Macbook 2016 HDMI output flickering

I'm having the same issue, and its incredibly frustrating. If my laptop was less than 30 days old I'd return it. Hopefully someone figures out a fix soon. If anyone figures anything out pease let us all know!

The Issue :External monitor attached to the Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter causes flickering.

My Analysis : When an external monitor is connected, the Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter sends more than one Hot Plug Detect interrupts. Also, when the external monitor is turned off, the Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter occasionally does not communicate any Hot Plug Detect interrupts and fails to re-establish the connection when the monitor is actually turned on. The Hot Plug Detect feature is a communication mechanism that makes the source device aware that it has been connected/disconnected to/from the sink device. When the HDMI cable is inserted between the devices, the resulting hot-plug detection instantiates a start-up communication sequence. The Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter takes some time to address these multiple Hot Plug Detect interrupts which may cause flickering on the external monitor. No workaround is available for this issue.

Is anyone else using Google Chrome when the screen flickers? If I close it completely (including chrome apps), the problem seems to stop.

Never mind, I got it again, but its a lot less frequent. I think it has to do with resource intensive tasks

I've gotten it after a fresh restart with nothing running. From my experience it doesn't seem like theres a correlation between running tasks and this problem.

"No workaround is available for this issue."

The workaround is to reboot the machine. Surely whatever gets cleared/reset in a reboot could be cleared/reset at other times as well?

Also, this doesn't only happen with the Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter, I also have a Minix Neo C (http://minix.com.hk/en/products/neo-c-usb-c-multiport-adapter) which has exactly the same symptoms under the same circumstances. (Indeed, I bought this second adapter to see if it would solve the problem). This makes me think that the problem is in the computer, not the adapter.

Anyway, I've sent another series of log files to Apple with all 3rd party stuff disabled. Hopefully they will realise it's at their end and start getting on with identifying a root cause.

-ambanmba

You guys should all be opening service tickets with Apple. You can maybe even reference mine (Apple Care Case 1184045304) or this forum. I don't think they read this forum and unless they get a bunch of people complaining this issue may not float to the top of the priority list. The guys at the local Apple Store claim they've never heard of the problem and it wasn't until I escalated through a few levels of support that they started paying closer attention.

-ambanmba

Same issue here with a brand new Macbook 2016 running the adaptor into an HDMI screen, didnt seem to happen for the first day but now it happens all the time, extremely frustrating :s

Yup... sent them a link to this. Don't know if they read it.

Entered a chat with apple and i got this answer with the addition that they seem to push another update for 10.11 before 10.12.

"Yes we will be making an update in the next week or so. Not to worry this issue will get resolved..."

I referred to ambanmba's case so atleast it sound like they are close to a solution, but hey, i guess we need to wait a few weeks to know for sure. Hope is up atleast.

I have the same problem and I don't know what to do! It's frustrating..

Just chiming in that I have the same issue. I have tried multiple USB-C HDMI adapters. It also happens with the USB-C VGA adapter which is problematic because I present to clients on their displays during site visits. I dearly hope it's fixable via an update.

Over the weekend I had some time to do a full re-install of OSX (10.11.6) on the device and it didn't fix the problem. So that rules out some sort of config file corruption.