Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

PSA: Coil Whine on MBP 16

I read this thread and thought long and hard before getting a 16" MBP. The thought of having a computer making a constant noise would irritate me and I would have to return it.

I ordered my 16" Space Gray MBP and I am pleased to report it's silent. I can detect no noises coming from it. I tried copying large files, like iMovie, and there were no problems.

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro16,1
Processor Name: 8-Core Intel Core i9
Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz
 
  • Like
Reactions: ascender, sau93 and quolpr
Good to hear! I returned mine too and I hope the next will be without this defect :)

Also, my friend made mic recording on iPhone with the geekbench, and I didn't hear any coil whine on his MacBook 16. I also made a mic recording on my iPhone, and I can hear that noise clearly.
 
  • Like
Reactions: bingefeller
quolpr said:
Good to hear! I returned mine too and I hope the next will be without this defect :)

Also, my friend made mic recording on iPhone with the geekbench, and I didn't hear any coil whine on his MacBook 16. I also made a mic recording on my iPhone, and I can hear that noise clearly.
Click to expand...

Good luck! It's a great computer, I hope you have better luck this time.
 
  • Like
Reactions: quolpr
Get my third MBP, with sound of coil whine even more loudly then in second.
Decide to make refund, because I'am already tired from these replacements.
I wish all of you to have more luck!
 
  • Like
Reactions: happyhippo1337
Nothing I can hear on mine so far. Although I hope I never have to deal with it. My XPS 15 was brutal with coil whine.
My config is 2.3 i9, 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD and 8GB VRAM.
 
I think I did finally hear some on mine, but it was barely audible with head right next to laptop in absolute silence of middle of night.
 
Well I just got mine with 2.4 i9, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD and 8GB VRAM. It has so much coil whine it sounds like it has an old school spinning hard disk.

Pretty disappointed by this, not sure if I care enough to return or try and swap it yet.
 
Im looking for an update, cant you just keep getting them to "repair it" and eventually just get upgraded to a newer 16"?
Its common in the PC world to get RMA's for coil whine, so its hard for them to refuse a repair.
[automerge]1588428772[/automerge]
fokmik said:
Yes...these days you cant run from it
Also had this on 2018, probably on the upcoming 16", on surface laptop 3 and so on..
Easy to check with black magic disk...
Click to expand...
Surface pro didnt have it....
 
iMacDragon said:
I think I did finally hear some on mine, but it was barely audible with head right next to laptop in absolute silence of middle of night.
Click to expand...
I don't think I've ever had a completely silent computer. Usually the fans are the loudest thing. I can hear a faint noise from my Mac mini even at idle if the room is really quiet and I lay my ear against it but most of the time I don't use it in that position so it doesn't bother me. It's really uncomfortable to lay on anyways.
 
Hi! I've got i9 2.3/32Gb/1Tb/8Gb MBP 16 and that coil whine is really annoying! The scratching sound is half of a problem. I had a Chrome extension which triggered cpu turbo boost to max frequency for some seconds every 5 minutes and that sound was just like an ultrasonic dog whistle, very annoying and even painful a little. My previous MBP 15 2017 was much more silent - you could barely hear squeaking sounds with you ear near the keyboard. May be the 16 inch model is louder because of the larger gaps of new scissors keyboard? I guess we should get to some point where the critical mass of unsatisfied with coil whine customers will make Apple treat this as an issue.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Alex W.
When I had mine mbp with coil whine, i wrote to Apple support, send them the rec of this sound with the description. One month passed, but there is no answer, they ignore it.
I make a decision to refund, because for me this sound is very uncomfortable. But as I think, most of users are done with it, so apple decided to ignore the problem.
 
  • Like
Reactions: bingefeller
simpsoid said:
When I had mine mbp with coil whine, i wrote to Apple support, send them the rec of this sound with the description. One month passed, but there is no answer, they ignore it.
I make a decision to refund, because for me this sound is very uncomfortable. But as I think, most of users are done with it, so apple decided to ignore the problem.
Click to expand...
You can only get a refund within 14 days from purchase.
 
  • Like
Reactions: bingefeller
- very very good video - this tells us many about Apple and it service nowadays - everything they think about is money nothing other - too many problems for just brand new MacBook(which I bought also but don't know what to do with it) - due to as apple experts have had 'passed' tests as explained in video
 
  • Like
Reactions: Marinier
shpakdm said:
Guys seem almost all MacBook Pro 16 have this issue - go to the apple forum and leave comments - more effort to make us heard.
[automerge]1588628977[/automerge]
Decided to share audio which i sent to apple and they said that this this is normal. Audio by link

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/okgdq6c36tgp7mw/AAAkUzOksfHmmS8CoGxGeCvpa?dl=0
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I hear on my 16’’.
I’ll give some context of my situation.
I’ve had my 16’’ since november, so around 6 months. Since the beginning I always felt a little cracking sound when I boot it up, right before the Apple logo appears. It bothered me at first but didn’t pay too much attention to it and eventually accepted it. Besides that, and the regular fan noise under heavy load (the fan noise in my 16’’ has always been pretty impressive compared to my last 15’’) never really heard any coil whine, or at least, never noticed it. A couple of weeks ago i felt some weird noises, and I thought it was the fans, as if they got stuck or something, but everytime I stopped doing what I was doing to hear closely, the sound would stop; kept working and forgot about it. But today, editing, started hearing it non-stop, like with any minor change on an adjustment layer in Photoshop, opening any folder, or changing any parameter in Lightroom, I would hear it. Most of the time, to actually hear it I would have to put my head closer to the keyboard, but if I wanted to paste the adjustments from a photo to another in Lightroom, it is definitely noticeable from a normal position.

