Is Spotify harming your Mac?
When my daughter was in elementary school, she asked me for a computer of her own. I told her that once she reached high school, I'd get her one. Last August, that day finally arrived so we went to the Apple Store here in Austin, Texas and bought her a MacBook Pro.
A few weeks ago, she started to complain that the computer was making a buzzing sound. It only happened while the computer was asleep. I checked it out and sure enough, every few minutes it would buzz and vibrate slightly like a smartphone set to vibrate. I made an appointment at the Apple Store and took it in.
The guy at the Genius Bar knew exactly what the problem almost certainly was before he even looked at it. He said, "The only moving part in that computer is the fan. Let me take it in the back and run a diagnostic." He picked up the MacBook Pro and vanished into the crowd of customers and Apple Store employees. About 10 minutes later he reappeared and confirmed that the problem was indeed the fan. He said it would take 3 to 5 days to get it repaired and fortunately it's covered under AppleCare. Several days later I received an email that the computer was back from repair and ready for pickup.
Yesterday morning, I noticed that her MacBook Pro was buzzing again. I took it to my desk (I work from home) and left it there, sleeping, while I worked. Every few minutes, sometimes several times a minute, it would make that same buzzing sound. Sometimes the buzz was very short (less than a second) and sometimes long (several seconds). I discussed it with Greg, one of the engineers I work with. We took a look at her Login Items in System Preferences -> Users & Groups. She had several that could no longer be found so I deleted those. This got Greg wondering about background tasks. He had me download a tool that would show them. There were only two. One was from Adobe because my daughter has the Adobe Creative Suite and that task is almost certainly checking for updates. The other was part of Spotify. Like the Adobe task, it was probably getting updated information from a server somewhere. Unlike Adobe, however, this Spotify task appeared to be running even when the computer was asleep. The computer was running on the battery and PowerNap was turned off for the battery so Spotify should not have been running at all.
Using the tool Greg asked me to download, we turned off the Spotify background task. I put the computer back to sleep and left it on my desk. It never buzzed again. So what was that buzzing that Spotify had caused? Greg is pretty sure it was the sound the SDD makes when it's waking from sleep. This makes sense. Spotify was running a background task and upon receiving new information, writing it to disk. The problem is, it shouldn't be doing that while the computer is asleep especially because SSDs have a limited number of reads and writes before they go bad. That number is really, really high but still, Spotify was unnecessarily reducing the life of the SSD in my daughter's MacBook Pro. If you have Spotify installed, you might want to look into it.
I run a software company and I really appreciate feedback from users. With that in mind, I went to the Spotify website to contact them about the issue. There was no way to contact them without a Spotify account. Even the option to login with your Facebook account is not a solution because for that to work, your Facebook account must be linked to your Spotify account. It appears that Spotify only wants to hear from their own users.
If you're a Spotify user, please contact them and point them to this post. They really need to fix this problem because they may be potentially harming Macs with SSDs without even realizing it.
As for the fan in my daughter's Macbook Pro, it was probably coincidental that it was bad. Having said that, I'm tempted to take it back in and see what Apple thinks.