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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."
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.
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
Fud - dunno.
I still have fond memories of my first Am386DX. It was spread around the desk surface with the more critical components bolted to it (so we could use it to test boards and components). A few days after we put it into action we found out that the CPU heat sink (this was in the days before CPUs had fans) perfectly doubles up as a coffee warmer for one of those neat little copper kettles used for Turkish coffee. Just the right form factor (the later CPUs became too big for that).
I also remember burning my hand on the first slotted Celery after forgetting to plug the fan in. The scar is still visible, because I got my hand trapped in the case against it (it hurt like hell). I also remember cooking eggs on one of these after moderately overclocking it. Amazingly enough it was still working throughout the process. In those days (P2/P3) Intel used to have nearly perfect thermal throttle which prevented CPUs from baking. It lost it sometimes around P4.
Frankly, I would not be surprised if an egg will cook on the bottom of a new Mac. I am pretty sure that it will cook on the bottom of my HP if I run a make bzImage on it and turn the cpufreq off. Do not see why the Mac will be any different.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Common practice in the 30s through 50s. You could even buy commercial units. You can bake potatoes by simply wrapping them in foil and jamming them between the tubes of the exhaust manifold, although there is a certain risk of them falling out and I won't comment on the taste.
KFG
Apple is coming out with a previously unannounced, now leaked, new product, the Egg MacMuffin.
Maybe they should cool their laptops with an Egg MacMuffin Fan?
Disclaimer: my new 17" MacBook Pro actually seems to run cooler than my old 17" 1.33MHz G4. And the fan hardly ever comes on at all. Wth my old G4 I would somtimes set it to "reduced power" mode just to keep the fan from running.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
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.
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.