So after reading the whole thread I came up with the next conclusions:

1. There’s no way around, there’s always gonna be some level of coil whine, regardless of specs, and unless it’s unbearable, I wouldn’t return.

2. If it was there for 6 months straight and I never heard it, there’s gotta definitely be a perception factor. I doubt it just got worse out of the blue.

3. It happens in different tasks. Wether it is reading SSD, using Benchmark 4 (CPU) or GPU demanding tasks.

I’ll let you know if something changes.

If anyone notice it with similar examples as I do, let me know
 
  • Like
Reactions: antoine92 and elite953
I've had nothing but problems with the 16" and coil whine. I bought two machines from Apple's refurbished store and both had this issue. The first one I purchased was an i7 base model with a 1TB SSD, and the second one was an i9 2.4/32GB/1TB/5500M 4GB version. Both sounded akin to an old-school laptop hard drive at startup, however did not seem to exhibit the issue much after startup, or when I was restoring them back to factory settings prior to bringing them back (both were returned under Apple's pandemic return policy). Another interesting issue that the i9 model exhibited: bluetooth cutting out when the CPU frequency would increase. Both for audio and input devices, the bluetooth would cut out momentarily when the CPU would "ramp up", which ended up being a bigger deal breaker than the coil whine. I have a theory that refurbs are notorious for this, since they were already customer returns from people who have already noticed, and were disappointed by this flaw. I will be shelling out for a new one from now on, and hopefully it won't exhibit these problems.
 
I've been using my refurbished MBP 16 for the last couple days and no issues at all, I'm running latest Catalina 10.15.5, no coil whine, no kernel panics, no stuttering, no thermal issues, no bluetooth issues, speakers sound perfect (bass is not as loud as I thought), battery came with 96% of capacity which is not perfect but I won't complain for a 4%, after reading al the issues here I think I was lucky.

I'm a game dev so I'm running unity almost all the time the best battery life I can get is around 5-6 hours while working.

My current setup is i9 2.4/32gb/1tb/5500 8gb.
 
  • Like
Reactions: antoine92
Jonathangsk said:
But today, editing, started hearing it non-stop, like with any minor change on an adjustment layer in Photoshop
Click to expand...
This is exactly what I had with both 16” machines and a brand new 13” 2020. I returned them all. Now I’m waiting for another 13” to see if it has coil whine or not.
 
Out of seven MacBook Pros we've had in the last four years, six had coil-whine. You would obviously not notice this on battery or in a louder environment, but they all had it. It bothers me a lot but I decided to deal with it on my 16'' because you can immediately get rid of it by disabling Turbo Boost for example with Turbo Boost Switcher.

You'll take a performance hit, aproximately limiting the 2.4 8-core to the 6-core levels of performance, but it's whisper quiet, has massive battery life and is enough for my every day tasks on the road for years to come. If I need more horsepower for Lightroom, the fans will kick in anyways with Turbo Boost enabled / disabled :)
 
Guys... I think I resolve the mystery of the sounds!!

It is a static energy inside of the Mac who makes that sounds. Try something.

Leave the Mac in a surface that does not allow to transmite the electricity (as wood). The sounds is more intense, right?
Now put your Mac in your legs or hold it between your hands. Do you hear the difference?

In my case is RADICAL using photoshop. Over the wood table I have coil whine, over my legs nothing.
Doing the same actions
 
I've just received MBP 15 5600m and also have coil vine. I was not even looking for these type of issues, I've just started hearing and then started googling. I only have this for 4 hours but around 97% it's not there. So need to do more testing. I believe this coming from the right side of the laptop
 
DeadeyeM said:
I've just received MBP 15 5600m and also have coil vine. I was not even looking for these type of issues, I've just started hearing and then started googling. I only have this for 4 hours but around 97% it's not there. So need to do more testing. I believe this coming from the right side of the laptop
Click to expand...
i7 ? i9 2.3/2.4?
 
adeelrahman said:
i7 ? i9 2.3/2.4?
Click to expand...

i9 2.3

You can also test this, just watch this video and download the app

I've tested this on my old late 2013 MBP it's there but it's quieter on these newer machine coil whine is louder, what i have also done is just raised my fans to 2500 because I'm used to them so hopefully this will mitigate the issue.

I have this feeling all MBP 16 has this some better some worse. And same goes for Windows laptop
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back