Zoom is a shockingly CPU consuming program. I know people have to use it, that’s been the case for me too, but it was easier to make sure I had a plug handy when using Zoom than trying to make it run well.
I think a review that use based around Zoom battery life is about as useful as one based around short circuiting the battery terminals.
Teams hogs power as well. I get about 4h on my 16” MBP M1 Pro. When in a teams call it also significantly impact single core benchmark results of the app I’m working on.
So maybe power drain is inherent in conferencing tooling? Is teams even utilising the hardware decode/encoding paths? When in a call Teams consistently consumes a full single core.
While videoconferencing does take some resources, the fact of the matter is both zoom and teams are poorly written web apps packaged into “desktop applications” and that’s where most of the utilization is coming from
Poor coding criticisms apply to almost every massively popular software. At this point it almost seems like a requirement to make it not too fast as to reduce user frustration and mental share by proxy.
I don’t know Teams, but Zoom has to do some image processing (it has some face cleanup tech which is weird because everybody knows a programmer’s power-level is directly correlated to how disheveled and tired they look), and also some audio filtering (need to filter out keyboards).
But, I mean, Discord manages to do the latter for pretty cheap, and the former is stupid optional vanity stuff anyway.
The conclusion I come to is that Zoom is a badly written program that would never have seen the light of day if we weren’t suddenly launched into WFH around 2020. That program is like the third worst thing that happened that year.
I think a review that use based around Zoom battery life is about as useful as one based around short circuiting the battery terminals.