
New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled - pmaxx
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7048457
======
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?

~~~
rasz_pl
>Hangouts will bring just about any laptop to its knees.

because Google insist on forcing their own codec and encodes in pure software
bypassing hardware h264 encoder block on cpu/gpu.

~~~
justizin
They insist on forcing, for HD as someone noted earlier, an open and non-
patent-encumbered codec. h.264 is great, but it is an Apple-centric solution.

~~~
kitsunesoba
The way I see it, H.264 is more about practicality than anything else.
Hardware acceleration for it is everywhere. VP9 is great, but until there's
hardware acceleration available for it, it's a bad idea to use the codec on
devices where high CPU usage is undesirable.

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

~~~
kitsunesoba
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.

~~~
sangnoir
> 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM#Hardware)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA#H.264.2FMPEG-4_AVC_lic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA#H.264.2FMPEG-4_AVC_licensors)

------
macNchz
Hangouts is awful in general...it heats up even very powerful computers in the
process of showing pixellated, glitchy video with distorted audio, even over a
very low latency 200 megabit connection. We use it every day for work and its
a source of constant frustration. Honestly I'd prefer a conference call on a
landline, we have the video off most of the time anyway because it seems to
cause more audio dropouts when it's on.

~~~
christkv
turn off HD quality and it stops using the VP8 codec (no hardware
acceleration) and drops back to H264 which is hardware accelerated. My cpu
usage goes from 80% to less than 20%.

edit: only applied to hangout

------
savanaly
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
communication via hangouts and skype.

I'll add that it can also get extremely hot just from running a simple local
node.js server and mongo database. Not sure how normal that is but they seem
like they should be fine considering i have no incoming or outgoing traffic,
it's just keeping the port open.

~~~
fenomas
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.

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

~~~
PopeOfNope
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.

~~~
parasubvert
I had a first generation MBP Intel back in 2006 , Core Duo, before the
unibodies came out. Now THAT one was hot - I had to keep the fans cranked
through software all the time or it would randomly shutdown from overheating.
Apparently it was a misapplication of thermal paste in the manufacturing
process.

Other unibodies have been okay, the retina MBP being the best so far I find at
even heat dissipation.

~~~
PopeOfNope
I also had a pre-unibody core duo. Mine was a 17 inch, though. Guess mine had
all its thermal paste in the right place. :) It got hot enough to be
uncomfortable, but not hot enough to burn.

------
jsjohnst
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.

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

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

~~~
anon1385
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](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806976)

~~~
TD-Linux
Well, Hangouts on Safari is a Google plugin. I believe it generally uses VP8.
Hardware doesn't matter, as what's needed is an _encoder_ \- and hardware
encoders usually aren't good enough to use for real time chat. Encoding video
for any format well is going to be costly, hence the original article mentions
complains about Skype as well.

------
batou
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.

~~~
goldfeld
Beware, "the cockburner" can make you sterile.

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

------
eropple
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.

~~~
rayiner
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.

~~~
gherkin0
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.

~~~
rayiner
It depends on what you're doing. Most of the time, the fans are totally
inaudible. Even at full bore, it's an unobtrusive "woosh" not an annoying
"whine." And Apple probably has the best fan control in the business in terms
of not fluctuating between different speed ranges. It's actually kind of a
shock to go back to a ThinkPad and hear the fan struggling.

------
ggreer
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
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...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget-20)

2\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FF_iYZg5oU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FF_iYZg5oU)

------
kitsunesoba
I have a latest-model rMBP 15" with a R9 M370X. I use it for developing iOS
apps and it works great… even with long periods of repeated tweak+compile
sessions, it only gets moderately warm and still manages good battery life.
The only thing I can find that really gets it cooking is WoW, but laptops
aren't made for gaming anyway and the heat is fixed by dropping WoW's settings
down to something more reasonable.

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.

------
djhworld
My 2011 MBP gets super hot when viewing Flash videos or browsing particularly
javascript heavy websites, so it doesn't surprise me to hear that these things
are struggling under the load.

