iPhone 7 Plus Makes Hissing Sound Under Load, Some Users Complain (businessinsider.com) 196
Several commendable users are complaining that their iPhone 7 Plus handsets are making a "hissing" noise especially when they do some heavy weight work. Some users note that this issue extends to the iPhone 7 as well. BusinessInsider reports:Stephen Hackett, cofounder of podcast network Relay FM, tweeted that his iPhone 7 Plus "makes terrible noises when under load," and shared an audio clip of the noise. TechCrunch writer (and former Apple employee) Darrell Etherington responded that his "brand new, just-unboxed [device is] doing the same thing right now." It sounds like the problem isn't affecting all devices, and it's not immediately clear what's behind it. Hackett said on Twitter that Apple will be replacing his device with a new one, which suggests it's a defect rather than just an unexpected quirk of the new smartphone's design. There's some speculation out there as to what's causing it - but nothing concrete yet. Engadget's Jon Fingas suggests it could be "coil whine," a process where electronics make an unintended noise while working, for example.
The Holy Ghost of Steve Jobs Says (Score:2, Funny)
"You're listening to it wrong."
Re:The Holy Ghost of Steve Jobs Says (Score:5, Funny)
What do you expect when the phone doesn't have a headphone jack?
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Haha, just kidding...
That's just the C4 in the battery cooking off as it warms up, nothing to worry about!
Snakes! Why did it have to be snakes? (Score:5, Funny)
Someone at Apple has been coding in Python instead of Swift.
Basilisk (Score:3)
I think that it just means the people who hear it are Parselmouthed and can hear the inner basilisk spell that runs the A10.
Don't buy the first batches... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well Apple tends to not lower its price over the lifetime of the product. So financially you are often better off buying it on release date, and keep it until it is no longer supported. Then getting the next new one on its release date.
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the iphone deals come out around black friday and the summer time. only the early adopters who must have it the first week buy it now. Over the summer they had BOGO deals for the 6S and best buy and carriers are always running specials around black friday as well. sometimes they start earlier depending on when the early adopters finally buy their phones
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Apple may not lower it's price, but the carriers sure as shit do.
Paying full price, even for something with an Apple logo on it, is a choice made by someone who absolutely has to have the latest thing at the earliest possible moment. In their mind, having the thing earlier is worth the higher cost. Much like someone choosing to pay a higher amount of shipping to get it faster, I suppose.
Note: I'm not saying I agree with this justification in any way, just that you can look at it that way.
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But not by that much. or the Carriers will add extra deals for stuff that you don't want.
My method of keeping until it is unsupported. Does give me some sense of satisfaction when I do upgrade, because my current phone is so old that those years and generation of features is nice to have, and worth being the first adopter I get to be cool for a while. I know it is mostly mental, but sometimes for the extra $100 it is worth the delusion of happiness for a week.
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Re:Don't buy the first batches... (Score:5, Insightful)
Customers were told that they wanted thinner, stronger, and water resistant.
FTFY.
"I would buy a new iPhone if it were just a little bit thinner," said no Apple customer ever.
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"If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse". - Henry Ford
Either the experiment works and everyone ditches the headphone jack or it fails and everyone gets a laugh.
Given the number of other things Apple's done like this I'll side on this becoming a trend.
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Given the number of other things Apple's done like this I'll side on this becoming a trend.
Yep. People that have to have the latest Apple device will continue to need the latest Apple device.
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Given the number of other things Apple's done like this I'll side on this becoming a trend.
The problem is that the other switches Apple made were to alternatives that were actually better -- USB is more useful than other keyboard/mouse ports, other portable storage devices were better than floppies, and lightning is better than the 30 pin port.
It's not clear to me that bluetooth is superior to a 3.5mm headphone jack, or even nearly equal. The only thing it does better is not have a cord.
My experience with a dozen or so miscellaneous BT devices has been that while they mostly work, they can be pr
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I think the optical drive is an example of Apple following, not leading. I think the broad base of consumers moved off optical media before Apple removed the drive -- software as ISO downloads (loopback mounted, not written), downloaded music, streaming or downloaded video and so on.
