Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

iMac G5s have BLOWERS not FANS

Toe

Toe

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Mar 25, 2002
1,101
2
Sorry, this needs to be cleared up. As you can see at the bottom of http://www.apple.com/imac/design.html the new iMac has blowers, not fans.

Here's a link to describe the difference:
http://www.electronics-cooling.com/Resources/EC_Articles/MAY96/may96_01.htm

The blowers in the iMac (and in the Xserve, for that matter) are very carefully placed so that they push air through specific channels. If you look at the inside of the iMac case, you can see how they are channeling the air from particular blowers in particular directions. They cleverly combine convection and directed air to minimize the amount of blowing necessary.

Anyway... no fans.
 
So the difference between a fan and a blower is that a blower is basically a fan turned on it's side with the blade re-engineered to move the air across it rather than through?

Makes sense, I don't see a fan that is less than 3/4ths of an inch thick doing much good in my laptop anyway. A blower makes far more sense.
 
Back in the 80's (and I guess earlier) they had new types of "fans" in copier machines. They were called squirrel cage fans. That's what a blower looks like to me: a version of the squirrel cage fan.

At any rate, who cares what they call it as long as it keeps the G5 cool. And the cooler they keep it, the faster machine they can build.
 
Blowers are not fans? So what do you think is in the blower that's moving the air? Ham slices? And I suppose you think Mazda's Rotary engine is not a real engine?
 
Well this one takes the cake.. a while back my Engineering Professor said that "the new laptop from Apple (the G4 that I have) has 9 fans in it." :eek: Well even though it was early in the morning I quickly rose my hand and said "umm no the computer you're thinking of the the G5 THAT has 9 fans, my Powerbook has 2 blowers in it." He snickered and said "well im pretty sure that the laptop has 9 fans in it." At that point I had lost all respect for that guy because he supposedly worked for IBM a while back.
 
I have to agree with FuzzyBallz (hmmm... that's not a sentence I would've ever imagined myself saying), this is a pretty shaky semantics issue. Fans, blowers, impellers, propellers, pumps, compressors - these terms get interchanged a lot in various fluid dynamics situations, and there's huge gray areas in their definitions. I, for one, wouldn't get too entrenched on a particular definition, but in this case I see that Apple refers to the components in the G5 iMac as 'blowers', and I can go along with that just fine.

I just wanted to point out that there's not a really clear differentiation, in general, between a 'fan' and a 'blower'. I bet Apple even refers to the parts in the new iMac as 'fans' somewhere.
 
Blower: A machine for producing an artificial blast or current
of air by pressure, as for increasing the draft of a
furnace, ventilating a building or shaft, cleansing
gram, etc.

Fan blower: A wheel with vanes fixed on a rotating shaft
inclosed in a case or chamber, to create a blast of air
(fan blast) for forge purposes, or a current for draft and
ventilation.

Fan: A device for creating a current of air by movement of a
surface or surfaces
 
Though I agree that it's mostly semantics, and really not worth getting worked up over, there is enough of a difference between the construction and function of your average computer "fan" (in the G5 tower, for example) and the "blowers" in the iMac G5 to be worth making something of a distinction.

You could just as easily say that they're a specific type of fan, which would be correct, but since that particular type of fan is usually called a blower (the industrial air blowers I work with are certainly sold as such, and function similarly), it works as a simplified distinction.
 
I have a feeling that the people who care are probably the same people who get bugged about confusing MAC with mac.
 
JRam said:
I have a feeling that the people who care are probably the same people who get bugged about confusing MAC with mac.
Click to expand...

I know this is true in my case, I found it interesting, AND it bugs me to have to explain what a MAC address every time I use it in a sentence.

"What's the MAC address of the computer?"
"785 E. Belmont ... "
"No I mean... wait, how the hell did you get a job here?!"
"Well uh ... " *immediately bolts in the other direction*
 
Hey, there's no harm in a geeky conversation over semantics, so long as you don't take yourself too seriously. It's silly to get worked up if somebody calls the air-moving devices in the new iMac fans, but I'd say it's more specific to call them blowers.

That said, I reiterate that from a simple technical standpoint, there's a useful distinction between a traditional fan and a blower. It is the reason they're called "leaf blowers" instead of "leaf fans".

Also check out this kit from Themaltake, which includes both a blower and a fan.

A fan is, generally speaking, a propeller-style set of blades that spins around and pushes air in one direction. The stream of air isn't very focused, the area from which the air is drawn isn't very focused, and there's a dead area near the center of the fan where the hub is.

Contrast with a blower which, although it often contains a hamster-wheel-shaped fan mechanism (yes, technically making it a fan), it directs a relatively uniform stream of air out, and can easily draw air from a narrow area.

Yes, you can make the argument that they're both the same thing, and there's more than one type of each, but you can also loosely define a blower as a type of fan that produces a uniform, directed stream of air, which is the way most people use it. Making every blower a fan, but not every fan a blower.

Anyway, if I pick up Newark or a simlar industrial supplies catalog, I expect a distinction along these lines when I see the term "blower" in a part's description. That's why they have seperate categories for axial fans and centrifugal blowers, the latter of which is, I believe, what the iMac uses.
 
The way I see it, blowers contain fans, therefore it's okay to call a blower a fan but not okay to call a fan a blower.

Then again.. Fans do blow, do they not? :p jk
 
JRam said:
I have a feeling that the people who care are probably the same people who get bugged about confusing MAC with mac.
Click to expand...

Shouldn't that be MAC and Mac? :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back