Slashdot Mirror
Cook Your Breakfast With MacBook
Kisom writes "Everyone knows Apple isn't famous for their cold notebooks. Dan Lurie however discovered it was possible to cook eggs on the bottom of his MacBook. Even though it took three times as long to cook the egg, Apple should probably be concerned."
I do not like MacBooks and ham,
I do not like them, Sam I am!
From the summary: Even though it took three times as long to cook the egg, Apple should probably be concerned. Actually McDonalds should be concerned. Apple is coming out with a previously unannounced, now leaked, new product, the Egg MacMuffin.
Developers: We can use your help.
My PowerBook runs pretty hot as well. I've always figured that it was the form factor. Unlike my Latitude, my PowerBook is minimal in dimension, making it necssaary to cram all the pieces parts in there. I've never really thought that much air actually gets into the PowerBook, but it is nice on a cold day.
"Introducing the superfast, blogging, podcasting, breakfast-cooking, do-everything-out-of-the-box MacBook."
By the way, yes, I am a Mac user.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
When will we start seeing iOmlettes?
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
Take a look at the original link:
http://www.sagags.com/?p=441
It mentions that it is in fact a joke.
So why does /. link to a blog which in turn links to the actual article: http://www.sagags.com/?p=441? The normally adds NO value.
This is more satire taken seriously by an idiot on the web. The link in the article above is a blog that picked up another blog where the guy clearly says he's making a joke. This is like when the onion is taken seriously...
That aside, props to the Egg MacMuffin joke...
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
I just got a new (black) MacBook. It doesn't run any hotter than my old three-year old Dell Inspiron 1100 (Celeron 2GHz) laptop. Besides, why would anyone mix food and laptops together? Especially if you have the black MacBook. :P
if anybody actually looked at the original article, this is a joke.
original
"If you didn't know yet this is a
joke."
http://www.sagags.com/?p=441
Does anyone read beyond the headlines? It's a JOKE.
...not to mention the new baked Apple Pie.
Didn't they have the iGrill on thinkgeek?
But doesn't it just overheat in the most user-friendly, fashionable, ultra-hip and trendy way?
Should you run out of supplies for your own experiment, you can get a fresh dozen from newegg.
With the designer colors, this cookware seems less Emeril and more Martha Stewart, doesn't it?
Steve Jobs is announcing that the iPod Souffle will be available in November.
I wasn't surprised at all when I read this blog entry. My Macbook (the vanilla version, cheapest of the three) is so hot that I actually burnt my skin. If I put it on a pillow, it gets excessively hot and makes the laptop hum like hell.
I have experienced heat before, but not this kind. I wonder what the airports say about the new portable egg toasters.
Full Tilt
With some recent software updates my new Macbook Pro (around a month old now) doesn't run overly hot under OS X, even when charging the battery. However, I installed Vista under Boot Camp and since it isn't supported by Boot Camp yet the power management functions don't all seem to work as normal (it is a beta after all). Well, needless to say you can't put the Macbook Pro on your lap at all, especially not when plugged in (which, running Vista you get maybe 90 mins of battery life or less so plugged in is a constant state). I could easily cook many things on that upper left corner which is where I assume the battery is located at since the charging input is on that side. My guess would be that the temperature on that side exceeds 130 degrees fahrenheit or more.
And yes, it is blasphemy that I am running Vista on a Mac and its unsupported blah blah blah blah, but either way the Macbook Pro's still run way too hot and don't ever seem to run their fan. Their own documentation tells you not to use your *laptop* on your lap, which seems quite stupid to me. Whats the point of a mobile computer if I have to be tied to a *DESK*.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
This reminds me of a story I once heard about a scoutmaster who rigged up a miniature oven you could put on top of a car engine. He supposedly had recipes where the time had been converted to miles driven. On camping trips, the boy scouts would set up a meal before they left, and by the time they arrived at the campsite, dinner would be ready.
So many options! So little importance!
Is this an exampe of egg-streme programming?
Or have reports of overheating MacBooks been egg-sagerated?
<ducks>
Dude, use a frickin LapPad... you know something designed to work with laptop vents, that isn't too heavy and has a cusion for your parts... all while deflecting the heat from the laptop.
Having had several P4M space heaters that double as a notebooks for the past 3 years ( 5 laptops in two seperate companies no less), I have become averse to frying my balls :-)
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Please read TFA (http://www.sagags.com/?p=441), which states, "If you didn't know yet this is a joke (you guys really need to read the whole thing)." Engadget messed this one up too.
Actually, Pentium M processors have sofware adjustable voltages. I've successfully undervolted my Dothan 725 and the difference in cooling (and the lack of fan noise) is quite stunning. I believe the Core processors have something similar, in which case Apple does have control over the CPU heating.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
A good rule of thumb is for every 10 degrees Centigrade rise above maximum temperature specification the chip's reliability is cut in half. Notebook vendors fudge temp spec. Many have altered BIOS's that allow them to perpetually run hot, even beyond normal shutdown temp.
