New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled | Hacker News Reader

New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled

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112 pointspmaxx110 comments

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?

>yes, Hangouts will bring it to its knees, but for some reason Hangouts will bring just about any laptop to its knees.

I've got a couple year old x1 carbon 13", and it handles hangouts fine, more or less everyday. That's with the (annoyingly high) cpu usage of a couple hundred tabs open as well. If a tiny couple pound ultrabook van easily handle hangouts, I highly doubt that hangouts would be difficult on most laptops (let alone "just about any").

I think arcticbull meant "just about any Apple laptop". That's my experience with Hangouts on Mac anyway.

Mid-2012 MBP here, haven't had any significant problems with Hangouts. (Aside from it being generally pretty terrible if your network connection isn't rock solid.)

>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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

I have this issue with linux and I was wondering if it was hangouts (really, the old "GoogleTalkPlugin") on linux that was the issue. Is this on Windows you have these issues?

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

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.

I guess it's what you get when all your customer focuses on your 'wireless battery duration' benchmark

macbook temperature envelop has been optimized for idleness way to long, even on MBPs. Mine (2015 first retina) gets unbelievably hot, especially since we got steam on mac it's running floored most of the time, but so far hasn't died.

I had the original rMBP, now the 2014 one, and don't see the same problem. A lot of it is in the persistent services that are running on the machine; I'd take a good look at Activity Monitor's "energy" pane. One thing I noticed: if you're using Chrome and have persistent pages open (cough, GMail, cough), this is probably a big part of your general heat issues. It made me go back to Firefox for a while, but Firefox's habit of occasionally just locking up because something crunchy is happening in a page was even worse.

Safari handles those cases like a pro.

It does! Safari is much better at battery life. But, for my use cases, it's an unusably poor browser outside of its rendering engine. My extensions don't work within it, I can't easily find equivalents, and there's no easy, good way to sync between Safari and browsers on Windows (Xmarks hosed my bookmarks so badly that I haven't yet even fixed all of them).

Overwhelmingly, I find FireFox with AdBlock and click-to-enable Flash much better than Safari without them.

Firefox has the bad habit of jumping off into space and not coming back for a while, which makes it a non-starter for me.

Open a video hangout in Safari. My early 2013 rMBP would go to 200 degrees per iStat and stay there for the duration of the call. Skype would keep it around 160.

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.

"You're holding it wrong!" Apple can do no wrong! /s

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

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 work on, and can guarantee supply parts for, at least 7 years, might be able to win over guys like me--who want consistancy? I want to turn it on, and do work. I don't need the fastest chip. I do want to be able to work on the devise myself. I am older, but never understood this weight thing--make it out of metal(Aluminum is fine. Use the case to disperse the heat--great! I don't care, as long as I can take out the screws, and put them back in, and they don't strip.) I have seen so many products start out great, but get too fancy. So fancy, they don't work? And can't be repaired, reasonable priced, because of the Fancyness? (Don't get me wrong, I'm still a fanboy, but they are loosing me with every new upgrade, and model.)

> Wouldn't the average consumer like a product that was easily serviceable?

The answer to this is a resounding "no".

Not only that, but when Apple sells a computer to users who would like an easily serviceable product, they do quite a good job of it. Older Mac Pros are a joy to work in compared to many Windows PCs I've had to deal with. No thumbscrews, parts slide in and out easily, etc. The newer Mac Pros are fairly serviceable too, though there's not nearly as much reason to need 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.

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.

It's been an issue since they switched from the G4, TBH.

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.

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.

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

For those interested, it's likely smcFanControl - https://github.com/hholtmann/smcFanControl

Doesn't turn the fan off but I found Temperature Gauge App to be very helpful in terms of monitoring what is going on with the fan and temperature.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/temperature-gauge/id46783052...

Looks like they have another app which does have fan control:

http://www.tunabellysoftware.com/temperature_gauge/

Also, iStats Menus: http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

I feel I can't live without it.

That's not the one I had, but it looks better - thanks!

If you turn off turbo boost, the fan pretty much never turns on, a lot less heat and you get a couple more hours of battery life. Here is a switcher app to turn it on and off:

http://www.rugarciap.com/turbo-boost-switcher-for-os-x/

I get extremely uncomfortable with any keyboard that's hotter than my fingers. Why do people put up with this? ThinkPads aren't great either, though a Broadwell CPU is fast enough that I can leave it throttled to 700MHz and day to day Visual Studio (except compiling) and Firefox usage is fine. This way it stays under skin temp.

It's possible that a lot of Mac users are simply not objecting to something they should. I have been using aluminum Apple laptops since they had a PowerPC G4 and were called PowerBooks, and there have been some models with known heat issues. It doesn't surprise me to hear this about the new 12", I think what they're going for is doable, but perhaps ambitious at this stage. There was a 12" G4 which wasn't fanless, but still crammed too much into too small a package.