Apple removing it was just a response to lack of consumer interest in it.
I work as an IT contractor and I haven't used an optical drive in literally years -- I'm on my second disc-less laptop now. Ironically, most operating s
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An external optical drive that is used three or four times a year is better than an internal one that you have to carry with you, yes. They add a fairly significant amount of weight.
That said, even though I rarely used the internal drive, and even though they were kind of flaky, I still wish Apple made a single Retina model with a spinning hard drive and an optic
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Don't uncable the optical drive, get a caddy for $5 on eBay and swap it. You can put a second drive in said caddy, or not. It doesn't matter, it won't be opening either way. If you have an SSD as your boot drive, you could add a large but slow/cheap hard drive to the caddy. It's one of the few real uses for an optical drive bay, IMHO.
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It's obvious looking back now that USB was a superior solution. People said the exact same things you're saying now back then about USB.
At least Bluetooth devices exist in the quantities they do.
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Customers wanted thinner, stronger, and water resistant.
I must have missed that round of voting.
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Wait, who is asking for thinner? The thing is already so thin that I could snap it in half with my bare hands. How about going thicker and doubling the batter life?
Re:Don't buy the first batches... (Score:5, Funny)
Those people who put their phones in a fat extended battery case? </sarcasm>
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Three things all aided by removal of that jack.
Actually there's a fourth thing: Apple relying on users to gobble up the garbage that you just spewed as a reason when in the grand scheme of things people called them out on their shit previously.
Seriously their market share is below 20% now which shows a great deal of users don't give a shit.
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I have been buying iPhones since the 3GS (recording videos was when I jumped in). The 3GS is still going strong as one of the kids iPod touches. However, I won't be buying any more iPhones after my 6 plus unless and until they listen to actual customers (or customers who aren't also total morons). The iPhone 7 is clearly designed by a committee who really had two driving motives: make Apple more money and make it waterproof.
I want things like:
Waterproof without removing basic, essential features in lieu
Re:Don't buy the first batches... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who (i.e. what customers) asked for this un-feature to be thrust upon us consumers?
"Please remove the headphone jack so I'm forced to buy new hardware" said no one, ever.
I can pretty much guarantee that no customer ever asked for this "feature". As for their remark that it was "courage", that's utter bullshit.
Storming the beach at Normandy took courage.
Running into a burning building to save someone is courage.
Martin Luther King Jr. standing up for equal rights was courage.
Jacklyn H. Lucas, who jumped on two grenades to save his buddies showed courage.
Removing a fucking headphone jack from a phone doesn't quite cut it in my book, sorry.
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I disagree Apple have lots of courage.
To stand up in front of people and claim they removed a headphone jack because of courage, that's courage!
To hide $billions in taxes via underhanded and illegal deals and then cry foul when called out on it, that's courage!
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While I still agree that removing the jack is fucking retarded, it does make for an interesting opportunity for companies that have a bit of electronics design savvy to bring a fix to market: http://www.phonearena.com/news... [phonearena.com]
Most people are going to buy a case for their phone anyway. This one fixes a design flaw as well.
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The issue isn't the removal of the headphone jack - they've been a terrible and unreliable piece of technology for decades. Professional gear doesn't use 3.5mm jacks, it uses 1/4" jacks, or XLR leads, or optical, or whatever. I don't use a 3.5mm jack on my work machine, I use a USB headset. Minijacks are fragile and crap. Even now, if you pop around to a non-techy person's house, and fancy putting some music from your device onto their stereo, the chances are that they won't have a minijack connector, and y
bad inductor selection (Score:3, Interesting)
I would guess they chose an inductor too small and it is vibrating.
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And I would guess the newfangled "barometric vent" is acting like a megaphone for all noisy components inside.
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I would guess they chose an inductor too small and it is vibrating.
Or, it could just be a fault in the hardware or firmware that controls audio - maybe it's just yer average digital noise coming right of the speaker. Plugging in those old earbuds you have lying around would help with the troubleshooting effort. Oh, wait...
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I don't care what causes it, but it drives me nuts. I've had this on a Dell laptop (circa 2012) and on my current (2014) Macbook Pro. It's kind of terrible that this is now spreading to phones.
