Does the MacBook Pro fan constantly run? And a note about the whiney noise [Update]

Just purchased my MBP yesterday 4/12/06 and also have the whine (not the lcd whine). Also, I've noticed the CONTINUAL running of the fan? on the left side. Wish I could find out if this really normal or not. I guess my main concern is that if something is running continuously, it might have a shorter lifespan... Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!

I gotta add -- the only way I'm not returning this thing pronto is if there's a hack that forces the fan on all the time. I don't mind a bit of noise in exchange for the power; but when the top surface of the laptop is hovering around 140 F and the bottom is over 160, there is something wrong with the design.

Just bought a MacBook today - revision E - and I guess they fixed the fan problem, because the fan WILL NOT GO ON. This POS is running as hot as, or hotter than, my old Titanium that had a broken fan. To keep that one from melting down I used to keep a stack of magazines in the freezer and switch them out every 20 minutes. But this one's frying-hot. I finally made the fan go on by forcing a 3D rendering on both processors and running google earth at the same time. As soon as I shut out of Earth the fan went off again. What's the deal, did they just pull the heat sensors out of the new revision so the fans wouldn't go on?

My 1.83 Ghz MacBook Pro's fan is on all the time - left side near the magsafe. It's very quiet, but is never off. The machine is also *very* hot in the same place. So, given other posts about the lack of productive answers from the Apple Genuises, my question is: Is this worth taking in for a look or calling AppleCare?

My first MacBook Pro had a slight whine not unbearable but annoying nonetheless and a faulty keyboard. I received a replacement three days ago, one of the new ones for which such problems are supposed to be resolved. Keyboard works, a faint but acceptable whine plugged in, and horrors! a noticeable whine when running off battery power. Firmware, OS update no help. The only way to stop it is to turn the built-in isight camera on with photobooth and leave it on. Very disappointing.

I was wondering why my MacBook Pro fan was blowing all the time really loud. I opened Activity Monitor and there were three Skype entries, each using 60% of the processor power (which doesn't make much sense). I force-quitted all of these and now the machine is quiet again.

Hey, I got a MacBookPro recently, about a week before March ended. My notebook had the wierd sound coming from the processor, but it stopped after a little while. And the screen in Front Row and the desktop on my Sharp Aquos LCD TV shows no distortion with the extra light at the bottom of the display. So as far as I know I would say just certain notebooks are affected.

My stock MBP 2.0 has a very quiet "whooshing" sound that comes on the instant I power up the computer.

I don't know if this is the hard drive, or if it is the left side fan spinning at a very leisurely rate of speed. It is barely noticeable in a very quiet environment such as my home office. But at work, the gentle "whooshing" sound of cars going by on the street outside (not to mention the crappy Dell PC sitting on the desk next to the MBP!) is much louder than the sound coming out of the MacBook, and I don't notice it at all.

I *do* know that if I run CineBench a few times in a row to get things running really hot, "new" fan sounds kick in that are much louder and remind me of propellers on a model airplane. It appears that there is one fan for the CPU and one fan for the graphics card. Both fans seem to operate independently of each other.

I have occasionally heard a sound that I think others have described as a "mooing" (moofing??) sound. What I believe this to be is the fan on the right side kicking on for just a moment and then shutting off. Perhaps the graphics card temperature is right at the threshold of "hot enough to turn the fan on". So the fan turns on, then before the fan can get up to full speed, the temperature quickly falls to "cool enough to turn the fan off," and then the temp rises just a little bit and the fan comes on again? Imagine blowing on a spoonful of hot soup...*Blow* "That should cool it off...Nope! It's still too hot!"...*Blow* "How is it now?", etc. I must admit though, that running the computer for very long in the "Better Performance" Energy Saver settings does result in the MBP getting rather toasty...almost burn-worthy on the strip of metal right above the function keys.

I also have what I guess is the "CPU Whine," although to me it sounds more like a "sizzle" that varies in frequency slightly...it almost reminds me of the sound of rapid Morse Code or maybe a very high-frequency version of the sounds a dial-up modem makes when logging in. If I open up the "Mirror" Dashboard widget, wait for the camera to turn on, and then close the widget, the sound completely disappears and stays gone until the next time I restart the MacBook. If I go into Terminal and type "top" after this workaround, I see no indication whatsoever that any CPU percentage at all is being used by anything Dashboard-related (although I may be missing something, I am not an ܢer-Geek). I *do* see a number of processes labeled "Dashboard" (I'm guessing one for each active widget), and although they appear to take up a wee bit of RAM, they all show 0.0% CPU usage. At the same time, my idle iTunes and Mail.app both use 0.2% of CPU. If I restart, and then check "top" before opening the Dashboard for the first time, none of the Dashboard processes are listed at all.

However, I can only hear this "CPU Whine" when my ear is placed less than 6 inches away from the left speaker, regardless of whether I'm in a very quiet environment or an only "semi-quiet" environment. The only reason I ever noticed it to begin with was I had been reading every MacBook-related web posting or forum I could find and had read the noise complaints and was *specifically* trying to listen for it. Otherwise, why the hell would I be sitting around shoving my ear up against the speaker? I would have never noticed it if it wasn't for all you whiners! ;-)

Unless the noises other people are hearing are considerably louder than what I have on my MBP, I can't understand why anyone would get bent out of shape enough to return their computer for repair or demand a refund - other than some demented sense of "It's Apple, it was expensive, SO EVERY LAST THING ABOUT IT MUST BE ABSOLUTELY PERFECT AND IT MUST BE SILENT AT ALL TIMES NO MATTER WHAT OR ELSE IT IS CRAP!!!"

If I hear about an officially confirmed repair process for eliminating the CPU Whine (other than "return the computer and see if the replacement sounds better") or if it becomes apparent that Apple thinks my fan behavior or the heat of the system is abnormal, I'll certainly give Apple a call and send it in. But I'm so happy with this computer that I couldn't imagine being without it for more than a day! As far as I'm concerned it performs flawlessly. Why should I get all upset about a noise I can't even hear unless I put my head against the keyboard?

Oh yeah, I do sometimes get the "Airport won't detect wireless network after waking from sleep" problem, but as far as I can tell, if I turn Airport off, and then right back on, it then automatically detects and joins the network. Looks like it maybe needs a minor software tweak, nothing more.

From what I have read in a lot of forums and blogs, Apple already have a lot of negative press about macbook. Seems a very defective machine, I think this negative press (a fact) is what has put on hold a lot of purchases about the macbookpro.

To hear the fan I have to put my ear close to the left side. No sound from the right. Very quiet in normal use.