.

It's highly dependent on the country you're at. I see people on r/thinkpad get new high-end ones discounted, the kind of discounts that you can't get in France.

What you can find in France is heavily discounted ones from people that resell their company-provided ones. I bought 3 T460 like that in the past, for me and my family. But no high-end models, nor much choice in the customization.

It might be worth buying the discounted thinkpad in US (I assume that's where most heavily discounted ones show up) and then ship it to France?

I looked into that too ahah. There are "forwarding" services that do that for you, if you don't have a friend there.

But I don't like thinkpads to the point of doing that rodeo. For now, Apple won my money.

Fan life really depends on usecase. The bearings roughly have a certain number of cycles, and most consumers just don't push them that hard.

For example a tiny 1000 RPM server fan running 24/7 rotates 5 billion times per year. My desktop spends most of it's time off, but if I game on it 10% of the time it's big fans might be at 1000RPM. This is only 50 million cycles per year.

I used to use capacitor noises too when i was younger. I could tell other devs when builds were finished by hearing the high pitched noise stop. At the time i thought i could hear the cpu but recently learned it was the capacitors lol

Inductor coils? I haven't heard of capacitors creating noise before.

I'm also trying to figure out a solution for remote access/file sync. I've been using resilio sync to sync my files between my laptop and desktop. It works great, but it destroys battery life on my laptop, so I've been looking for solutions.

Syncthing is next on my to try list, but its very similar to resilio sync so I don't have high hopes. iCloud drive/dropbox/etc have issues with syncing git repos, so not sure about that either.

Syncthing is great, however the biggest issue Ive found with thr Mac version is you explicitly need to end the task in the upper taskbar or it will just drain your battery. Also, if you sync a Mac with anything besides, be prepared to see a .nomedia file in EVERY.SINGLE.DIRECTORY. (i cant recall what exactly it is). It's very annoying to say to least.

That being said, Syncthing works great for a wholly cross platform sync tool. I have used it with a PC, Macbook, Android setup. Never have I not been able to get it to work.

To my knowledge, .nomedia files are created on Android to prevent the folder from being scanned for media. I don't think it's due to "anything besides", but Android in particular. I haven't tried configuring the Android Syncthing app to exclude .nomedia files, but it may be possible.

Then it's not .nomedia but some Mac specific file. I can't recall what it is since I stopped using syncthing on my Mac haha. I rarely use it unless I kinda have to.

IIRC, MacOS is well known for leaving .DS_Store droppings absolutely everywhere. If you ever shared a pen drive with a MacOS user, it would come back full of .DS_Store junk all over it. It might be that one you're recalling.

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteUSBStores true

Run these both in Terminal, and either restart Finder or just reboot. Should solve that problem.

The whole point of those files was to store Mac-related metadata (such as icon positions and other stuff) that the filesystem in question did not have the capability to store, to preserve Mac users' expectations.

I have been using syncthing across Mac, arm Linux, Linux, windows and android. Occasionally an Android release turns into a battery drain, but I haven't had an issue with mac (my Mac shares are about 70G). Could need a db wipe and reinitializing? I think their file watcher is native.

MEGA has been working pretty nicely for me also with Git. I use it on a macOS desktop and a Linux laptop. Only thing is the mobile app isn’t the most polished compared to Apple’s Files for example, but I don’t need it often.

> Now I'm looking for a better remote access solution so I can consider sticking with a desktop at home and then maybe just an iPad for travel with good remote access and file sync.

This is my solution. I don't really need to do any file syncing as rsync or scp works fine for my purposes. It has been a fantastic dev experience. I remote in, bring up my last tmux session and pick up exactly where I left off, regardless of the front-end machine. I use an ipad pro for a ton of development now and it really is fantastic for it.

I've got a overkill desktop dev machine (previous gaming rig) that can make all the noise it wants in my basement and my front-end shell remains quiet.

I set up zerotier so I can constant access to it whether I'm on my local network or remote.

Can you tell me more about your setup? What apps do you use on your iPad for remote access? Is it just remote shell or do you do Remote Desktop too? What do you use for Remote Desktop?

Not the original poster but I use my iPad Air for a similar setup. Development environment runs under Docker Compose/WSL2 on my desktop, which I can start/stop using Chrome remote desktop. I've got code server and portainer in that compose file which are accessible from my iPad using tailscale, it makes for a passable development environment if I want/need to work away from the desktop for whatever reason

> I've got a overkill desktop dev machine (previous gaming rig) that can make all the noise it wants in my basement and my front-end shell remains quiet.

I want to have the better of both worlds and a nice uncluttered desk so I ended up buying an Intel NUC 9 module plus RTX 3060 that I keep hidden in a closet and game remotely using Moonlight and Gamestream. Everything works just fine on a Gigabit connection and plays well with the Xbox controller on the M1 as if its local. I can play everything on 1440p@60fps which is more than enough to me.

Can you not use rsync on an iPad?

is it better to have rogue processes silently wasting energy and creating heat?

I think this is a case where the meaning of the parent can be taken multiple ways, and one of the HN rules is to take the more generous case. My interpretation is that they are saying they see the purpose of needing some type of cue when CPU usage is high, but didn’t realize that they were using the fan speed as a proxy for CPU utilization until this was posted, at which time, they put 2 and 2 together. That’s not saying that the product is bad or not, just an anecdote.

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