I have difficulty taking someone seriously who can't figure out where the battery is on a laptop.
And grill your dinner to a crispy state in five seconds flat.
You're comparing a desktop computer to workstation? Isn't that a little like comparing ... oh, I don't know, Apples to oranges?
As far as service is concerned, only one of my four Macs has ever needed service: a dropped laptop. They fixed it in 3 days for a reasonable price, given the amount of damage. Still works great, after 5 years. No other issues with them. Now, with Dell, on the other hand, I have NEVER managed to get a broken machine fixed, and I've sent in at least a dozen (and they were all under-warranty hardware failures, not user damage).
I know the article is a joke, but I could tell that from just looking at the picture. If he really cooked an egg on his MacBook, he would need a bigger foil, otherwise the moment you crush the egg, it would spread and stain the uncovered parts of the laptop. The foil is too small to cover the spread of one egg. Thus, it is apparent from the picture that the egg was cooked before it is placed on the foil.
I once had a signature.
Yummy Egg MacMuffins every morning! :-)
The 604e was quite a powerful CPU in its day, and the G5 was very competitive at release, when the 1.8 GHz Opteron was the fastest thing on the block.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Buy a dell (and a frying pan)...
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
One thing that it did have going for it was some really cool desktop apps. At the time when the Amiga 1000 and Atari 520 STs were out (yeah, I had those too) the Macs had a lot of cool software. That's why they were being emulated. The first Amigas and Ataris had Motorola 68000 processors. They were pretty quick for their day, but when they came out the current Macs were then using newer processors. It was fun to use Spectre128 and SpectreGCR on the Atari to emulate a 68K Mac, and it was useful, but the truth was that it would be emulating old tech -- like someone making a machine to run MacOS8 today. Interesting, but maybe just a geeky thrill than practical. The Amiga had a powerful OS, but it was lacking in some applications. For example, there was a word processing application (don't recall the name but I think it was WordPerfect) for the Amiga. It ran, but scrolling and inserting images was not optimized properly. As a consequence, an older Mac could scroll a page faster even though its hardware was primitive compared to the Amiga. This also happened on the Atari ST. The drawing routines in GEM were so abysmal that there was a market for improved libraries. There was a text editor called Tempus that used these improved routines and it was super fast compared to the TOS routines.
But Macs did things that were not easily available on other machines. For example, I've had multiple desktops on my Macs for years. Only recently (last couple years) has this become stable in XP (though some apps still are not multiple screen aware - E.g., some Java apps, full screen applications, etc.). This has worked for as long as I can remember in Unix, but recently it has actually been problematic for some configurations (dual head on Linux laptops, for example).
Don't get me wrong -- I loved my Amigas and Ataris, but there are clearly areas where the Mac led the pack.
I'm reading this from my original-recipe blueberry iBook. Yes, still useful after all these years. It might not be the fastest computer on the block, it might not run Tiger, but it runs Panther and it still does everything I need it to do. And does it in so much style people still stop and stare at me when I bring the thing to my local coffeehouse. Not because they think I'm nuts because I'm running on an antique. It's because it still looks bitchen. Snoogans, biotch!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Up in the great white north we have gadgets that cook kabasa under the hood of your snowmobile. I have heard of store bought ones but never seen one. After a 3 or 4 hour ride, whatever is in the box is heated or cooked enough to have a beside trail snack.
Stay tuned for new sig...
.. unless you want that cooked too ;-)
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Anyone for a software solution? It should be that when motion is detected, on your lap, the fans are programmed to run more and keep it cooler. When no motion is detected, on a desk, the fans are programmed to keep it quieter.
The fixation on light/powerful/ultra thin and chic has lead to a plethora of problems with notebook computers. Battery life, still dismal in 2006 because every battery advancement which should have gone to extended useage times has been completely negated by making them increasingly smaller to reduce weight. Heat dissipation has gotten worse (now they have to use fans when orginally most laptops got by without fans using passive cooling) because of packing so much stuff inside a too closed up case. Slightly thicker with better bottom to out the back airflow, using normal thermodynamics would help with the heat problem immensely. But no-o-o-o-o, can't do those things because it would result in a slightly heavier laptop and a little bulkier and that just won't do, wouldn't be fashionable. So now we get li-on batteries that can explode or catch fire and laptops continue to get too hot to use as laptops,so they have to call them "notebooks" or some other dodgy marketing name to help diffuse potential lawsuits from people actually holding them in their laps.
