Do mac laptops have fans?

Huh? Sorry, you’ll have to speak up, my MBP is making too much noise…..

Yes.

I had a old G3 iBook and it scared the crap out my when the fan first came on. I had it for about nine months before it ever kicked-in.

Yes, my PowerBook sometimes decides to take off and goes into super fan speed. It really scares my cat….!

I’m a big fan of mac laptops!

Don’t have one sniff.

@ Lightlyseared – DRAT you! You beat me to the punch on that one!!! Nice

i wonder, how did this question came to creation…power generates heat, all laptops have fans, because they use power and thus get hot, even 45nm processors, so how could a mac circumvent this? just my question back…what where you thinking?

@iwamoto: Desktop computers generate heat as well, but some Mac desktops don’t have fans. And it’s possible for laptops to be fanless—like the OLPC, though that’s an extremely low-power system. So it seems like a reasonable question.

i guess it would be an old desk system, it’s a misconception that imac’s don’t have fans. anyway, it’s a dual core system, ofcourse it’s gonna generate a whole lot of heat, but okay,

Yeah, if you want control over it get SMCfancontrol. That’s what I use.

Old G3 iMacs didn’t have fans. And I have a Core2Duo iMac and I have never heard the fan. I know it has one. It just runs very slow or only turns on when it gets very hot. I feel heat coming out of the vent on top but it doesn’t feel like air is being pushed out of it.

Oh weird, even the mini has a fan. I guess I was thinking of the old iMacs the cube. Poor cubey.

haha, and that’s why the cube failed, seriously, it had coolant fins inside (i had it open) instead of fans and well…that did not go well in stress situations

@JP, check behind the metal clamp, see that little vent, put your hand against it, and you’ll feel the fan

@iwamoto, we had a cube for years and it was brill. Fan never ever came on… ;) But seriously not sure what you have in mind for ‘stress situations’. We never had any problems with ours.

It was the Cube that eventually led our firm to standardise on Mac hardware: when windows computers were going wrong, needing upgrads / new drivers, and generally annoying people. Our cube just worked. No fuss, no bother. So people started to say “I’ll have one of those…”. So we replaced a couple of the windows laptops with Powerbooks, and they didn’t go wrong either… Now even the die-hard windows fans would not go back.

well, stressing the CPU by for instance rendering a movie, realy big conversions, just processes that realy make it work hard, ofcourse, for the standard desk stuff it’s a great machine, we still have on lying around on site, cute little thing, i’m not saying it was bad, it was just not a smart move to put in no fans at all

@iwamoto, just curious, but what happens when you have the problems? As for the fan business, if you really want one there are several sources of aftermarket fans to add – including options to upgrade the CPU (presume to support movie rendering?).

I guess it is horses for courses. I wouldn’t have imagined that anyone would have viewed the Cube as a serious move rendering machine – in part due to limited ability to upgrade video. At time Cube was sold, the G4 Towers were being pushed as the ‘heavy duty’ computer of choice. Just because my saloon car has four wheels and an engine doesn’t make it great off-road.

The convection system to remove heat is designed very well, so the fans barely have to kick in. They usually idle constantly, but this is very hard to hear. You’ll notice it most if you start using the laptop in bed or somewhere similar, where the heat cannot escape quite as easily.

thanks delirium, allie, blue, and helpful others.