Loud fan on brand new macbook?

Ok, it seams that all the 2.4Ghz MacBooks are experiencing this issue. I spoke with Apple Care they said "bring it to an Apple retail store", i believe The issue only pertains to the 2.4GHz because of its larger capacity hard drive, and the aluminum which amplifies the sound.

When i come up with more concrete evidence i will post it ASAP.

Regards,

Thanks for agreeing to report back.

Alas, I too am an owner of a 2.4 GhZ model and hear the fan
its annoying since I usually use it in my room and to drown out the fan I have to turn on iTunes even when I'm not exactly in the music mood.

Hope we can eventually get our HDDs to be silent!!

If I can into an apple store will they even pay attention to me? Quiet is needed for the sound to be audible, so I'm afraid of being turned way

Very interesting and quite convincing hypothesis, Noah D. We'll be waiting for your update! If it really is the case...I'm curious about what could be done to solve the problem.

I put my Mac on the table near my bed. My room is not so big and I can tell you this: I cannot sleep if I don't let my MacBook sleep too! It's so loud and I'm sure it's from the harddisk. My HD is Toshiba 250GB.

I will go to a friends house soon to compare my MacBook with his.

If he has the same issue as most of us. I will then demand for a replacement due to the defected HDD or fan, although i don't think this will be the case.

pizzatart, if my hypothesis is correct then I'm guessing the only way to resolve this issue would be to replace your current HDD with a solid state hard drive.

If someone wants to be extra sure that is is the hard drive, you can...

1) Shut down computer
2) Remove the hard drive
3) start up without the hard drive.

See if there is any fan like sounds anymore, if their isn't then it is a hard drive issue, if there is however then it is a different part in the computer.

*PLEASE NOTE: I only recommend to remove the hard drive if you would consider your self to be tech savvy. This is only a suggestion, you may harm your computer if you do not know what you are doing.

Hello,

I have good news: the sound that all of us are experiencing is the same on all 2.4Ghz Macbooks. After comparing it with the same model, they both sounded the same.

Hope this resolves everyone's questions.

Regards,

wooohoo...thanks for going through all that work Noah D. Really appreciate it!

Well it looks like the good part is this means our HDDs are fine. The bad part is...the faint humming is still there and the only real way to solve it is by forking over $600 (of $540? for the education discount) to an SSD. A little too much for a little humming. Looks like I'll be getting used to it!

That being said, I'll be sending a little feedback to Apple about this. With difficult-to-expect design flaw like this, I hope Apple takes it into account for their next gen notebooks. From an engineer's standpoint, if they really do so, I'd be truly satisfied with the standards Apple holds their products to.

Noah D wrote:
If someone wants to be extra sure that is is the hard drive, you can...

1) Shut down computer
2) Remove the hard drive
3) start up without the hard drive.

See if there is any fan like sounds anymore, if their isn't then it is a hard drive issue, if there is however then it is a different part in the computer.

*PLEASE NOTE: I only recommend to remove the hard drive if you would consider your self to be tech savvy. This is only a suggestion, you may harm your computer if you do not know what you are doing.

Or for those faint of heart, the easier way would be to boot from an external drive or your system dvd disc and unmount the internal drive (use Disk Utility if booting from dvd, unmount normally if booting from a drive).

I have pulled the hard drive out and booted from an external hard drive.
My problem is not hard drive related.
The fans cause a loud vibration throughout the case and are very audible from first boot.
Not even time for the machine to warm up...

Any ideas?

I had my 2.4ghz alu mac for a couple of weeks now, and my machine is amazingly quiet. no fans or HDD are loud. Even when it is warm and/or loading lots of info. Being 22 yrs. old, i'm pretty confident in my hearing... I would definitely take it to the apple store if it is so loud from boot up. i also have no vibration on the case either, it's all quite solid and quiet.
I had to trade my first machine because there were specks and dust-like particles on the inside of the screen.. seems like a few bad machines got through QA. I guess it's also expected to have a few problems with the first batch of brand new products

Hello to all interested in this topic,

I definitely can tell that this noise is comming from the fan(s) installed in the macbooks. I'm experiencing the same thing since friday. I removed the lid on the bottom to get access to the hard drive and when I'm putting my hand on the drive its not humming at all. The noise is comming from above the drive and it sounds like a fan.

I have my macbook for about 5 weeks now and it was dead silence till friday. I didn't carry it with me a lot. So the only thing I can correlate to the noise and the difference in usage before friday was that used my book on the train to watch a movie. It wasn't a very rocky ride or anything but maybe it did something to the fan or to its bearing. But such usage shouldn't influance a portables working. The only other thing I did on friday is the firmware and OS updates, but they didn't do anything with the fan, did they?

Anyway the fan-humming noise is totally anoying me as I know that ther wasn't any noise before.
All the specs seem to be ok, fan is running at around 2000 rpm, safari and mail are running without real cpu activity noticable.

I even listened to those mp3 files of broken fans on pros, but the fan noise on my book isn't that bad. It's more constant.
Could someone record their noise and post it over here so I got something to compare? I would appriciate that very much and I would if I'm freaking out on nothing or if there is really something wrong.

Markus

Same problem, today my fan started to.. er.. trrrrrrrrrrrr or something like that. Anybody knows which fan model is used in an unibody macbook? Cause it would take a month or so to replace it officially here.

I don't know if I should be replying on this post or start a new one, but I've arrived to this post for the exact same problem. But I have a MacBook 13" 2.4 Ghz, white older model, which is only 2 weeks old.

I've noticed that whenever any graphic/animation is involved, the fan just speeds wayyy up. It's also like that when I do secure empty trash or hard drive backup (Time Machine, SuperDuper!). These two, I can understand. But how come it becomes so loud and the laptop so hot while a short video, say 3-5 clip on CNN, DailyShow?

I downloaded the iStat widget after reading this post. Would anyone be interested in checking out this website? http://www.lifetakesvisa.com

- My "normal" fan on iStat is around 1800 rpm (I have MS Word, iTunes open but not running, KeyPass open).
- I open up the above website, leave it on for a while, the speed goes all the way up to 6000 rpm, in app 2 min (or less).

I used to have a Dell, and this much video/graphic handling wasn't that an issue so I'm not used to this. Is this something normal? Should I contact Support? A while ago, just with iTunes and Safari, the fan got so loud I had to shut down iTunes...

Message was edited by: turn2fish

Unibody Macbook, silent fan for the first two months, and now it's been incredibly noisy for about two weeks. Geniuses at the Apple Store ordered me a new fan and are going to replace it.

I'm also having problems with my new 24" cinema display changing colors slightly, and flickering a broad black stripe (4" wide) to the left of center when the CPU usage goes up. I'm guessing and hoping this has something to do with the fan... if not, then I'll have to figure that out also.