This has a sour taste in my mouth. Not because I have anything against Apple, but because I just know some of those Apple fanboys will hail this as the next progressive, genius idea even though it's nothing really new.

Fortunately these seem like techniques with very little usefulness, so Apple won't be harming the ability of other companies to make silent computers with these patents.

Most recent Apple computers, mainly notebooks, iMacs and the Mac Mini, are already pretty much silent.

My unibody Macbook Pro is less than an inch thick (with lid closed) and the only time I hear the fans is when both cores are working at 75%+ load for a continued time.

My former Macbook (white model) was the same way (again, around 1.25" thick while closed).

My former Mac Mini G4 was dead silent while in operation, until the CPU was starting to get maxed out and I hear the intel models with Core2Duo are really silent too.

All 3 of my former iMacs were dead silent and I have yet to hear iMac fans kick in other than when I was encoding H.264 video for long periods of time.

The Mac Pro (recent models, not pre-Intel) is supposedly really silent too, with over 28 temp sensors inside and automatically controlled fans, aided by an interior lay-out supposedly thought out for better airflow. The fact that almost no cable clutter is visible really helps too. The hard drives connect to stationnary connectors in the back of HD bays, the wiring for the optical is just the right lenght for its location etc.

The Mac Cube of olden days was completely fanless and was cooled by convection. It actually overheated in most scenarios and was a failure, but it is nice to see they tried.

The G5 PowerMac was one of the first or maybe even the first massively produced and massively available computer to be sold with water cooling out of the box (I mean by a major OEM, as opposed to custom systems built by computer shops).

All in all, Apple is already paying attention to the noise factor.

Some will argue that they often sacrifice heat over noise and it is indeed true, so maybe those patents are a step in the right way, by trying to find better ways to cool silently.

I, for one, really like Apple products and have been for a long time and I can safely say that for this kind of stuff, they will probably be the ones to change the market. Intel tried with BTX and that didn't take off but again, they did not really appeal to the end-user with this.

If someone is able to sell quiet as a paradigm to the customer base, it's Apple. If they market quiet, people will start expecting and asking for quiet. As always, the rest of the computer OEMs (I'm looking at Dell, HP, Toshiba and company) will have to do as they often do: Monkey see, monkey do. They will inevitably follow suit and start offering quiet.
That is a good thing for the customer.

I'm not an idiot but the things described in the article sounded quite vague and blurry... Didn't saw anything new there, though. It all has been done for ages now, but the guys at Apple are smart enough to blow up the hype once again. For many users who never suspected that fans can be precisely controlled in a, er, PC, this may sound like the next cool thing from Apple, I guess. Couldn't figure out what exactly they wanted to patent, but never mind.

I'm very much anti-Apple, they ruin everything they get their hands on!

They've seriously ruined the DAP (digital audio player) market with the advent of the iPod, my DAP is a Rio Karma, its about 5 years old now, its still quite possibly the best DAP ever made.

Its doubtful a DAP will be made that surpasses its audio quality and features purely because Apple has muscled its way in with "prettyness".

What annoys me even more is that this iPod phenomnia has even started affecting music itself, take for example Metallicas latest album, or Green Days latest album, both of which are very big bands, and both have had their CD's mixed so they sound great on an iPod or similar low quality system.

Listen to either of those albums on a high-end system and it can quite literally hurt your ears, Metallicas latest album is literally unbearable to me in both my home and car audio systems.

The same will happen with mobile phones too if were not careful!

AFAIK the Mac Pro's hard drives are hard mounted to the case. Hard drives contribute a large amount to overall noise especially if they're not suspended, so I have doubts about the Mac Pro's so called silent noise level. It's probably silent relative to the machines Dell and HP make (which are loud), but not by SPCR standards.

The Mac mini fan seems to spin at about ~1500-2000 RPM which is pretty high by SPCR standards. A scythe slipstream at ~500-700 is going to be quieter. Not sure about hard drive mounting but wouldn't be surprised if it's hard mounted.

I'd love to see SPCR review the new iMac since they swapped the 2.5" drive for a 3.5" drive. I wonder how the noise levels are affected since the 3.5" should have much higher vibration.

I think it's been at leas a few years since Apple Canada sent anything to SPCR so I'm not holding my breath.

Yes but you expect that from laptops. Dell, HP etc. will also be quiet if they have modern components unless they are gaming systems or quad-cores. The noisy thing is the hard drive but you now you can have an SSD. The low power SSF computer is something that Apple has but should move to PCs with Ion-based systems for example.