I have a Unibody 15" MBP from 20011 or so that has absolutely no heat problems, have used several generations of 11" and 13" Air and both 13" and 15" Retina MBP and I don't have any substantial heat problems.

One thing a lot of people don't understand is the thermal design expects to be on a flat surface so that there is some air under the machine, in the small gap created by the rubber feet. If you use any of these machines on a bed, a couch, on top of a pillow, or on your lap, they'll get hotter. I keep a piece of cardboard handy for when I want to use my machine in bed.

That's the main reason I ended up buying a Zbook G2. During summer, the 2013 rMBP was unusable, basically.

Don't know about that, have a late 2013 rMBP and never had any problems.

What exactly do you people do? Put the laptop on your bare (maybe even oiled) legs, while sunbathing?

No need to be condescending.

My 15" Retina MBP gets extremely hot after just a few mins of waking up.

I've checked the activity monitor and the CPU is barely active when this occurs. I just opened it a few minutes before writing this comment, and touching between the top of the keyboard and the screen is almost too hot to touch.

There's a handful of people in this thread reporting this experience.

I'm on a late '13 15" rMBP and I don't run into these heat issues until I introduce video. Youtube, vimeo, gaming, basically anything video related and things start warming up quickly... but when I'm just browsing, no fans, no heat.

(Ambient temp currently is 75f - MBP sitting on a table top, been using it for a few hours now, with a vagrant instances up. Almost zero heat from any piece of the body. But if I fire up a video... that will change to hand melting heat very quickly.)

The inconsistency of the reports of heat issues makes me very wary of buying a new MBP, purely on the 'lottery' chance of getting the issues so commonly reported that I don't seem to run into. (I also don't have Wi-Fi issues that most mention, or issues running external displays and coming out of sleep.)

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.

I use hangouts daily and unless I'm on a high end PC I switch to audio only to avoid the jet turbine effect. They really need to optimize.

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

But with Hangouts you get both.

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 instead your video card would handle the scaling with ease.

Hardware scaling using overlays is very old technology, so it was kind of sad that from mid to late 2000s, internet video was being hampered by poor software scaling.

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

And yet it shouldn't be, with GPU acceleration and all. Video encoding and video calling should be a solved problem.

> FCP exporting a 4k video uses less CPU than Hangouts

I'd probably say it's busy waiting for IO for more time, hence not using the CPU as much

Either that or Hangouts has some lack of optimization that's going ignored (like busy waits, etc)

Hangouts causes my recent rMBP to kick on the fans with video chat. Skype doesn't cause as much of a heat up as Hangouts does.

Just more anecdata.

Final Cut Pro X renders mostly on the GPU, so yes, it uses a lot less CPU than Hangouts, which apparently uses a software codec. Even if there's no hardware acceleration for VP9, you'd think they could use OpenCL, CUDA, or something else to take load off the CPU.

Yeah, but I guess the MacBooks or even MBPs with Intel graphics can't offload much of the work

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

While I don't think you're wrong, that's just .. dumb. They're both Google's products. You would think they would put some thought into that.

This is part of why I stopped using Chrome, it encourages a closed ecosystem where technology is only advancing if you use Google Everything.

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

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

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

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.

Browser-specific performance quirks has been the name of the game since forever.

I guarantee it doesn't. Hangouts in Safari will peg my CPU near the thermal limit for the duration of the call.

I have a 2012 MacBook Pro. Very little use. Never even got warm. I downloaded google chrome browser the other day, and it gets hot, fan goes on high, wheel spins like regret. I can't blame it on google chrome. My memory, and cpu aren't using a worrisome amount of resources?

I am wondering why Google chrome would cause this problem--if that's the problem? From a programmer's perspective?

(I did turn off Apple automatic update, and install.)

Maybe FCP isn't as good as using all of the cores?

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.

Beware, "the cockburner" can make you sterile.

Accidental downvote, sorry. That is correct!

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

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.

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.

That may be, but I've pegged both and not noticed it throttling in a way that harmed performance.

Well, I would rather have a throttled Mac than one that overheats.

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.

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.

The only time I really notice the fans is when I'm running a website in debug mode in visual studio. Note I have no issues with running a vm in VMware Fusion all day, or with using visual studio in it. Which I assume is a fairly high base level load.

The key part is to make sure you don't block the intake vents where the hinge is. If you make sure there is good clearance then it stays cool. If you are using it on the bed then its very easy for the sheets to block the vents and the temperature and fans ramp up very quick if you are say playing World of Warcraft.

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...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FF_iYZg5oU

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Apple's are explicitly called Notebooks, and they recommend not using it on your lap.

>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?

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.

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.

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.

Do you have a discrete GPU?

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

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.

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.

Activity Monitor allows you to switch out its static icon to a dynamic CPU Usage gauge on the dock.

View -> Dock Icon -> *

* CPU Usage

* CPU History

* Network Usage

* Disk Activity

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/

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.

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.

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

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.

Probably with things like thermald.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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