I'm more and more convinced that society hit a local peak in technology quality in about the 2000-2010 decade. I hope the next stage of improvement comes soon; even purely mechanical things are going downhill at the moment (the front panel of my 2-year-old dishwasher is detaching from the door frame; makes we want t
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No, inductors do not make sound in modern DCDC supply.
What a silly statement to make. Modern? DCDC supplies have not changed in the last 20 years. The ability for a coil to make a whine has always come down to a combination of design choice and manufacturing. Caps designed for powersupplies have nothing to do with hiss and everything to do with low Effective Serial Resistance, a stat that makes them more effective at handling high transient current flows that are common in powersupplies.
Also the stand-off's are a standard package components allowing those cann
Re:bad inductor selection (Score:5, Informative)
The big change in DCDC design is in the different modes of operation that a DCDC controller can support. It used to be simple pulse width modulation but now we have pulse width modulation and, to use a term adopted by Linear, "Burst" mode DCDC converters. The purpose of the "burst" mode is to achieve low power level efficiency by on/off modulating the DCDC converter. The resulting on/off modulation can be within the acoustic range even if the actual DCDC converter is switching in the MHz range. So Linear, TI, Analog - they all now support their own version of a "burst" mode.
In the past 5 years, far more parts from various manufacturers are available for designing systems that goes to sleep but require always-on power rails. You used to have to pair a DCDC and LDO together to achieve the best of both worlds. And companies like Murata have capacitors specifically designed to assist in alleviating the whine. Check out their product line for a more detained description. I have designed and built power supplies that have had a noticeable whine - typically under low load. So I can confirm - it is the caps.
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Very possible. We will know if it is ground saturation if the capacitative touch screen also starts acting up.
Not enough info in the article for proper diagnosis.
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Clearly there's a tiny snake coiled up in there. And it's angry.
Clearly there's a tiny coil snaked up in there. FTFY
#hissgate (Score:5, Funny)
#hissgate
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You, sir, have won the Internet for today.
Please mod the parent up.
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The hissing sound is just the feedback from the instruments at the NSA listening in citizen! There is no scandal here! Nixon pioneered the modern information collecting techniques we use today!
Back to your mindless binge consumption of kittens and the Kardashians!
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If that were the case it would have been "Nixxongate" not "Watergate."
You should be complaining about water!
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Or #herrgate for the other half of the population
What??? They are the same (Herr) [wiktionary.org]
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#fraugate
Fanboies are often the biggest critics. (Score:4, Informative)
I have noticed this in most equiptment over the past 30+ years of computing. I remember hearing the processing noise from my old Amstrad PC-1512C 8086. Which didn't have any cooling fans so when I did heavy processing it would make a whining sound.
I also hear a whining sound from my wireless router, I can often hear noise on LCD Displays, especially on a full screen refresh. I expect the the iPhone 7 it is doing so much stuff (whether it being useful or not is open for a another internet flame post) and the new CPU allows it to do more enough to cause a noise.
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I can't use smooth scrolling on systems using Intel's GPUs because of the distinct noise they make.
I typically disable smooth scrolling anyway, but whenever I come across an Intel-only box I don't control it's maddening.
Coil whine is something else entirely (Score:2)
Not saying that what you experience isnt real, but having a brand new video card a few years ago with coil whine, i learned a lot about it. It is VERY noticiable. To everyone. I used to game at night and my wife said the noise was keeping her awake. With headphones on, it wasnt bothering me and the card itself was fine. It was a high pitched whine which everyone could hear easily. It started about a month after i purchased this video card. I had to RMA it, but the successive cards i recieved back all had di
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I listened to the noise in the "article" and it sounds more like a feedback from a hot mic coming out the speaker or something like that,
That observation is just downright scary...
No, of course they're not listening to you, right? RIGHT?!?!
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It's coil whine from the switch mode power supply under heavy load. It's a common problem. The CPU runs at 1.8V or even less typically, and there is a little power supply that drops the battery 3.7V nominal to the right voltage.