Yes. What's amazing is how slow normal PC makers are to do allow something so simple as fan control.

Yes, it amazes me why they are so slow to adopt good design and new technology.
Although quietness has been getting better with all systems. With SSDs and Intel's 32nm stuff with on-die graphics there will be no excuse for making noise.

Audio quality is near to perfect with all these players if you use an amp.
A lot of ipods are rockbox-able and then they make good DAPs.
Although I'm using an old rockboxed H140 and will until a good smartphone comes along with a good headphone output and >40Gb microSD cards turn up.

Most non-classical music is tuned these days to low quality systems and that's been the case for quite a long time. But it's the mastering for loudness that is an even bigger problem. Truly appaling; I wonder how the engineers can live with themselves. It's not an ipod problem because before people listened to iphones with earbuds they listened to walkmans with earbuds and equally bad sound. Only perhaps now non-classical music has to compete on a track basis rather than as a whole CD and that might exacerbate loudness-competition.

Lol, the Mac Pro has STOCK heatsinks on the GPU, and both Nvidia and Ati stock heatsinks are loud under load. The same aplies for the hardmounted hard drives.

Good job Crapple at pateting things people here on SPCR have been doing for the last couple of years. GG

PS: We have Dell Precision workstations (were i work), and even those are silent when idle or at half-load, they only turn up there fans under heavy load (and become noisy), so companies like HP or Dell have thermal management and temperature controlled fans.

PS: The Apple apologists should kiss the feet of Intel, for inventing thermal management, because without Intel/Nvidia/Ati/Samsung (memory)/Seagate (hdd) and BSD, Apple couldn`t design a hair-dryer that actually works And even with those things, the "most secure OS" just found itself into a botnet via a worm : http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3157


Now just think of how the new Mac vs PC adds will look like :
-"Hy i`m a silent patented mac virus"
-"Hy, i`m a mac user"
-"We are going to get along just fine in the next couple of months"

Did you folks read the article? The patents apparently describe assessing a PC's noise, not simply thermal management.

In any event, I'm reasonably confident that a mountain of prior art exists here.

The iMac has always used a 3.5" hard drive.

Way to file a patent for something people have already been doing for a decade. The sad part is that it'll probably get approved despite the obvious proof (SPCR, for example) that this is an old idea. These patents are loosely based on characterization of noise and user interaction, but they are quite vague. It won't be long before Apple's lawyers are suing makers of noise reduction parts & software; specifically I wouldn't be surprised if they go after SpeedFan et al.

But there are also Dells and HPs that are needlessly loud. At my old workplace some of the (<2yrs old) Dells would ramp up the fans to jet engine levels while doing light browsing. If they are getting quieter in general I'd say it's mainly because Intel chips are taking less power and hard drives are becoming quieter.

Intel's power management is good but thermal management not I would say. Instead of making a system themselves they leave it to motherboard manufacturers and the result is it's rare to find a desktop motherboard where the fans can be set in BIOS/EFI to turn completely off below a certain temperature.

I didn`t say all of them are quiet, but they do make models that are quiet under half-load or idle, and somewhat noisy under idle. The Lenovo desktops (at the faculty i went) are also quiet when idle (browsing, listing to music, office documents etc.) but are loud when you put the under load.

Intel doesn`t make thier own motherboards?What, in what parellel universe does that happen? http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... name=Intel
Intel`s motherboards are the most stable motherboards in this branch, and Apple`s motherboards are designed and made by Intel. Same goes for Dell/HP who have custom motherboards too, just open a Dell/HP PC and try to find that model in a shop..you won`t.

As for power management of the fans, PWM rings a bell? My Asus mb with Q-Fan automatically controls my PWM fans according to the CPU/MB temps. My fans idle at 400rpm (that`s inaudible at 2 am at night, with windows/doors closed in a very sound/thermal isolated house) and go up to 900rpm under heavy load with a Q9550+8GB+9800GTX+ Corsair VX450 and 3 softmounted hdd-drives (WD640AAKS) + Ninja2 & AcceleroS1. 2 intake fans + 1 cpu fan, ArcticCooling PWM 120mm models all controlled by the BIOS, daisy-chained together on the same PWM header. And Asus Q-Fan is available on almost every board they make/made in the last 2+ years, rangeing from cheapo 40 bucks mb to 400$ models. Gigabyte and other manufacturers have similar things, all have at least one PWM fan header and a couple of voltage controlled headers.
DFI has a function to disable the fans completely when the CPU goes under a certain temp, but it`s useless considering the fact that a 400rpm fan is almost inaudible, even at 2 am in the night.

