So, the new
iMacs and the new
Power Mac G4 Cube don't have any
cooling fans in them. I must admit, that's kind of
clever and
neat, and I can appreciate that the
PowerPC processor generates less
heat than the average
Intel processor, so they can make these
fanless designs. Then I thought about how
cool it would be to have a completely
quiet computer in my
office or at
home.
Then I realized, after listening to lots of computers that most of the noise you hear from them is the whine and whoosh of the hard drives, and although you can hear the fan, it's probably less than half of the noise the computer makes. So these computers, while a step in the right direction, will not be completely silent as long as they have a hard drive. And we won't even mention that the CD-ROM drive is louder than everything else on your computer.
This is true in laptops especially--many laptops have no fans either, but are still noisy because of the hard drive, CD-ROM, and in some cases the screen itself. Oh, yeah, my monitor makes an annoying whine too. Yeah, a flat screen is quieter, but you can still hear something on many of them.
I support the idea of a noiseless computer (at least on the desktop--I don't think I'd trust my servers if they didn't make noise), so I hope people figure this out, and also people figure out how to keep an Intel chip cool without lots of fans.