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dont have their coils wound tight enough
That's gotta be a metaphor for something...
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Maybe they wanted to save a few cents and didn't get the inductors dipped in qdope/lacquer/glue/whatevertheyusetostopthewiremoving
Dr Archangel says ... (Score:4, Funny)
Take two antiHISStamine and call Apple in the morning.
The headphone ports (Score:5, Funny)
...They're haunting Apple. "Bring us baaaaaack.....*hiss*......Bring us baaaaaaack....."
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My guess (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the sound of your soul being sucked into the device. That's why it's noticeable on a "brand new, just-unboxed device". Should go away after a few days, once you are completely soul-less.
Hard disk spin (Score:2)
Obviously just the hard disk spinning up and down. Apple should have considered these effects and used a small page file with more ram. Nothing to see here.
Back to VisiCalc.
Apple Iphone Proud Sponsor (Score:5, Funny)
Apple iPhone, proud sponsor of house Slitherin.
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Of course- it could be the mini sprinkler system inside the phone going off to prevent a Galaxy Note 7 event occurring.
Probably a combination of factors (Score:5, Informative)
Given that Apple is apparently quite obscessed with making their device the same thickness as a sheet of onion skin paper, the issue is likely a combination of things.
Namely, thermal noise needs to be overcome with higher voltages, which then get switched at pretty high speeds. That switching of higher than normal voltages (because it is under load, and having to overcome passive cooling only) coupled with a most likely saturating floating ground, means RF signal leakage. Given that one of the proposed reasons for Apple's removal of the headphone jack was that they were having problems with RF noise being produced and picked up on the headphones (and nothing to do with "Courage") I find this likely, and suspect the issue to be more systemic than apple wants to admit, especially in light of the Samsung battery disaster.
(EG, the reality that you can't reasonably push a design that thin without having very real problems with the electronics does not fly well with the ivory tower designers with sticks up their asses at Apple, but their marketing droids pay better attention, and realize this is a potential problem they need to be mum about. I would expect higher rates of failure from out of expected tolerance voltages on devices driven hard, and apple blaming the users, rather than the hardware like they should be.)
Re:Probably a combination of factors (Score:5, Interesting)
That's actually an explanation for their use of the word courage. It takes courage to release a product full of design flaws, masked by removing features you can't get working.
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Namely, thermal noise needs to be overcome with higher voltages,
I'm not sure this make sense.
- Do iPhones have a higher voltage than other phones?
- Are they somehow able to vary the voltage?
- Are they meant to run hotter than others?
Your initial assertions seems contrary to common sense. Could you explain it?
Re:Probably a combination of factors (Score:4, Interesting)
The CPU gets hot when in use. To overcome thermal noise, the voltage on the CPU goes up a little.
There is an expected tolerance band for operation, and the control of the voltage on the CPU and ram has upper bounds for very good reasons.
I am suggesting that the normal operation of this voltage regulation under computational load results in increased bus noise due to a saturated ground, and that apple considered this acceptable because most users will just be listening to mp3s, or playing casual crap on Facebook, and not taxing the system this way, making the issue statistically ignorable.
The way you deal with signal bleed on a device that cannot be earth grounded is to have a very large conductor inside that serves as a floating ground. Usually this is sandwiched inside the PCB as a good thick copper layer. Apple wants a device that is practically lighter than air, and thin as a straight razor. Copper is pretty heavy, and extra layers inside the PCB add thickness. Both are things the idiots, I mean, "geniuses" in Cupertino think are trendy to do away with. As a consequence, I expect the grounding layer to be thinner than what is actually needed for the proper operation of the device at heavy load, resulting in ground saturation. When the ground saturates, coupled with a hot CPU from heavy load, the regulator pumps up the voltage to try to assure reliable signals are being generated. This adds to the problem, because now more heat is being added and the ground is already saturated, so rf noise leaks everywhere. Throw in a densely packed PCB, where lots of devices will pick up the noise, and you have a recipie for early component failure.
All the devices are working within design, but the design is poorly considered.
Rather than admit that the design is poorly considered, due to the absurdity of trying to make a high performance device that thin, I expect apple to blame users for overloading the phone instead. The noise only happens when the system is taxed, because it was designed to play on facebook, not number crunch.
