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Comment by jorticka | Hacker News Reader

Many times you could also feel the hard disk vibrations through the desk.

Now that's got me wondering if you could replicate that through the haptic feedback component of e.g. MacBook trackpads.

I assume you could in theory? While in reality, there's probably no way for user software to access that part of the hardware directly?

Core Haptics [0] my friend. It's been a staple for mobile game dev for a while. It also happens to work on the trackpad on macos. But please don't. I'm sure apple would probably veto the idea as well.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corehaptics/

On the contrary, I doubt Apple would reject an app for this. CoreHaptics are there for unlimited use in e.g. gaming and this HDD toy app is basically the same use case as gaming.

If Apple wasn't keen on it, they would limit the macOS taptic engine APIs similar to how they do on watchOS.

Right, they have software controls in place to prevent my trackpad buzzing for an hour straight. Good point. I’d assume Apple devs thought about how this could be abused, thought ahead, put a circuit breaker in there and said “call the api as much as you like”.

Well I don't know if that's the case, but I also don't know why your trackpad should brake after buzzing for an hour straight?

Your iPhone doesn't break from buzzing for an hour straight, developers are free to call the apis as much as they like. The taptic engines in both of the devices are pretty much the same thing, no?

Although, mildly related to your point: There was a Tesla software update last year that put a cooldown on the steppers moving the seats if the user fucks around with a seat position too much. Apparently _those_ were prone to overheat and brake.

Mmmmm, never said it would break. Just that it would buzz indefinitely.

Sorry, then I misread you. Well, it's up to the user if they want to use such an app and up to the developer if they want to make it configurable.

We have no haptic permissions so far :D

Back in the day I had an AST 386 with a Miniscribe full height 40MB drive. When it was being accessed steadily, you could actually see the desk shaking. It wasn't as bad on my earlier computer that only had a half-height ST225.

Could?

I've got a NAS with five HDDs on my desk right now, you bet I can feel that when it goes thrashing.

And hear them amplified through the sides of your "mini tower" case.

I could smell this sound

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