Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled

discussions.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 114 posts

Re: New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled

#11

Post by eropple »

rayiner wrote: post #8
eropple wrote: post #5

This is one of the reasons (along with a discrete GPU) that I stick exclusively to the 15" rMBP line. Yes, fans are unsexy and all that, but it's got two of them, they're very good and fairly quiet, and the shell is big enough to serve as a decent heat sink by itself.

The 15" rMBP will apparently throttle if you load the CPU + discrete GPU at the same time. That said, I have no use for GPU, and I've been pretty impressed by how cool it stays given the thin profile and quad-core CPU.

That may be, but I've pegged both and not noticed it throttling in a way that harmed performance.

Re: New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled

#13

Post by ianlevesque »

jsjohnst wrote: post #9

Hangouts over taxes just about any machine, it's ridiculous. FCP exporting a 4k video uses less CPU than Hangouts does to show a choppy video feed.

I use hangouts daily and unless I'm on a high end PC I switch to audio only to avoid the jet turbine effect. They really need to optimize.

Re: New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled

#14

Post by eropple »

savanaly wrote: post #6

This is a severe problem for me with my 15" MBP. Long meetings (heck, even short) with colleagues make it extremely hot to the touch (keyboard and frame) and destroy the battery. Same with streaming netflix or youtube videos. Microphone seems fine but not great quality. It wasn't my decision to purchase this computer, it was my company's, but I'm very disappointed in its performance at simple two way audio video comm…

I had the original rMBP, now the 2014 one, and don't see the same problem. A lot of it is in the persistent services that are running on the machine; I'd take a good look at Activity Monitor's "energy" pane. One thing I noticed: if you're using Chrome and have persistent pages open (cough, GMail, cough), this is probably a big part of your general heat issues. It made me go back to Firefox for a while, but Firefox's habit of occasionally just locking up because something crunchy is happening in a page was even worse.

Re: New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled

#15

Post by fenomas »

savanaly wrote: post #6

This is a severe problem for me with my 15" MBP. Long meetings (heck, even short) with colleagues make it extremely hot to the touch (keyboard and frame) and destroy the battery. Same with streaming netflix or youtube videos. Microphone seems fine but not great quality. It wasn't my decision to purchase this computer, it was my company's, but I'm very disappointed in its performance at simple two way audio video comm…

I'm relatively new to Macs, but it seems like it's partially a cultural thing. When I first got a macbook for work, I found my fingertips got really uncomfortable from how hot the keyboard and mousepad got, and assumed there was a problem to be solved, but several Mac-centric colleagues said they just got used to it.

I wound up downloading some random app that lets you control when the fans turn on - and voila, a cool(ish) keyboard. As near as I can tell, by default OSX intentionally just leaves the fans off until well after things get uncomfortable.

Re: New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled

#16

Post by Iggyhopper »

rayiner wrote: post #8
eropple wrote: post #5

This is one of the reasons (along with a discrete GPU) that I stick exclusively to the 15" rMBP line. Yes, fans are unsexy and all that, but it's got two of them, they're very good and fairly quiet, and the shell is big enough to serve as a decent heat sink by itself.

The 15" rMBP will apparently throttle if you load the CPU + discrete GPU at the same time. That said, I have no use for GPU, and I've been pretty impressed by how cool it stays given the thin profile and quad-core CPU.

Well, I would rather have a throttled Mac than one that overheats.

Re: New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled

#17

Post by toast0 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #12

I wonder if this has anything to do with Apple soldering on plenty of the hardware components (such as ram) or not.

Not really. Soldered ram should actually produce a tiny but less heat, since you're eliminating the resistance of the connector on the system board and the circuit board the ram would be attached to, to slot into the connector. It should be measurable, but small. OTOH, eliminating the connector makes a significant different to the system height.

Re: New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled

#18

Post by raverbashing »

jsjohnst wrote: post #9

Hangouts over taxes just about any machine, it's ridiculous. FCP exporting a 4k video uses less CPU than Hangouts does to show a choppy video feed.

> FCP exporting a 4k video uses less CPU than Hangouts

I'd probably say it's busy waiting for IO for more time, hence not using the CPU as much

Either that or Hangouts has some lack of optimization that's going ignored (like busy waits, etc)

Re: New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled

#19

Post by wereHamster »

jsjohnst wrote: post #9

Hangouts over taxes just about any machine, it's ridiculous. FCP exporting a 4k video uses less CPU than Hangouts does to show a choppy video feed.

Are you using Chrome? Apparently under Safari Hangout uses much less CPU.
Post reply on HN