Big Fan

Monday, 28 April 2008

After reading this morning’s blurb on the egregious fan noise in Psystar’s supposed Mac clones, my friend Cabel Sasser emailed with a story, including documentary video footage, regarding Apple’s 2005 Developer Transition Kits — Intel-based PC hardware housed in Power Mac cases intended solely for use by developers during Apple’s transition from PowerPC to Intel processors.

I encouraged Sasser to publish this important story on his own well-regarded Cabel’s Blog LOL, but, alas, due to scheduling constraints at Panic, he estimated such publication wouldn’t be feasible for another few years, and so I agreed to publish the story here.

What happened is that Cabel’s and my mutual friend Craig Hockenberry, Iconfactory co-founder and lead developer, had, at that time, recently undertaken a project to greatly reduce the ambient noise in his office, moving servers to his garage, unplugging seldom-used devices, replacing noisy equipment with quieter alternatives, and so forth. Concerned that the Developer Transition Kit machines would be noisy (as Hockenberry told me, he “fully expected it to be the normal PC POS hardware”), he asked the Panic crew — who received one of the first DTK machines sent to third-party developers — about fan noise.

Writes Cabel, “We took a quick video to quell his fears.”

Cabel continued, “Suffice it to say Craig’s response contained all-caps comments that are unprintable here. We waited a little while, then sent him a follow-up video with a little more… explanation.”