Whine for Mac Whine

There has been quite a discussion about the not-so-recently released Macbook Pro laptops generating a certain whine. People are writing about various circumstances in which the whine gets louder so as to be audible and annoying at the same time. I was following this particular discussion on the so called apple discussions (more rant about them later) and found out that the an earlier discussion had already been wiped off by Apple and another was simply blocked to disallow more posts.

For those interested in knowing different situations the Macbooks are whining, please read the above links. Users have detailed the experiences in detail there. My situation? Well read on....

Apple Whine: I refuse to register for an AppleID to write on Apple Discussions. Reason? Before allowing a user to post on their super moderated user forums, they ask the user to provide them with all their personal information to create an AppleID even if the user just intends to post and ask for help for a product Apple made! I checked for newsgroups and did find a few under comp.sys.mac.* but many of them are closed and are there for archival purposes only. The few which are open, I couldn't find much discussion going on there about the latest hardware. I guess that I have been spoilt by Linux with several places to ask for help even without having to register!

MBP Whine: My Macbook Pro (MBP) has been whining since day one. I have noticed that the whine is audible when on AC power (still have to check when on battery). The whine it seems is more when I'm doing nothing e.g. reading a web page. The more things I make the MBP do, the volume of the whine decreases. This probably shows that the more busy the processor is, less is the whine. Is it the processor which is whining? I don't know. But I'm sure that it is neither the screen which is whining nor does it come from the speakers. The whine seems to come out of the top right side of the keyboard though.

One interesting point: I was able to stop the whine if I kept the trackpad button pressed! In Firefox, this gave me the context menu which was of no use to me, but it did definitely stop the whine (or atleast made it inaudible).

I'm still experimenting the scenarios when the whine is there and when not. As I find out more stuff, this post will be updated. My other whining about the Macbook Pro (for which I should call Apple Support) won't be mixed in this post but in a separate one.

MBP Details:
MBP 15"
2GHz, 1GB RAM
Serial W8612******
SMC Version: 1.2f10