HP has a long history of poor thermal design practices. The entire Omnibook series had thermal issues, the xe-3 series as well.
The original Pogoplug (Marvell ARMada) hsd a similar issue when they discovered the GbE part was putting off way more heat than they expected.
Bottom line is that you have to put in a potential board/BOM spin for thermal compliance, or you end up adding a fan when you run too close to the edge.
Does anyone know under which conditions could they be taken to court?
I know that it's very unlikely for this to happen, but I would guess there are laws that would prevent this. I know they exist where I live, but not sure about the US specifics.
I've seen those notices before, and I do think they could shield them for some liability. But outright lying? I don't know, it looks like one of those things so fuzzy that certain things make absolute sense, but then you move 1 mm forward too much and then you are in absurd-situation land.
Eh, I'll cut them a little more slack because it seems like it does its job without a bladed fan, and the bladed fan is hidden inside. This is just straight lying, and it's immediately obvious lying too. Especially to anyone who knows anything about fanless designs - there are no external fins on the machine and it uses an Intel chip, so you probably don't even have to look at the back to know it can't be fanless.
Back in my professional housecleaning days, Dyson vacuums also seemed a lot more prone to breaking than a lot of other vacuums, mostly in a lot of simple ways as far as buttons sticking, beater bars no longer working; my favorite vacuums to work with were Sharks, though there are a lot of other very nice affordable, bagless, powerful, durable vacuums from other companies too.
I worked for a while as a vacuum repair tech years ago. It was kinda neat.
Dysons had a few specific problems. One, their cord was undersized for the power it was carrying, and would get warm to the touch, much more so than other brands. I never saw any repairs related to that, but it was indicative of a cheaply-built philosophy that had lots of other problems. Two, their rolling brushes had a simple plastic-on-plastic bearing surface (other vacuums had a plastic-on-metal or bearing-on-plastic), and as the brush accumulated hair and other things, the two plastics would melt into each-other from the friction and it would require a top shell replacement. This was a really common repair on these. Another problem, common to all bagless vacs, was a buildup of dust and grit inside the motor, causing early motor failure.
A well-cared-for Dyson is a decent vacuum, but you're generally better off getting a good Eureka for half the price and abusing the crap out of it. Those things could take a beating.
One a side note. This guy's channel is one of my youtube favorites. Some of the classic computers he tears apart and talks about are absolutely fascinating.
The Asus when announced seemed to have a similar confusion as to whether it had a fan or not. I wonder if some part or other didn't live up to its spec?
Reminds me of the Surface 3 announcement and being told the device is 'fanless' when a giant picture of a fan on the motherboard is shown on the screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uaOMypr9Po#t=1532
When he says 'This thing, is fanless', he's quoting other people talking about other tablets. In context, he's clearly not talking about the Surface, as he's then going into minute detail on how awesome their fan technology is.
Regardless, it's pretty shady especially when they try to spin it as 'another way to say fanless is thin'. No, fanless means there is no fan on a device. I don't see how there can be any gray area here.
In context, he never says it's fanless. He mentions the properties that fanless designs bring - thin, don't hear a fan, don't see a fan, cool to the touch - and then explains how the Surface Pro 3 incorporates those properties, with a fan. For all the consumer would know, it was fanless as it shares those properties with literally-fanless devices.
If you look at the full context it's not comparable. First, do they say fanless in any of the marketing or promotional materials like HP did? Not that I know of.
Second, the "another way to say fanless is thin" seems to be marketing spin to me, like saying one of the benefits of fanless is thinness.
Third, unless someone tuned off the video in 30 seconds, it's clear that it is not really fanless.
Here's the transcript, can anyone come off with the impression that the Pro 3 is fanless? Especially while the fan was shown on the screen to the audience all along?
>I can go through all 100 custom parts it took to do that. I won't. I want to talk about one part. It's probably the most significant of the parts. I'll hold the device so you can continue to get a shot of it. But look at the fan that you see up there. We talk about fanless all the time. Fanless is an interesting concept. That was something people talked about three years ago when they talked about tablets.
>This thing is fanless. Another way to say fanless is "thin." Another way to say fanless is "cool" to the touch. Another way to say fanless is you don't feel the air.
>So what we designed in our product as you know from Surface Pro 2. Take a quick look at Surface Pro 3. Do you see that perimeter vent going around here? That same vent in Surface Pro 2, that same technology invented came into this small package.
>Then we reinvented the fan. We were able to make it 30 percent more efficient than any fan in any product today. Then we reinvented the fin on the fan, and we're able to radially emit air throughout the entire product so you never feel it. You don't hear it. You don't even see it.
> Do they say fanless in any of the marketing material?
What are we watching? This is the product announcement video, it doesn't get any more marketing than this. I'm calling out that this is a shady tactic to associate the device with fanless devices when it clearly has a fan. In reviews it's even mentioned that the fan in the Surface Pro 3 is louder than in the Surface Pro 2: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8077/microsoft-surface-pro-3-r... "The big difference is that in situations where you wouldn't hear fans spinning on Surface Pro 2, you'll sometimes hear it on SP3."
The video very clearly states many times that there is a fan, there is even a picture of it on the large screen and it's announced that we're looking at that particular part.
There is a body language and tonal miscue with the "this thing is fanless", but it's quickly over ridden by things like "Then we reinvented the fan. We were able to make it 30 percent more efficient than any fan in any product today. Then we reinvented the fin on the fan"
Take that Pro 3 video clip or transcript to a thousand people who never heard of the Pro 3 or the Chromebox and ask them if they think the Pro 3 is fanless. Next show them the HP Chromebox product page and ask them the same question about it.
Care to estimate how many you think would be wrong about the actual hardware? My numbers are < 5 and > 995 respectively. I really want to know what your estimates are.
The fan is IN the device not ON the device so it's actually fanless according to your definition.
Perhaps there is a gray area where ON is synonymous with IN for people who aren't being pedantic, just as fanless is synonymous with cool and quiet for most consumers.
Reminds me of the time when Google first launched the Chromebox, they claimed it had a Intel Core processor, when it actually had a Celeron. Also, there was no mention of the extremely paltry 16GB local storage at all on the product page.
The latter can probably be passed off as marketing spin but the former is pretty much lying to sell your product. It's like passing off a 4-cylinder car as a 6-cylinder car on a car website or brochure.
