The MacBook Pro has been plagued by its share of hiccups since its launch but that’s to be expected. Whenever a mind-blowing innovation hits the mass market. Issues range from over heating to the more annoying and notorious MacBook Pro whining.
If you’re a MacBook Pro owner, you’ll know if your system is affected if you hear a constant hum or whine, emanating from beneath the center of your keyboard.
The reported whine seems tied to the current level of CPU activity. Under very little load, an audible whine is reported that is presumably tied to the system’s CPU throttling for the sake of battery life. This whine is reported to be more frequent when the MacBook Pro is in dual core mode, when the 2 cores are idle.
If being just purely ‘annoying’ isn’t good enough reason for Apple to come out from behind their “within specifications” shield,James Blackburn from UK has even taken sophisticated equipment to go the distance to prove that the whine actually interferes with recordings using the MacBook Pro’s internal microphone.
One touted cure, comes in the form of an edit to a deep system file that changes certain CPU throttling thresholds.
An alternative to hacking your Mac is to get Daniel Jalkut’s QuietMBP app that attempts to limit the MacBook Pro from becoming ‘too idle’ by allocating useless tasks for it to perform whenever it falls below the set threshold.
After countless failed private attempts at getting aid from Apple directly, the Net is now a buzz with forums and web sites rallying owners of whine plagued MacBook Pros’ to gather. In a united front, with hopes of being heard. Most notably, The MacBook Pro Whining Site, that attempts to collect a database of whining MacBook Pros. If nothing else, as a form of online petition to visibly quantify the extent of the issue globally.
Apple could not be contacted for comment at press time, and no official statement or cure has come out of the Cupertino Mac-maker.