My M1 isn't even full of cat hair like my x86 MBP, because it never needs to run its fan.

The x86 MBP was stuck in a vicious cycle of getting overheated, running the fan all the time at high speed, sucking up enormous amounts of cat hair, and jamming up the motherboard and cooling vents: the hotter it got, the faster the fans ran, the more cat hair it sucked up, the worse the cooling and more snuggly warm the insides got, the more attractive it was for the cat to sleep next to.

That should be the Wikipedia definition of a positive feedback loop

Sounds pretty negative to me!

Not for the cat!

100% agree. The last generation of MacBook pros with intel processors were virtually unusable for zoom calls or any intensive processing power tasks.

This is downvoted, but my intel MacBook Pro (maxed out specs) from 2015 really was dying on zoom / MS teams calls. Probably says a lot about those two apps, but this was one of the main reasons I upgraded to an M1 Mac during corona.

Same, and same spec machine (2015 15" maxxed out everything).

I did manage to make it handle Zoom just fine by opening it up and blowing it out with an air duster, which I've been doing about every 6 months since 2018 or so. The interior is a magnet for dust in a way that my Dell work laptop just isn't (even though that thing is a PoS in many other ways, most of which I suspect are down to Windows rather than the hardware).

After a periodic dusting it runs a whole lot better - no lag or dropped frames - even when the fans come on. It's still a nightmare for fan noise compared with my 2011 17" MBP (again, maxxed retail specs, but then replaced internal drive with SSD - which made it a new machine - and upgraded to 16GB RAM because you can replace at least some stuff in machines of this vintage), which then unfortunately died due to the GPU desoldering issue (I've already "fixed" it once by reflowing the solder, but this only held for a couple of weeks before it died again).

I think I'm going to wait for M2 MBPs and then splurge - hopefully get 7 years out of the new machine as well.

I'd forgotten, because I've had an M1 Pro for a while now, but Slack video calls on my last gen, maxed out Intel MBP could heat the thing enough to burn through to the earth's core.

Yeah, same, that's why I resorted to water-cooling :) https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/so-i-water-cooled-my-ma...

It's pretty much silent now, even with the CPU governor pegged to max.

Thank you! I've been looking for a water-cooled laptop solution. I've tried the fan based laptop coolers and they're basically a waste of time (plus they add to fan noise). This is what I wanted. Nobody sells it, but I don't mind a bit of fabbing.

I had to rub a plastic bag of frozen peas on the bottom of my overheating x86 MBP to make an important zoom meeting one time. It made the peas inedible.

The only thing my 2015 pro had trouble with was Teams. No problem with Zoom for me.

But Teams was a nightmare of dropped sound and video in both directions.

I have had luck running Teams in the safari web app instead of the native (ahem Electron) app. Cuts the CPU usage down to 25% instead of 75%.

Interesting, as an engineer, I wonder what explains that.

My guess is that the Electron app is using a generic video codec that they got working reliably across Windows/Mac/Linux, but Safari is forcing a more efficient one that's well-optimized for Mac only.

Bizarre how my 2012 mpb15r (16GB RAM, SSD) is still usable and maybe preferable to models 3 or 4 years newer.

It's almost like different people have different expectations from their computer. (Different workloads, different environmental conditions, etc.)

Which os & version are you running?

Catalina (10.15.7)

Yes, mine too. I actually set up a large desk fan pointed at the keyboard to help dissipate the heat. Got so hot I would burn the tips of my fingers if I let them rest on the keyboard.

It was not a well designed laptop.

I got a late model MBP 16" i9. Zoom, Teams video confs, backups, and anything else even mildly intensive and it would ramp up to impressively loud levels, enough for people in the next room to ask what the noise was.

I swear my 16" i9 could eat the battery in an hour of a Zoom call. Even doing just CPU-heavy golang code, I could out-run the stock power brick and drain the battery.

Totally agree. I have an M1 MBP for personal use, and a 16 inch i9 for my work laptop. The M1 is silent and not too bothered by zoom. Last week, in a pinch, I had to use my 16" MBP for a zoom call, and it didn't last much past an hour before it was complaining about needing to be plugged in to power. And it felt like it might melt the desktop. Really drove home how much better the M1 is.

I had a laptop that did that (got people noticing), I went to IT a few times to tell them that something was wrong with my laptop, as colleagues' were a bit quieter.