Wimpy users demanding wimpy laptops=get what you deserve. Can't tote an single extra pound because your girly man arms can't handle the temporary stress going from the cab to the starbucks table? Too bad, suffer crummy battery life. Can't tote something a little thicker, insist that "thinner is better" when from an engineering standpoint of getting rid of heat it *isn't*? Too bad, suffer overheating. And pay an extra 500 to 1,000 dollars for the privelege of being commercially identified in marketing databanks as "wimpy". And double too bad that apple contiues to slide into an also-ran company, forgoing good engineering to be replaced entirely with "style". Style has its place, and that is AFTER engineering. Sticking it in first place results in this sort of nonsense. Apple used to have (and I used to be a fanboy but not any longer) engineering as job #1 at Apple and you paid for it, but it was there and worth it. Ya, you got a decent looking box usually, but it performed as advertised and wasdn't a commodity POS with curb feelers and fins on it. Now the fashion fetishists have *completely* taken over, so I predict an eventual decline of Apple (I never did before but I will now), even if they are riding high with iPod right now. Going to intel chips will not help them, nothing will if they keep fashion first. If they change back, they'll survive, if they don't, SGI-ville for them. Pretty, but losing it on where the computing rubber meets the road to stay "looking mah-ve-lous"
Exactly. If you have no idea where your battery is, you probably aren't the target market for beta-testing software. I can just imagine what that guy's bug reports would look like.
- - - -
SUMMARY: When I click right there [::insert gesture, not written in summary::] I get an error.
HOW TO REPRODUCE ISSUE: Click right there.
POSSIBLE SOLUTION: Keep that error from showing up. Or make it impossible to click there.
- - - -
± 29 dB
Sorry parent poster, you're wrong. The Commodore Amiga came out with a full-screen, 4,096-color palette, high-resolution monitor, with sound and a multitasking OS all in 1985. It was far more advanced than the Mac of the day.
As memory fades, we tend to remember the PCs that have lived on until today, notably the IBM PC and the Apple Mac. But just because these PCs are around now does not mean that they were necessarily the better computers then. Far from it.
At the time of the Amiga's release, Apple was still selling the monochrome, single-tasking Macintosh and for roughly three times the price, and the Apple bosses were sick with worry.
In fact, Apple considered buying the Amiga and selling it as their own product. Look it up. I'd recommend reading On The Edge if you need a reference.
Flash point is the lowest temp at which a substance creates enough vapor to catch on fire, altho real engineers will probably cringe at that definition. It's usually applied to gasoline etc, altho I suppose it could be applied to anything, since even coal will presumably produce a flammable vapor at a sufficiently high temperature.
But fabrics? I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Infuriate left and right
Unlike Microsoft's typical crash and burn solution, the new MacGrittle will cook your eggs differently: while leaky, the runnyness will be smooth, and you won't face the dreaded viruses and E. coli of the competition.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Now I hate fans in computers as much as any other Mac Fanboy, but as Parallels on the MacIntel hw is just too damn compelling to ignore any longer I'm pricing out one of these notebook computers.
So I got to thinking - if the fan kicked on at a lower threshold, perhaps the case wouldn't get so unreasonably hot? Is the fan threshold temperature in PRAM or some other place that's reasonably easy to manipulate?
I've got two G4 PowerBooks (a 12" and a 15") and after cooking my the logic board in the fifteen inch have learned to always have the computer sitting on a book of some kind, to help insure airflow about the box.
Anyone have a clue if this is possible? I'd rather hear the fans earlier if it meant a much cooler system overall.
A message from our sponsor
Well, considering that my Powerbook can easily get to the temperature needed to cook an egg (which is 65 C), how is this news worthy? They run hot, they have run hot for as long as I've been using Macs. A lot of electronic components crammed into not a lot of space, then wrapped in thin plastic or aluminum equals quite a hot computer.
Well, if you want to bake some food with a computer, and you don't have a mac, use http://www.phys.ncku.edu.tw/~htsu/humor/fry_egg.ht ml
Mac: Hi, I'm a Mac
PC: Hello, I'm a PC
Mac: I can cook an egg!
PC: You must think you're hot shit
Mac: Yes, yes I do
Actually, it's like comparing Apples to something that doesn't suck. In any case, the statement was about "computer"s, not "personal computer"s (read the comment I replied to in the first place.
What I find interesting about this whole conversation is that I got modded down as a Troll. I could see "flamebait" but marking me "troll" is simply an abuse of moderation. I really do believe that Macs and MacOS prior to X fucking sucked. I also believe that Apple's use of the PowerPC was a huge mistake.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The thing is, you want to fry an egg quickly. Otherwise, it gets all rubbery. Put an egg on a city sidewalk on a hot day. It actually fries. And the point...?
