Macbook 2016 HDMI output flickering

2 swipes during the last hours on the second day of testing. About 28 hours after installation.

I have a similar problem with my MacBook Pro with toucher 13 inch late 2016 (just got it) constant flickering every with a samsung 28 inch 4k monitor using - genuine Apple Multiport adaptor and HDMI. I updated the software for the Mulitport Adaptor and tried both left and right USBC ports. Monitor is running at 30Hz

I have the 12" Macbook 2016 too. All external displays hooked up to this laptop flickers. I've tried many adaptors, cables, monitors. All the same problems. I've brought the Macbook to the Genius Bar TWICE and was turned away because I wasn't able to reproduce the on the spot. It is really frustrating. I'm now stuck with a defected, expensive product that I cannot return or exchange.

Have you tried the latest public beta? https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/ This has fixed the issue so far for us.

Hello mhohman. Thank you for the link. I just enrolled for the beta program. I'm downloading it now. I will report back tomorrow. I hope this will fix the issue for me too.

Well, after over a month of non issues and lots of calls from Ray @ Apple asking me to recreate and being unable to my screen has finally started to flicker again.

Ray, if you are reading this i have the log file now but have lost your contact details.

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Well, Your post just confirms my suspicions...

Issue started with MacBook 12, launched in April. Users complaining, no solution. Now issue gets attention... why? Because it also impacts Apple's biggest laptop revenue model…

As for my experience with beta, na flickering but I would not call it stable by all means. Still weirdness on some situations.

Let's see what gets out as official 10.12.2.

Just posting an update to the status of my repair case with Apple, which I've pressed hard and finally got an interesting piece of information on.

They convened an engineering team to look at my case, but agreed to simultaneously look at the hardware in the store. Nothing has come from the engineering side and the store said they were unable to reproduce the flicker issue.

However, I got a call from the store this morning mentioning that there was a problem with the I/O board. I'm not 100% sure what that means, because the 2016 Retina MacBook does not have multiple boards...just the main/logic board.

I could swear this was a driver issue with poor memory management and tied to something USB-C-related, as I've heard this issue cropping up for Late 2016 MacBook Pro (w/ USB-C of course) users. Whatever it winds up being, I will update here on whether or not the "I/O board" replacement changes anything.

Really interesting, on several points.

How the store engineers can't replicate the issue I do not know. My best guess is that they simply don't give it enough time to see a flicker. The other option is that the monitors they have actually exhibit the fault. We should always ask for the specific make and model they test on. I asked for the same by email to the engineering team here on the uk 4 days ago. Total radio silence.

Re : the IO board potential fault. It's got some legs as as this ifxit tear down shows there is a tiny bit of silicon on the cable. Interestingly this is different to the 2015 model.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2016+Teardown/62149

Also meant to say wow about the 2016 MBP's are also having the issue. Now I didn't know whether to expect this or not. As the MBPs are running thunderbolt they've got some quite different video support. At the same time most of the current USB-C video adapters I believed to just be pinning out straight HDMI using that weird Alt-mode feature of the base USB-C standard, as such using most of them at the moment I guess triggers alt-mode and not the thunderbolt video carrier.

Either way... a lot of angry new owners of the very pricey new MBP will be exactly the sort of push that will help us all get a fix.

Finally an update on my own sierra latest beta trial. I've got through a full day at home with my 1440p Dell. No flicker at all. On the negative I couldn't get any connection to a 1080p Dell at work. Might have been another issue though.

The 10.12.2 developer build (16C48b) seems stable and flicker-free so far with my LG ultrawide. Am on 6 days uptime - though there was a similar story when I installed 10.12.1 and the problem did come back.

@tomthebeard ... This is getting a bit off topic but... Alt-Mode isn't in any way weird, it's a way to repurpose the signal pairs to cary things in addition to USB. Thunderbolt 3 is another of the various alt-modes on USB-C, along with HDMI, DisplayPort and MHL. That and the Thunderbolt signal is in turn a mashup of PCIe and DisplayPort which get demuxed downstream by your hub/dongle/monitor. In short it's not that different.

But yes, you'd be right in thinking that the vast majority of dongles out there in the wild will be using the DisplayPort or HDMI alt-modes rather than the Thunderbolt one, at least for the time being.

Thanks for the explanation on Alt-mode Sam, I think that when I say 'weird' these days it just means I don't know enough about it 🙂

Today I will be doing a full day on the may works 1080p Dell. Will report back on the results.

Interestingly i managed to run Quicktime to screen capture the flickering. Screen was definitely flickering but on playback of the QT file there is no flicker evident?!?!?!

@relin that's what I'd expect. Quicktime capture should not be affected by the flicker as it's capturing the GPU's internal rendering of the display rather than the end result once the signal has passed through a bunch of interfaces and wound up on the screen.

Well today I got through an entire day without a hint of flicker in my works Dell monitor. So far my own beta trial is looking pretty successful.