My iMac once was super quiet, but many years later is less so. Unfortunately, I cannot clean its fans, which would probably reduce the noise levels quite a bit.
You can take it to an Apple certified repair center to get it cleaned.
But keep in mind the noise could also be caused by worn out fan bearings. You'd need to replace the fans to get the noise level back to 'as new'.
Yes, its just between 100 and 200€ of service charge, as they have to unglue and glue back together the machine. And carrying an 27" iMac is also a challenge - you don't want to have it damaged in transport. This all is possible, but it shouldn't be necessary. Didn't stop me from buying and loving my iMac, but it is not good design.
I am planning to get a Mac Studio as the replacement for that iMac, but I would be happier, if easy cleaning of the fans would be possible.
Can't you just pop the screen off and clean it? I had an iMac; the glass is held on magnetically and there are a dozen-or-so Torx screws behind the bezel.
No, that was an earlier design. On later iMacs, the magnets were replaced with glue. So to perform any service on the machine, the repair shop has to cut through the glue and after the work glue the Mac back together. Which, for a desktop, is pretty unforgivable in my eyes.
That glued on iMac design was really stupid for a desktop that uses fans. Even my older generation iMac with the magnetically held cover is too much of an effort to clean. And from the looks of it, this new Mac studio suffers from ur same issue. While you can access the fan and the heartsink, it requires too much fiddling and too many screws to make it easy for any user.
I’m guessing it’s like everything else: cost and margins. Most people either aren’t willing to pay for it, or aren’t given the option because people think they won’t be willing to pay for it.
Apple only has something like 10% of the desktop market yet they seem to be the only company in that space doing anything interesting. Dell, HP, Lenovo, and all the other big desktop computer makers look pathetic in comparison. I say that as someone who has only bought Lenovo computers for the past 15 years.
Is there any chance at all that six months from now Dell or HP will wow us with something that is faster, quieter, and as aesthetically interesting as the Studio? Or will they crank out another version of a black sheet metal case that is loud and hot and inexpensive? There have to be people in those companies that want to do something interesting, right? Or do they assume that anybody with money and taste are already out of the Windows market?
Maybe it is all the fault of Windows. There's a pretty good story about the problems of Windows elsewhere on HN right now. The comments there are so damning it makes me think nobody believes in the platform anymore. You know how there's no M in FAANG? Is Microsoft stuck with people not good enough to work elsewhere? There might be no point in building interesting hardware that is ultimately going to run Windows.
Personally I would be more than willing to pay a premium for exceptionally quiet PC cooling, even if that meant having to use a case, CPU cooler, and GPU cooler all designed for each other.
They make passive CPU coolers that work fairly well on modern processors. Additionally, you can set fan curves on a GPU to only trigger in the case of a legitimate emergency (eg. 85c+, which you would never hit in casual non-gaming workloads), which would probably get you 90% of the way there.
Used to own an Intel. Recently purchased an M1 Pro, and it’s astounding how quiet it is.
My old Intel MBP would sound like a jet engine just by opening Chrome.
This one… I hammer it all day with multiple servers running, JS projects, tons of tabs, Docker containers, many misc. software utilities… not a single noise.
I’ve only heard the fans once while using Handbrake.
The 16” M1 Pro also has amazing battery life. I regularly use mine for a whole day’s work on battery, while with the i9 16” battery rarely lasts more than 3-4 hours under similar loads.
I own both a 2019 and 2022 MBP. The former is the loudest laptop I've ever owned when doing day to day compute tasks. The latter is the most quiet. It's shocking how bad the older Apple laptops are.
Yes, addressing that was a major theme when they redesigned the MBPs in 2021. People complained that they looked chunky compared to the sleeker 2016-2020 models but acknowledged that cool and quiet might be worth a little more utilitarian appearance.
My work gave me this and it’s the worst! I thought mine was faulty. Sent it for repair 2 times and then I realized it’s just garbage thermals and noise. The i9 + dGPU is too much for that form factor.
The optional i9 upgrade is a bit of a trap, to my mind. The regular i7 version has pretty reasonable thermals by comparison, with marginally lower performance.
I have hit more cases of "burnt a body part" with Windows machines than with Apple laptops. Apples tend to run with more warm surface area because the aluminium spreads all the heat on the entire surface, but high-power Windows laptops can be downright nasty if you manage to touch the area around the fan outflow because all the heat concentrates there to form an incredibly hot spot.