I wish that I'd have been more firm with getting a replacement. I now have tinnitus after a year of a really loud laptop. I'm in my early 30s. I can't even tolerate my desktop with relatively quiet fans.

One day in the office, I shutdown my laptop for the day after the air conditioners turned off at 5pm. There were about 6 people left in the room, everyone noticed that "something had just turned off".

Be careful that your laptop doesn't damage your hearing.

> I now have tinnitus after a year of a really loud laptop.

Hmmmmm....

Does your laptop sound like:

       - A Dyson vacuum ?
       - A jet engine ?
       - A Harley Davidson exhaust ?
       - The sort of sounds you hear in the datacentre hot aisle ?

No ?

Well, I didn't think so either.

Not a cats chance in hell your laptop caused hearing damage.

More likely you had the laptop speakers too loud, or you had headphones plugged in which were set too loud.

Yes but what if he did that to drown out his laptop fan?

> Yes but what if he did that to drown out his laptop fan?

Nonsense.

The "rule of thumb" is that you are at risk of hearing damage in an environment where you cannot talk comfortably at normal voice level with somebody at arms length away.

I have owned many laptops in my time (including Macbooks). I have frequently pushed them hard (e.g. compiling code) to the point where the fans run for extended periods of time.

Not once have I had difficulty conversing in a relaxed normal fashion with somebody with arms length or even further away in the room. I've never had to raise my voice.

Its simple, if you don't believe me, get a calibrated decibel meter and take a reading in a controlled manner in a controlled environment. Frankly I'm willing to bet you hard money that the measured sound level with the laptop fans running at full whack will not be anywhere near hearing damage level.

I don't think you understood my question.

You ended your comment with:

> More likely you had the laptop speakers too loud, or you had headphones plugged in which were set too loud.

To which I suggested that maybe he had very loud headphones because he was annoyed by his laptop fan and wanted to drown out the noise. Which, I concede, is probably not the best life decision, but I can imagine someone doing it.

hmm while I do believe that your laptop is pretty loud, I seriusly doubt that it could damage your hearing. Ear damage occurs over 90-100 decibels, this is akin to leaning close to a loud vacuum and magnitudes greater than any laptop.

You more probably became your tinitus because of being stressed that your laptop was so loud. No way it could physically harm your hearing ..

afaik tinitus is not necessarily damage to the (inner) ear, but could as well be psychological or physical damage to the brain (blood flow). Have a doc check that out.

come on now... damage your ear from a laptop fan? can't even damage your ear from the crap speakers laptops come with let alone a fan...

Its interesting that Apples "premium line" at the time can't handle zoom, whereas my mid level lenovo ( Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8665U CPU ) has no issues with zoom. Feels like poor design, not architecture issues.

This was true for me.

pmset -g thermlog was showing below 30% CPU limit with only Zoom.

I swore I'll never buy MacBook again. Here I am with new 14' MBP... I have zoom, 10 IDE windows, slack, Spotify, Firefox with tons of cards, docker with ARM images and that thing barely turned fans to inaudible speeds. Only way I can make them relatively loud is by running heavy x86 docker images.

This hasn't been my experience. How many CPU cores we talking here? Haven't really run into Zoom perf problems since running it on a dual-core 2015 i5 MBP.

Since 2019, I have been using Zoom multiple times per day on an early 2019 and a last 2019 Intel-based Macbook. Both are 6-core Intel i7 based. One with 16GB, one with 32GB.

Roughly speaking, Zoom eats a single CPU core or so. This is far from ideal but the machine remains plenty usable. No insane fan noise, etc. No problems doing pairing sessions, etc.

This is not a defense of Apple, Zoom, or Intel for that matter. Not really a fan of the latter two myself. It's just interesting that your experience is "virtually unusable" while mine is "fine" -- I'm curious what the difference is.

I honestly wonder if parent plugged their MacBook into power on their left? I’ve found my meet conferences are unbearable when my MBP is plugged into the wrong side and then overheats and throttles the CPU.

Zoom kills the battery on my (non Mac) laptop as well, why the heck does a simple video conference app have this kind of power draw?

Software video code/decode is extremely expensive.

It's actually a serious issue for sales these days, we have a compute expensive product that can't be demo'd effectively over zoom.