As someone said before, good job Apple on pateting things i have been doing for the last 2 years, and people on SPCR have been doing for the last 10.

The first time I realized PCs make any noise at all was ~14 years ago while working in a computer store. I sold this woman a (self built) 486 PC to replce her dying apple computer. She came back to return it the next day, and said it was too laud and wanted to buy a new apple (3 times the price f the PC) just so it wouldnt sound like a "frigirator" (in her own words)

The fact is Apple have allways (with the exception of G5) made relativly quiet computers.


I must comment on the Metalica mastering mentioned earlier. On an interview with the mastering engeneer he claimed (in his defence) they wanted it that way. It is infact clipping (distorted) and discussed on many audio forums.
I personally don't understand the low level music has deteriorated to over the years. Loudness wars are killing the music!
You only NEED to be that loud if you dont have much to say and you want to make sure people notice you.

Not likely, the loudest thing in my old Pentium-4 Dell Dimension was the HDD. Never ramped up that I could tell. At some point, Dell decided they could save on complexity and cost by not using CPU-specific fans and duct system fan to the CPU. Every recent mid-tower I've seen uses a similar setup and is very quiet.

The Mac Cube of olden days was completely fanless and was cooled by convection. It actually overheated in most scenarios and was a failure, but it is nice to see they tried.

It's not nearly as bad as all that. The Cube failed because it was basically a repackaged PowerMac that cost a lot more, and most people didn't want to pay for it. The 500MHz Cubes were prone to overheating, but the 450s are quite stable, especially when you do what SPCR readers would do anyway -- replace that honking big and loud hard drive with a notebook drive.

I actually think the Cube has been much overlooked, from a silencing perspective. It's essentially silent out of the box once you do the hard drive swap. It runs OS X 10.4. It's got adequate power for websurfing, playing DVDs, pretending to be an X terminal, and the usual non-gaming day-to-day tasks. And it's now quite cheap to boot.

If you want a completely fanless, quiet system, and you aren't a gamer, you could do much worse than just buying a Cube (if you can find one) and calling it a day.

If the subject of the patents are "old hat," then Apple should not be allowed to win the patent from the PTO.

Any thoughts on whether Apple is doing anything novel here, either in terms of actually getting theoretical designs to work or coming up with innovations?

having silence in mind while building computers and implementing the principles of silent computing is one thing, but patenting them is a completely different thing. Dell makes silent pcs too, but when apple starts filing patents, we suddenly notice some the manufacturers think about silence too? Apple should be prosecuted for filing those patents, especially because they don't describe any new discovery that apple had made. Patenting known things does not move progress forwards, it hampers it and prevents the competition to develop and implement new technology.

this is the same company that bought the patent to the best and most silent keyboard ever, and then shelved it. if your going to hold a patent in something at least produce the product(s).

hey apple! i want a frikin touchstream already! http://www.fingerworks.com/

I'd strongly suggest that the mods here contact whomever they need to to show prior art. This site is a goldmine of data on these exact techniques that Apple is trying to steal.

*edit* ignore - bad links from The Register article - see direct links in my post below.

What I'd like to know is what is the point of patents if a company can trawl up commonly known and widely used concepts and patent them?

What next - a patent in lighting fire?

It's a problem with the patent examination system. I don't know to what extent patent examiners trawl the internet for prior art - they are more likely to look at academic literature and other similar prior patents. Patent examination isn't an open process that everyone can participate in. Plus, the examiners are government employees with little accountability in terms of the quality of patents granted, as far as I know.

Patents for computer software and features or functions of computer software just shouldn't be allowed IMO.

Patent 1, USPTO Application No 20090092262

Patent 2, USPTO Application No 20090092261

These patents are more aimed at lower level BIOS and OS-level software control of noise. There appears to be at least some claims involving a microphone monitoring the computer's noise while other claims are based on estimates and user-input preferences.

It's more of a total system than just a fan control solution like SpeedFan. The patent appears to take elements from a range of software - like allowing undervolting and under-clocking to be done dynamically and then automatically reducing fan speed as a result, as well as spinning down hard drives etc to meet the desired noise profile.

