MacBooks and MS Office

[marillionnut]

Hi all,

As a Mac user at home since 2011 and Windows (on company supplied laptop) in work, I now find myself in a new job and needing to be mobile and commuting by foot/taxi/plane for the first time in a long while. I use an iMac at home and also have my old MBP Late 2011 (15", 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB Ram and 1TB SSD) to lug around at the moment, which I'm finding pretty heavy to lug around as you an imagine.

The team I am working with uses MS Office, which isn't a problem as I have this on the MBP but since the last update, it is seriously taxing my machine and shutting down due to high temperatures. I've given it a good clean inside to remove dust but I'm still hitting 100c on some of the CPU cores -

So my question to the forum is, I'm considering upgrading to a newer, lighter machine but unsure on whether the MBAir is up to the job of MS Office with usually Outlook, Word and Excel open the same time, along with Slack and Skype for Business, or am I better with a new MBP, 13" to get the better processing power? All my photo, video editing is done at home on the iMac, so not needing that capability as a priority.

Looked at loads of reviews of both machines and it seem the MBP is offering the best spec for similar money but all the reviews tend to look at high processing needs for video etc.

Thanks for your attention with this and look forward to some info.

 

[imwjl]

Hi all,

As a Mac user at home since 2011 and Windows (on company supplied laptop) in work, I now find myself in a new job and needing to be mobile and commuting by foot/taxi/plane for the first time in a long while. I use an iMac at home and also have my old MBP Late 2011 (15", 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB Ram and 1TB SSD) to lug around at the moment, which I'm finding pretty heavy to lug around as you an imagine.

The team I am working with uses MS Office, which isn't a problem as I have this on the MBP but since the last update, it is seriously taxing my machine and shutting down due to high temperatures. I've given it a good clean inside to remove dust but I'm still hitting 100c on some of the CPU cores -

So my question to the forum is, I'm considering upgrading to a newer, lighter machine but unsure on whether the MBAir is up to the job of MS Office with usually Outlook, Word and Excel open the same time, along with Slack and Skype for Business, or am I better with a new MBP, 13" to get the better processing power? All my photo, video editing is done at home on the iMac, so not needing that capability as a priority.

Looked at loads of reviews of both machines and it seem the MBP is offering the best spec for similar money but all the reviews tend to look at high processing needs for video etc.

Thanks for your attention with this and look forward to some info.

Hmm..... I'm not finding a performance issue with older i7 MacBooks, and where computer age is an issue I encourage my users to switch to the web-version of Office 365.

Don't guess what your problem is and don't let someone's guess sway you. Reboot your computer. Open Activity Monitor, then go to work and see if CPU, RAM or storage is your performance bottleneck.

Maybe rethink Slack and Skype For Business. Teams does that. Are you using latest version for all of those?

No matter what, no recent MacBook has any problems running current Office 365 in our enterprise. Most of the time I run it with a relatively modest MacBook 12 inch that's only the m processor. When my kids have performance problems with our aging Pro 15" it's usually what they have running or needing a simple cleanup of some sort.

 

[Lee_Bo]

Here's the specs of my MBP:


We're also an Office 365 environment and I have Outlook / Word / Excel / Teams open all day with no issues. I'm also part of the insider program so I'm getting updates that other O365 users are not getting, and still no issues. No Skype but I do run Slack in a browser. Still no high temp issues. I also have a 2011 iMac at home (i5, 16 gig ram) running the same O365 apps and no heat issue.

Like @imwjl posted, have you researched / troubleshot the heat issues?

 

[Just_Me_D]

Hi all,

As a Mac user at home since 2011 and Windows (on company supplied laptop) in work, I now find myself in a new job and needing to be mobile and commuting by foot/taxi/plane for the first time in a long while. I use an iMac at home and also have my old MBP Late 2011 (15", 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB Ram and 1TB SSD) to lug around at the moment, which I'm finding pretty heavy to lug around as you an imagine.

The team I am working with uses MS Office, which isn't a problem as I have this on the MBP but since the last update, it is seriously taxing my machine and shutting down due to high temperatures. I've given it a good clean inside to remove dust but I'm still hitting 100c on some of the CPU cores -

So my question to the forum is, I'm considering upgrading to a newer, lighter machine but unsure on whether the MBAir is up to the job of MS Office with usually Outlook, Word and Excel open the same time, along with Slack and Skype for Business, or am I better with a new MBP, 13" to get the better processing power? All my photo, video editing is done at home on the iMac, so not needing that capability as a priority.

Looked at loads of reviews of both machines and it seem the MBP is offering the best spec for similar money but all the reviews tend to look at high processing needs for video etc.

Thanks for your attention with this and look forward to some info.

I use a MacBook Air with 8 GBs of RAM at work and it handled the Microsoft Office Suite with ease. My now has since migrated to GSuite. Still, I keep a good deal of tabs open all day everyday and the MacBook Air handles them like a champ.

 

[marillionnut]

Hi. Thanks for the reply. Yes, I've taken a look at a lot of info on the 2011 MBP overheat and it seems like it is a common problem for them. I've cleaned it out, reset the fan controller and even though CPU load is no where near maxed out; its just the temp on CPU is hitting 100c after a short time and then the it goes to sleep. Chrome especially gets the temperature up; Safari a little bit less.

Been to the local Apple Reseller this morning and they might give me $150 as a trade in.....

 

[marillionnut]

Thanks for the reply. I've been to look and touch the Mac this morning and the Air does seem to tick the box for me and good to hear it's fine with Office, so many thanks.

 

[Just_Me_D]

Thanks for the reply. I've been to look and touch the Mac this morning and the Air does seem to tick the box for me and good to hear it's fine with Office, so many thanks.

You’re very welcome...

 

[imwjl]

Thanks for the reply. I've been to look and touch the Mac this morning and the Air does seem to tick the box for me and good to hear it's fine with Office, so many thanks.

You still want the knowledge and habit I suggested where you look at what is using your resources and network bandwidth. That is a lot better than the guesses many make.

You also mentioned Chrome. Over and over and long-running, I see it consuming a lot of resources on Macs and Windows systems. I provision Firefox to my users to address browser compatibility Safari can have. Most versions run well.