[deinonychus]

I'm not sure if I entirely understand your hypothesis, but I don't think it's 100% on the hardware - I don't think it's due to the hardware of the hardware.

I also have an M2 Air and a few things seem to consistently make my machine get hot and chug and dump the battery. Idling with my machine plugged into my 4k 144hz monitor isn't an issue, but going on a Zoom call or having one too many video streams open while docked to the monitor will do it.

Is my USB controller doing more "work" when I have a video stream open? I don't think so.

[motoboi]

In that case, zoom is transcoding video, which is a pretty damn heavy operation (note that this is why previous MacBooks didnt have 1080p webcams: they wouldn’t stand more than 5minutes on zoom without throttling).

My point here is that it’s not that the CPU (or the SOC to be exact) cannot handle such loads. It just that it cannot handle it when you have the device connected via USB-C and charging via USB-C too. Also, if using cheap usb-c to display port or adapters.

The corollary of this is that if that would even be possible, were your display wireless, or if you were generating frames by saving them on the disk, the CPU would not throttle.

Of-course that is of little utility here because the end result is the same: CPU gets slow, be it because of CPU, GPU or whatever.