New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by sangnoir » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 9:11 AM UTC

kitsunesoba wrote: post #98

sangnoir wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Codec & hardware acceleration is a chicken-and-egg problem: who would include h/w acceleration for a codec that isn't being used?

It wasn't a problem when H.264 was new. There were devices that had H.264 decoding support well before it was popular with users; I remember iPod videos sporting support for it back when DivX/XviD and flv was the norm. Eventually because devices had support for it, people switched over to H.264 and the older standards died out.

> It wasn't a problem when H.264 was new. There were devices that had H.264 decoding support well before it was popular with users;

You might be happy to know that it's not a problem for WebM either! There are[1] devices that have VP8 decoding support right now. Just not all devices (just as not all devices had H.264 hardware decoders when it was new.)

Obviously the iPod would supported H264 since Apple were a member of the consortium pushing it (MPEG-LA)[2]. Similarly, ARM Chromebooks support VP8 because Google is behind it. Several chip-makers have promised support: Intel is taking a wait and see attitude [1] and might support it in the future

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM#Hardware

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA#H.264.2FMPEG-4_AVC_lic...

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

#112

Post by hellbanner » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 7:06 PM UTC

PopeOfNope wrote: post #57

hellbanner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You gotta hand it to them, their factories in China & their designers in California make a damn fine machine.

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

#113

Post by derekp7 » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 7:16 PM UTC

marincounty wrote: post #95

toomuchtodo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do test it, it's just that Apple values form over function. Because of this, they run their gear with a much slimmer thermal margin.

I sometimes wonder if this form over function is a bad idea? Wouldn't the average consumer like a product that was easily serviceable? I have an old Toshiba Satellite Pro s25-S607. It big(17" and I don't care about the weight), but it has been basically running 5 hrs/day for more than a decade. It does gave three fans, but they are quiet. I can work on it! I think the first company that builds a laptop that's easy to…

That's one of the things I like about the ThinkPad line (at least the ones where Lenovo kept most of IBM's design ideas). The service manuals are available online if you want to look through them, and they are meant to be field serviceable (at least the X and T series are, I don't have experience with the other ones). That is, you can easily disassemble them following the service manuals, without having to worry about breaking tabs off or prying apart glued-together plastic components.

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

#114

Post by jsjohnst » Fri, Jul 24, 2015, 1:06 AM UTC

Klinky wrote: post #66

TD-Linux wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's probably similar to the fullscreen problems Adobe Flash had in the past, where the CPU was being used to resize tiny video to fullscreen resolution. This lead to low definition video becoming choppy while pegging your CPU at 100%. Playing the same video fullscreen in something like Media Player Classic would result in negligible CPU usage since it wasn't going through Flash's 2D engine + software scaler, and ins…

You'd think they could include hardware acceleration hooks for the video processing, at least in Chrome, but alas, doesn't seem so based on CPU usage