4 ms·

Ditto all the comments about swapping from 2019 MBP to 2021 MBP and being silent and powerful again. The other big game changer is battery life. My top of the

Ditto all the comments about swapping from 2019 MBP to 2021 MBP and being silent and powerful again. The other big game changer is battery life. My top of the line 2019 i9 would chew through battery on Zoom. I could barely get 1.5 hours… which makes the term ‘laptop’ a little silly. The 2021 can run long enough I don’t pay any attention to the battery, which is the point of a laptop - mobile computing. General computing is even better, people didn’t even bother bringing their power supplies to work anymore with the M1. They could go all day doing development and the occasional meeting. Power consumption and MagSafe are the hidden gems of the M1 models imho.

beeboop 5y ago
I never understood why zoom destroyed my work macbook pro's battery either. It was a max of about 90 min like you said. Seems ridiculous.
- MobileVet 5y ago
  Right? How is video decoding not an optimized chip level operation on modern systems? It’s network traffic and video decoding… it shouldn’t required an i9 going full bore.
  - wuunderbar 5y ago
    There's two components to a Zoom call: - Encoding: your own camera input. - Decoding: decoding multiple streams of video. Your CPU needs to do work on each on these, and depending on what codecs are used (and whether your CPU supports it) hardware acceleration may or may not be supported.
    - MobileVet 5y ago
      For sure, appreciate the break out. I am just shocked that as big as Zoom is, they don’t have an optimized client for MacBooks. I suppose the market is still far smaller than PC based systems… but come on, Zoom at el have the resources.
      - Teknoman117 5y ago
        We Linux users get crushed by zoom, meet, teams, etc. as well. They’re all based on WebRTC and electron/chromium. We don’t get hardware decoding or encoding because Google doesn’t even want to attempt to support it. There are PRs for chromium going back 10 years. I’m surprised WebRTC wouldn’t be hardware accelerated on macOS, especially considering the great lengths Apple has gone to to hide the hardware differences of the various machines behind CoreVideo, VideoToolbox, and AVFoundation. Edit - For macOS, it may come down to the fact that WebRTC, being a Google project, prefers to use the VP9 codec. It doesn’t look like Apple enables the use of hardware accelerated VP9.
        MobileVet 5y ago
        Thanks for sharing the specifics of the codecs in play. Definitely odd that something so prevalent isn’t accelerated.
    - jbverschoor 5y ago
      Don't forget about the rootkit :-)
mekster 5y ago
It's hard to imagine how laptops always lasted half a day from 20 years ago, despite plenty of technology innovations. It must be the desire of users and developer laziness that chews all the batteries.

beeboop 5y ago

I never understood why zoom destroyed my work macbook pro's battery either. It was a max of about 90 min like you said. Seems ridiculous.

MobileVet 5y ago
Right? How is video decoding not an optimized chip level operation on modern systems? It’s network traffic and video decoding… it shouldn’t required an i9 going full bore.
- wuunderbar 5y ago
  There's two components to a Zoom call: - Encoding: your own camera input. - Decoding: decoding multiple streams of video. Your CPU needs to do work on each on these, and depending on what codecs are used (and whether your CPU supports it) hardware acceleration may or may not be supported.
  - MobileVet 5y ago
    For sure, appreciate the break out. I am just shocked that as big as Zoom is, they don’t have an optimized client for MacBooks. I suppose the market is still far smaller than PC based systems… but come on, Zoom at el have the resources.
    - Teknoman117 5y ago
      We Linux users get crushed by zoom, meet, teams, etc. as well. They’re all based on WebRTC and electron/chromium. We don’t get hardware decoding or encoding because Google doesn’t even want to attempt to support it. There are PRs for chromium going back 10 years. I’m surprised WebRTC wouldn’t be hardware accelerated on macOS, especially considering the great lengths Apple has gone to to hide the hardware differences of the various machines behind CoreVideo, VideoToolbox, and AVFoundation. Edit - For macOS, it may come down to the fact that WebRTC, being a Google project, prefers to use the VP9 codec. It doesn’t look like Apple enables the use of hardware accelerated VP9.
      - MobileVet 5y ago
        Thanks for sharing the specifics of the codecs in play. Definitely odd that something so prevalent isn’t accelerated.
  - jbverschoor 5y ago
    Don't forget about the rootkit :-)

mekster 5y ago

It's hard to imagine how laptops always lasted half a day from 20 years ago, despite plenty of technology innovations. It must be the desire of users and developer laziness that chews all the batteries.