Let me be clear that I'm not placing my ear directly up against the computer to listen for coil whine. I can hear it while using the computer normally, on a desk in a quiet room. Some may say the issue is needless nitpicking, and that the computer industry as a whole has similar challenges and just have to live with it. I read the boards for other makes such as Dell and Razer, and they have similar problems too. I get it.
But coil whine is something I don't expect from Apple's products because of their above average quality control and use of premium components. My frame of reference comes as an owner of two SSD-based Macs before getting this machine. A MacBook Air in 2010, and a Late-2013 15" MacBook Pro that was traded-in to get the machine I have now. Those machines didn't have coil whine and operated silently, with fans kicking on only as needed. In addition, I've owned many iPhones and iPads over the years (all containing SSDs), and have never heard coil whine from them either. So I'm looking at this from the perspective that coil whine isn't a common characteristic/behavior of Apple products.
I'm in your age range, and am betting that other people would be able to hear it as well, but don't notice it because they're not using their systems in quiet environments. Instead, they're in places that have ambient background noise such as offices and coffee shops, and are listening to audio through headphones and external speakers, easily masking coil whine.
I've also shown in a previous post how the machine's built-in microphone setup, a Studio‑quality three-mic array with high signal-to-noise ratio and directional beamforming, was able to capture coil whine from the machine itself, making the use of the microphones less than ideal in certain cases.