------
KyleBrandt
I had the same problem with the first rMBP. I used Intel's power gadget and
could see the CPU clocking down to .8 GHz after a few minutes of Google
hangouts.

After a clean install and still having the problem Applecare let me schedule a
pickup for my laptop. Had it back in less than a week and then everything was
fine.

So the less was to gather the evidence with utilities (such as the Intel power
gadget), and then once you know it is hardware problem you can just keep
pushing until you get a replacement but feel perfectly justified since you
have evidence.

------
coldtea
Mac or PC, the idea that laptops should not get warm, or that you put them
directly on your naked legs or something and then you complain about their
heat is completely alien to me...

~~~
Cthulhu_
And yet, it's not that strange; laptop should be used on the lap, hence the
name, right?

High CPU usage, fine, but for regular things that should be perfectly
optimized by now like watching videos or using Skype shouldn't cause as much
heat as - apparently - it does.

~~~
coldtea
> _And yet, it 's not that strange; laptop should be used on the lap, hence
> the name, right?_

Maybe that's the origin of the name, but there are, well, desks, kitchen
tables, folding trays on airplanes and tons of other things besides.

Who really uses their laptop "on the lap"? Is that a comfortable position to
read or type in the first place?

------
msoad
Honestly once I though Google is doing their deep learning processing on my
machine when I use Hangouts!! Are they using CPU for image processing? That
could be an explanation.

------
pocketstar
Every aluminum macbook(pro/air) that I have used gets hot from basic use. The
computer will feel hot to the touch because aluminum is such a good thermal
conductor(170W/mK). smcfancontrol can be your friend if you have legitimate
heat issues.

------
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.

~~~
pocketstar
Define overheat...the MBP just gets hot "overheat" or greyscreen of death
"overheat"?

------
KiDD
Mid-2014 15" MBP (Top of the line model with upgraded processor)

Even with the upgraded processor I have no problems with heat while playing 3D
games on battery power.

I would contact Apple.

------
ypcx
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 gauge.

~~~
cmod
This is why the first thing I install on any Mac is MenuMeters. Beautiful,
simple, and, as you impress, essential:

[http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/](http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/)

------
vinhboy
Not sure why this is FP on HN right now, but if we're doing Apple Support this
morning, then I just want to say that all of the Macbook Air I have owned had
overheating issues after about 1 year. The fan starts going crazy and battery
drains fast. The first time it happened I thought it was a fluke, but now it's
annoying.

------
Mister_Snuggles
I've used Skype on my iPad to do one-on-one video calls lasting about two
hours and not had any issues with audio/video quality, overheating, etc.

Now, I know that iPads and MacBooks are completely different beasts, but it's
puzzling that something that works so well on an iPad can work so poorly on a
MacBook.

------
smaili
I'm very curious how the new Macbook compensates for overheating when there's
no fan. Anybody know?

~~~
steffan
It throttles the CPU to a lower energy state when using the chassis as a heat
sink becomes insufficient to maintain the temperature within some thermal
operating envelope.

------
gambiting
Yeah, my 2013 MacBook Air would turn into a little jet turbine if I was on
skype for too long. But to be fair, Windows laptops do the same thing, I have
no idea why video encoding for skype is so stupidly intensive. Is there no way
to do it in hardware?

------
doe88
It would be interesting to know which browser(s) they are using for Hangouts
and if they observe the same behavior in Safari if it's not the one used.

------
lewisl9029
What adds to the problem seems to be that Intel was overly optimistic with
respect to the ability of their Core M processors to run fanless.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9117/analyzing-intel-core-m-
pe...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9117/analyzing-intel-core-m-performance)

In summary, yes they can run fanless when idle, but under load, they will be
heavily throttled due to thermal constraints.

Maybe next generation we can finally have truly fanless ultrabook-level
performance.

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

~~~
toast0
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.

------
netman21
My brand new Macbook overheats from watching Netflix. Battery life when
working (no video) is about 3.5 hours. Was really hoping for that 7-8 hours.

