MacBook Pro 16 external display issues

That approach definitely did not solve the problem for me.

My issue doesn't happen every time connected to the display. But when it does, switching sides is not helpful.

No but they do get crash reports. Which is why it is insane this problem hasn't been solved.

Agreed. I have the same issue.

That’s why I don’t send reports. They get allot of information from those reports that had nothing to do with the problem. And you send 50 reports 6 months later problem still persists.

I hope this doesn't jinx me, but since the last (giant) Catalina update, my external Thunderbolt display has always woken up when the laptop wakes from sleep.

I have the same update, yet I find the computer in this state almost every morning.

Ok. Thank you for all of the ideas.

I’ve done some additional testing and the results were pretty much the same.

I’ve solved the problem by buying new adapter. The one that works well in this case is club cac-1510.

Had the same problem with a couple of external displays (Dell, Sceptre) making the laptop flicker/cycle (volume/mute constantly blinking). Moving my USB-C to HDMI adapter to the right rear side usb port solved the issue.

Feigning ignorance of a problem is SOP for Apple. I'm sure they know, but they have so many sales on 16" MBP's running these days, the last thing they want is to confirm a serious video problem.

Sure enough ... woke the MBP this morning and every window was on the external monitor. Night Shift and True Tone won't work on the main LCD display now - auto-brightness is screwed up as well. Which means I better reboot within the next 24 hours to prevent the system locking up on a subsequent wake-up. This is the kind of crap I'd expect on a Windows box, not on Apple's flagship laptop.

The fact that it takes time and multiple sleep/wake cycles to get into this state, and that a reboot clears it, tells me it's probably some driver or BIOS issue. But something is fouled up.

I have this problem too, but it seems to happen only after waking up from sleep and disappears after a reboot.