It does depend a lot on the software and I don't get why zoom is falling behind here. I'm dealing with this problem a lot on a recent Intel MBP and in my experience:

Hot jet engine: Meet on Firefox, slack video, zoom.

Works well: meet on Chrome, AWS chime, pop.

Is totally on MBP for being an odd one, but also on the software since we have counterexamples of good performance.

I do my Zoom calls happily with by 2013 MBP 15”. But I haven’t upgraded macOS for 3 years, partially because BigSur dropped support for these macbooks.

Might it happen that more recent versions of macOS are extremely slower for Zoom? I’ve always thought they tune macOS for bigger L2 cache and it keeps paginating, but you’re telling me recent hardware is slower too.

Last generation?

Without too much unkindness, MacBooks have been like this since the 1990s.

Many people I know wouldn't have considered them for one second before the M1.

Companies always solve their own problems first. Apple uses WebEx, which is probably the most piggy of the videoconferencing solutions that I use in terms of cpu and memory.

This is really funny considering how high people were about their MacBook pros during this era.

Funny, I remember we all complained about this issue ceaselessly.

I remember hearing people complain about their keyboards, not that they couldn't video conference.

With COVID lockdowns a huge population of people suddenly started video conferencing with Zoom/Teams/etc. If pre-COVID you only conferenced occasionally with those apps or used FaceTime or some other conferencing better using hardware encode/decode the keyboard was likely your biggest problem.

might be it, definitely wasn't hearing from people as much post-covid.

In just about any HN thread on Apple’s Intel-powered laptops, you’ll find plenty of actual users complaining about excessive fan noise and getting heat-soaked under load - compilation and video calls being a big one - with the problem being greater for the higher-powered i7 and particularly i9 machines. We were definitely complaining.

I can believe in the conspiracy theory that i9 models were released purely to show how bad Intel processors were and to make Apple Silicon look better.

Haha, I probably wouldn’t go that far, but yeah. I had a 15” i9 and they definitely weren’t worth the premium. Doesn’t help that it had what was probably the worst Pro chassis in the past decade or so.

Apple reused the exact same Intel chassis for their previous generation M1 MacBook Air and Pro 13”.

Sans the "contactless" cooling I'm assuming?

Sans the fan actually [0]. Yes, the cooling system got worse for the M1 Air.

The new slightly thicker Pros are great, but their chassis’ are not a significant factor in how they perform relative to the old Intel models.

The new M2 Air is the thinnest an Air has ever been. I bet it will perform excellently as well.

[0]: https://www.ifixit.com/News/46884/m1-macbook-teardowns-somet...

While last Intel based and M1 Air share the essentially same chassis, there is huge dufference in the thermal management. In both cases it is obviously explicitly designed to not be able to cool the entire TDP of the SoC in question and intentionally cause thermal throttling (the reasoning behind that has to do with limiting the outside temperature of the whole device), but the overall design of the thermal solution is better in M1 MBA as this us done by just bolting bunch of thermal mass to the SoC, while there was no space to do that in x86 MBA which necessiated the weird design with actively cooled intentionally ineffective heatsink.

> Making the laptop thicker and investing in proper cooling design made a huge difference.

Indeed. Turns out there is some utility in function over form. God I hated Ive's bizarre need to shave with the damn thing.

I suspect Apple was being aggressive on cooling designs based on inaccurate TDP information from Intel. Intel just made the power/thermal footprint configurable - so when you got the final silicon, there was a decision between lower performance than promised, or higher TDP than desired.

Multiply this by adding the chipsets, other IO controllers, and discrete onboard GPUs.

I suspect Apple are being overly conservative now, partially because these chip designs are new, partially because no internal team wants to be where fingers point if the design is inadequate, and partially because a SoP design gives them a bit more space/flexibility to do so.

> My M1 laptop is significantly quieter than my old Intel laptop at the same power consumption level. It’s not even close.

Work have me an M1 MBP and I have yet to hear it make a noise, it's amazing.

Yeah, they didn't even put the fan next to the heatsink on their later Intel laptops. I've seen some speculation that it might have been an attempt to make M1 look better by comparison, since the Intel chips weren't able to hit anywhere near the performance levels the same chip got on better-cooled laptops.

Then again, Apple has a long history of sacrificing cooling performance for form factor.

Yes and no? My m1 MacBook Air doesn't have a fan and performs better than my Intel MBP in many respects.