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New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled

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

#31

Post by Glide »

raverbashing wrote: post #18
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)

Hangouts causes my recent rMBP to kick on the fans with video chat. Skype doesn't cause as much of a heat up as Hangouts does.

Just more anecdata.

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

#32

Post by batou »

goldfeld wrote: post #22
batou wrote: post #2

Sounds just like the 2011 i7 MBP I had or "the cockburner" as it was officially named. Might be the CPU throttling due to heat. There is no active cooling system on the new MacBook by the looks so I reckon it's thermally managing itself by doing less causing other problems.

Beware, "the cockburner" can make you sterile.

It got replaced. Plus I have three children already :)

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

#33

Post by ianlevesque »

TD-Linux wrote: post #26
ianlevesque wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Video encoding is expensive. You get to pick between more CPU usage or worse video quality.

But with Hangouts you get both.

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

#34

Post by hellbanner »

fenomas wrote: post #15
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 coo…

I've gotten first degree burns from an old MBP that overheated. It's like they didn't test it..

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

#35

Post by copperx »

eropple wrote: post #14
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…

Safari handles those cases like a pro.

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

#36

Post by anon1385 »

TD-Linux wrote: post #29
wereHamster wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using Chrome? Apparently under Safari Hangout uses much less CPU.

This seems highly doubtful. They are both Google's code - one is just packaged as a plugin rather than built into Chrome.

It's possible that they are using different video codecs. On Safari H264 and on Chrome VP9 but with only H264 being hardware accelerated.

This is just a total guess of course (and I'd have thought it would depend on what the other end of the chat supports as well), but I bring it up since people have recently been complaining about YouTube in Chrome using far more CPU than YouTube in Safari, because YouTube uses VP9 in Chrome. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330357

On the other hand it's possible that it's just the general suckiness of Chrome video performance, even when using H264 it seems to use over twice as much power as Safari: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806976

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

#37

Post by gherkin0 »

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.

Do the fans stay at a pretty consistent level, or do they throttle a lot from quiet to noisy?

I'm thinking of getting one, but the people I know who have them tend to use them in noisy environments and can't answer my questions.

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

#38

Post by arcticbull »

The 'garbled microphone input' seems a bit of a red herring, it's likely that the thermal throttling is kicking in which is causing the audio recording app to get slowed to below real time making it sound like garbled.

I've had the laptop for about a month now, and yes, Hangouts will bring it to its knees, but for some reason Hangouts will bring just about any laptop to its knees.

Battery life is as advertised, you do get 8-10 hours of web browsing, and shockingly, about 6-7 hours doing some light development work with Xcode. I've definitely had times when battery life seemed a lot worse than it should have been but that has been solved with a quick trip to Activity Monitor to see what's eating the CPU.

Spotlight Web Content was a common culprit so I turned off Spotlight Suggestions (also Bookmarks and History) and that made a noticeable difference.

I've only had heat come up as an issue once; turns out it needs to be on a hard surface when you're doing something CPU intensive. Who'd have guessed?

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

#39

Post by ryanswapp »

I'll preface this statement by saying that I LOVE my Macbook Pro. (Retina, 15-inch, mid 2014) However, I do find it disheartening that it overheats so frequently/quickly. It generally overheats if I have more than 8 or 9 chrome tabs or I have a server running (ember-cli causes it to instantly overheat). The worst and hottest it's ever been was when I tried to play Starcraft on it the first day I got it. Haven't tried since... My wife is always joking about how my computer sounds like it is rocket ship about to take off because of the noise the fans make on a consistent basis.
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