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.
It's pretty much silent now, even with the CPU governor pegged to max.
But Teams was a nightmare of dropped sound and video in both directions.
It was not a well designed laptop.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.