Apple’s Senior Director of Product Design, Chris Ligtenberg, led the team that designed the all-new Mac Pro’s fan system.
Alexander George for Popular Mechanics:
Most high-grade PCs and displays cool things off with big fans or pump-driven water systems. But if you’ve used a Mac in the past decade, near-silent operation is a non-negotiable requirement for Apple laptops. That means Apple engineers have to find creative ways to exploit the laws of thermodynamics.
Among those engineers is Chris Ligtenberg, Senior Director of Product Design… Ligtenberg’s group built the Pro’s fan system—three axial fans in the front, with a blower in the back. Since most off-the-shelf fans would be too loud, Apple designs them internally. “Years ago, we started redistributing the blades,” he says. “They’re still dynamically balanced, but they’re actually randomized in terms of their BPF [blade pass frequency]. So you don’t get huge harmonics that tend to be super annoying.”
Noise is a major factor in the design of modern machinery. In this case: “That [solution is] borrowed almost entirely from automobile tires,” Ligtenberg says. “There’s a bit of math behind it, but you can create broadband noise instead of total noise with that technique.”
MacDailyNews Take: George also writes, “For all except a small customer base — most of them in the business of making movies based on comic books — the Mac Pro is overkill. Few need between $5,999 and $52,599 worth of computing power. But Apple is a company known for overkill design that goes on to set industry standards. Same as tech that first showed up in race cars, like rear-view mirrors and ABS, we’ll be watching for ways that the Pro sets standards for the future of consumer hardware.”
Exactly. In fact, that sounds very familiar:
Of the new Mac Pro, every Mac user should be proud.
The Mac Pro is sort of like why you fund a space program, if you’re smart. Yes, there are pressing needs elsewhere (and, btw, there always will be; it’s a bad excuse for not investing in exploration), but if you’re not pushing, you’re stagnating. Nothing unexpected can be discovered, no new solutions uncovered when no new challenges are ventured. It’s why smart car companies make esoteric supercars of which only a few will ever be sold and on which the investment will never be recouped. As with supercars, lessons learned from the Mac Pro, the Mac flagship, will percolate throughout and improve all of Apple’s product lines. Yes, Apple worst-selling Mac is their most important.
May the Mac Pro never be dead-ended, abandoned, and ignored again!
Think about what you thought of Apple’s Mac lineup when it had a half-decade-old, neglected, dead-end design as its flagship. The entire Mac lineup was diminished. Apple’s management who allowed this to happen were diminished, too. People could only see the flaws – in the machines and the people. Now, with the new Mac Pro proudly raising the flag high atop the mountain, all Macs, and everyone responsible for making Macs, are lifted up along with it. — MacDailyNews, June 6, 2019