I expect the engineers decided that transient loads of 100% were acceptable because it takes time to saturate the ground, and most things a user will do won't saturate the CPU like that.
For reference, most CPUs run between 1.2 and 1.5 vdc, with subtle changes up and down based on activity and temperature. This is normal, expected operation. In this case, the ground saturates when the CPU sits at 100% for a long time, and the voltage sits at 1.5v, with transient voltages from rf buildup pushing components outside that from the saturated ground.
Hypothetically.
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Interesting concepts. Thank you for clarifying it.
The RSS feed is stuck (Score:2)
Fix it fix it fix it fix it!
Stop Slashsplaining (Score:2)
So the headphone jack had to go (Score:2)
Terrible noise? (Score:5, Insightful)
I take it this is a first-world definition of "terrible"?
I had to turn up my speakers to even hear the video.
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Yes because starving people in the world exist we should accept sub standard garbage for an insanely premium price.
#thefirstworldisreal.
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#thefirstworldisreal.
Still not terrible.
I have a theory (Score:2)
Apple have been pushing to get multiple suppliers for each part of the iPhone, I assume to get more certainty in supply and competitive prices.
Perhaps this is the reason why some people have issues and some don't.
Maybe they had a few bad batches of inductors or ceramic capacitors from a supplier that are noisy?
Maybe that's why some people have problems when upgrading their OS and some don't.
Foxconn isn't the only manufacturer they use. Not all iPhones of the same model have the same components inside.
They u
No Mystery (Score:2)
Does this happen when.... (Score:2)
The irony (Score:2)
I was just recently researching Dell XPS laptops which are notorious for this, and some of my thoughts were "That's why you pay more for Apple hardware I suppose, they'd never let anything with coil whine out of the door"
Oh the times they are a changin'. That's why I don't buy their stuff any more, you're no longer paying more for better quality (which IMO I genuinely think used to be true, for a little while). You're paying more for the same old crap as everything else. Back to paying normal prices for
So same as the iPad Pro 9.7 then? (Score:2)
Well ok, not under load, but when scrolling the display in any capacity. Noise comes from a chip just near the volume rocker. I've got pretty good hearing for 38 and it drives me batty if I use the thing in bed on a quiet night. I was almost tempted to return the thing to be honest, my iPad air 2, no such issue.
(It's more of a hiss / hum in one)
Thermal noise (Score:2)
iPhone already emits enough thermal noise to be picked up from an AM receiver. You can even use it as a music transmitter.
> https://github.com/fulldecent/... [github.com]
The iPhone 7 works even better than the previous models.
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This is why it doesn't blow up like Samsung... (Score:2)
It doesn't blow up because it's venting pressure before an earth shattering kaboom. If yours isn't hissing, beware...
Information leak (Score:2)
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A proper circuit with proper drainage would be a whole 1mm thicker!
The GODS at apple's aesthetics department spoke, and the lowly peons were told to MAKE IT HAPPEN.
They did. You are listening to it wrong!
BTW, the new iPhone8 will be EVEN THINNER!
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They could have used the space the 3.5mm jack took up.
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Then where would the barometric valve go!?
I mean, Really!? Think about these things! That valve is clearly a necessary feature!
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You're right, what was I thinking!
Accurate barometric pressure measurement is more important for a phone than audio output.
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kids these days. Coil whine actually involves coils, for starters.
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I thought it was a way to run coils on linux instead of windows without using a vm or a coil container
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Ceramic capacitors can make noise too. They can act as a microphone too, injecting noise in to a circuit if they're vibrated.
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careful, he'll steal your soul's ideas! he'll try to screw free soul work out of your soul!
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Well, sonofabitch - I wish my Note 7 had that. Maybe Samsung can add it to TouchWiz, just like Ford added the V8 sounds to my V6 Turbo F150 over the cabin speakers. They might roll it out with the Nougat update. Fingers crossed, girls!
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Samsung wanted the real deal with the Note 7. Unfortunately sometimes the hot exhaust catches things on fire.