71–80 of 114 posts
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I've gotten first degree burns from an old MBP that overheated. It's like they didn't test it..
This has been an issue ever since they went unibody. A single, solid block of aluminum in direct contact with heat generating components. It's hard to believe they didn't intend the unibodies to act as heatsinks. Hasn't hurt their popularity at all, though.
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…
That's the main reason I ended up buying a Zbook G2. During summer, the 2013 rMBP was unusable, basically.
What exactly do you people do? Put the laptop on your bare (maybe even oiled) legs, while sunbathing?
The thing about modern Macs is that Apple designs the hardware (and OS, for that matter) assuming that the user will be running well-written, efficient applications. When you use software like Chrome and Hangouts where efficiency wasn't ever a serious consideration and extended periods of 100% CPU usage are a given, well yeah, of course you're going to get a lot of heat. The solution is to use (and thus, encourage the creation of) well-optimized, efficient software, not to cram in more cooling.
Honestly, there's no reason for desktop software to be as gluttonous as it is. If desktop software developers went to the lengths that mobile devs do to make things runs smoothly, we'd be in good shape. It's fine to make use of the absurd power than modern computers afford us, but only do so when the power is truly needed (video encoding, etc) or when there's some significant benefit to the user. Even then, do so in an intelligent way (use CPU cycles for the actual task at hand, not for expensive abstraction layers, VMs, etc) and offload as much as possible to HW acceleration instead of lazily dumping everything on the CPU.
I've had the 12" MacBook since its release in April. I use it as my main development machine. I have no problems with Skype, Hangouts, WebRTC video chats, etc. I've had exactly one overheat warning, and it was completely understandable. I was outside, in 90ºF weather, and my laptop was in direct sunlight. I maxxed-out the CPU cores for too long. OS X warned me that performance was reduced and, "Closing Google Chrome may help cool your Mac down." That's it. No data loss. No suspending to RAM. I ignored the warning and my laptop worked fine.
Hundreds of thousands of people use the same Apple hardware in the same way. If Hangouts or Skype reliably caused these problems on the MacBook, tens of thousands would be complaining. Instead, we just get a few isolated cases. Curiously, they don't seem to troubleshoot by checking Activity Monitor, Intel Power Gadget[1], etc.
Every time I've managed to troubleshoot with someone who complained about these sorts of issues, the cause has been an overlooked (or deliberately unmentioned) hardware issue. For example: Someone posted a video of their extremely slow MacBook[2]. I helped him troubleshoot, and it eventually came to light that the laptop had been dropped, bending the frame. It was so bad that the heatsink had been separated from the CPU! It's amazing that the machine ran at all. The video is a testament to Apple's design and engineering, not an indictment of it.
Now when I hear about supposed design issues in popular hardware, my explanations weight toward "clueless/disingenuous user" and away from "design defect." Both happen, but the former is much more common than the latter.
1. https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget...
Notice this is coming from a user who did not even use a task monitor first. He writes in a followup post that he had a task maxing his CPU on the background. Every system should come with a simple task monitor installed and running in a visible place, e.g. an icon in the Mac menu bar. Yes I know about the Activity Monitor - it's not enough. It's basically like being sold a car without the engine oil temperature gaug…
If your computer is behaving in this manner, the cause is most likely broken hardware, not a design defect. The only solution is to take your laptop to an Apple store for diagnosis and repair. I've had the 12" MacBook since its release in April. I use it as my main development machine. I have no problems with Skype, Hangouts, WebRTC video chats, etc. I've had exactly one overheat warning, and it was completely unders…
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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.
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 d…
>yes, Hangouts will bring it to its knees, but for some reason Hangouts will bring just about any laptop to its knees. I've got a couple year old x1 carbon 13", and it handles hangouts fine, more or less everyday. That's with the (annoyingly high) cpu usage of a couple hundred tabs open as well. If a tiny couple pound ultrabook van easily handle hangouts, I highly doubt that hangouts would be difficult on most laptop…