Amiga: 1985; Apple: 1984. Gee, a year later, same processor, 4,094 more colors than the Apple, and with hardware graphics acceleration. The Macintosh was a graphics-only system with no graphics acceleration until the second wave of graphics cards for Macintosh II-generation machines.
Or like someone making their modern Macintosh run OS9 in a sandbox so they can run old applications.
Yeah, I can't imagine why anyone would do that.
You're telling me that the Macintosh had more advanced hardware because you once used a shitty Amiga word processor? Good logic there, spanky.
The simple fact is that classic macintoshes cannot scroll anything as quickly as an Amiga can, because they have no graphics hardware to accelerate scrolling, or anything else, whereas the Amiga has a bit blitter and a bunch of other crap, because it was designed to be able to support multimedia applications, whereas the Macintosh was only designed to support graphics. And black and white ones, at that (back in that time anyway.)
But this didn't happen on the Amiga, because the drawing routines were so good, and supported by hardware. There WAS a program called cpublit that would patch around the blitter and let the CPU do things, it was useful if you had about a 20 MHz 68020 or better. This was possible because AmigaDOS has a patchlist that enables you to modify the operation of the OS in a safe manner (assuming you don't screw anything up that is) and because AmigaDOS is a microkernel-based system in which all drivers, handlers, etc are processes in their own right. Of course, that in turn was possible because the system had no memory protection.
That's nice. AmigaDOS has had multiple screens since day one, and you can switch between them. It was a reasonable thing to do when screen resolutions were so low. Now, virtual desktops make more sense. Granted, they weren't multiple desktop screens, but you could (for example) run directoryopus on one screen (it always created one) and workbench on another (ditto) while you had deluxe paint running (another screen.) In 512kB memory, no less. (And no more!)
Right, in consumer acceptance.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Their own documentation tells you not to use your *laptop* on your lap, which seems quite stupid to me. Whats the point of a mobile computer if I have to be tied to a *DESK*.
I recently read a comment that Apple or someone at Apple said the MacBooks weren't laptops they are notebooks. Discounting that though, even if the MacBook gets a bit hot to have directly on your lap it's still mobile. Try taking a Mac Mini or iMac with you. A MacBook and a real book, to set on your lap then set the MacBook on, is still a lot smaller and definately more mobile than a desk unit. I can still take one and go to the lake and work on it there. Or when I go out hiking.
FalconShould there be a Law?
only one of my four Macs has ever needed service: a dropped laptop. They fixed it in 3 days for a reasonable price, given the amount of damage. Still works great, after 5 years. No other issues with them. Now, with Dell, on the other hand, I have NEVER managed to get a broken machine fixed, and I've sent in at least a dozen (and they were all under-warranty hardware failures, not user damage).
As far as having a relatively trouble free computer goes, I've had two Macs and am now using my fourth PC. With only one of the PCs I didn't have any hardware problems within a year of getting it, and admittedly one of them was my responsibility. My first PC was a laptop from Gateway and both the harddisk and the motherboard had to be replaced before they were one year old. The same thing happened with my fourth PC, an HP Pavilion, which I'm still using. My second PC I've never had hardware problems with but because it's cpu is a DEC Alpha I haven't been able to install much software on it so I haven't used it much. And of these the Alpha is the only one I haven't had to reinstall Windows as well, every other PC has crashed requiring the OS to be reinstalled. My third PC, another Gateway laptop, had the LCD cracked about three months after I got it and when I called tech support all they said was that it would cost between $300 and $1200 dollars to fix. Now, the Macs I had, the first one I got was a used Mac SE and I was able to use it for more than 7 years before it died. The second one's a used Power MAc 7300/200 I was able to use for a few years before I had a problem with it. So though it's very limited from my own experience Macs are more reliable and last longer than PCs.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Don't get me wrong -- I loved my Amigas and Ataris, but there are clearly areas where the Mac led the pack.
Of the OSes/computers I've had or used the Amiga was my favorite. I had a 500 myself and while it couldn't, newer Amigas not only ran Amiga OS but also could be configured to run Mac OS and Windows as well. I recall seeing a demontration of an Amiga running Mac software and a then current Mac next to it running the same software and the Amiga ran faster. This was in oh about 1992. If Amigas were still being made to today's tech I'd definately would want one. When Gateway bought out the Amiga I was hoping they would revive it but as far as I can see they wasted their money.
FalconShould there be a Law?
You unabashed apple apologists are the reason why those with clues cannot take apple seriously. They have such a huge fanbase of people willing to excuse their every error that they never have to actually fix anything!
And MS doesn't have it's own apologists? They sure do. I have had and have used Amigas, Linux, Macs, and WinTel PCs. They all have their uses and one may be a better choice for a specific application or need than another. No matter what the hardware/OS platform, they are all tools, and the best tool for a given use should be used.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Dude, it was a Dell! ;)