What may be novel is the combination of all of these elements into a single system. If it was obvious to combine all of these elements, then the patents shouldn't be granted, however.

If anyone is particularly agitated by these patent applications, write to the USPTO referencing the above patent application numbers and point out the existence of software like SpeedFan, CrystalCPU, RMClock and the AAM firmware already used in most hard drives to reduce seek noise. No guarantee that your letter will be considered however.

Anyway, these patents are mainly of benefit if you control both the OS of a PC and exactly what hardware goes into it, like Apple does. If it spurs other computer manufacturers to take noise seriously, then this is a good thing. However, I wouldn't put it past Apple to start actively enforcing its patents if it thinks it can get away with it.

Lower level BIOS/OS underclocking/undervolting and fan control? You mean Intel Speed Step/EIST and AMD Cool and Quiet ? That`s what SpeedStep does, undervolts your CPU and turns down the multiplier when the sistem is idle or on a very light load (surfing the "internets: etc.) And the fans are automatically spinned down by the BIOS (Asus QFan with PWM fans) depending on the CPU temps/MB temps. Videocards have their own built-in control, all Nvidia stock fans have PWM controlled fans via the videocard BIOS/firmware. And SpeedStep comes turned on by default.
While i am writing this my CPU sits at 1400Mhz or something like that, and my fans sit around 430rpm. I don`t need SpeedFan/RmClock or anything like that, it has been already implemented for years (2 at least) in most motherboards in the BIOS, fss.
Spinning down hardrives? Oh, you mean what Vista and now Windows 7 do after 20 minutes of innactivity? Yup, it`s an option in the Power Management screen (in control panel), at the power profiles. By default it comes set at 20 minutes, but you can put it to wathever value you want..1 minute...2 hours.
I`m surprised to see somebody on SPCR that doesn`t know about this.

*sigh*

I don't want to get into a flame war here, but here goes.

I was commenting about the nature of patent applications made by Apple and the patent examination system. The point I was trying to make was that despite the existence of the various BIOS and other software based solutions, Apple may still get a patent because the patent system can be flawed and applicants can sometimes have a patent awarded for something that is not novel and inventive.

I can't see why you assumed that I don't know about SpeedStep, EIST, CnQ and the other items you mentioned. Just because I haven't listed all the functions that Apple is duplicating and bringing together in the total system that they are trying to patent doesn't mean I'm not aware of them. My post states that Apple is taking elements from a range of software (which includes basic level firmware-like BIOS software) and combining it.

I'm trying to bring my perspective on this thread, which is from a slightly different angle than most people who post here (my day job is as a lawyer practising in intellectual property), so please don't jump down my throat and make unwarranted assumptions about my lack of knowledge.

Thanks,

Jamie

Thanks for your thoughtful comments, JamieG.

I too think Apple could get these patents -- mostly because the whole patent process is silly. But if it is possible to sway the outcome of the patent office decision by communicating with them, then surely this is something we should all do, if only to avoid such nonsense as Ultra's lawsuit against every PSU maker who uses detachable cables -- somehow Ultra was awarded a patent for this, which is absolutely mind boggling. At some point in the P180 case development process, I was recommended to apply for a patent on the concept of a separate thermal zone for the PSU. I laughed... but now I wonder if I could be sitting pretty atop a pile of litigative $$.

(an aside -- believe it or not, I think Antec actually holds a patent on the LED light fan.)

Let`s start :
a) It`s not a flame war, it`s a discussion,
b) If you are a lawyer, then explain to me how can Apple patent things that already have been invented by others? SpeedStep/EIST and PWM by Intel, CnQ by AMD, QFan by Asus, AAM by God knows who.
c) All this things already work together, read my previous post again. Except for the hdd power management in Vista, they already work together as a "sistem", implemented in the BIOS.

SpeedStep controls the CPU frequency and voltage according to sistem load, thus controlling the temps. the temps are read by the built in sensors in the CPU/cores and MB, and according to the readings Qfan automatically ajusts the fan speed and noise level, by a set of predefined minimum and maximum temps. (which the user selects - Optimum/Quiet/HighPerformance(Overclocking) )
They are working together as a "sistem".

Indeed. If I remember my IP right lecture correctly then a patent requires an inventive step, which isn't obvious to a person skilled in the art. And of course that the patented matter wasn't included in the state of the art at the time of the application. The latter is probably one of the reasons why being a patent attorney might be quite a boring job - checking the state of the art, zzzzzzz (edit: woops, sorry JamieG).