MacBook Pro (2018) Audio on videos cuts out randomly

I bought the all-new 2018 MacBook Pro (13 inch, touchbar, 256 gb) yesterday and have been having issues since. While streaming video, every 5-15 minutes the audio of the video will cut out but the video will continue to play. If I stop the video and refresh the page, the video does not play. If I stop the video, wait about a minute, then refresh the page, the video plays with sound again.


This has been happening on Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube so it is not a problem with the site itself. I have reset my Wifi and router and have not experienced this problem from my iPhone, so I don't believe that that is the issue either.


Any thoughts? It's disappointing that this is happening when this computer is so new.

MacBook Pro TouchBar and Touch ID, macOS High Sierra (10.13.6)

Posted on Jul 17, 2018 2:29 PM

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Posted on Sep 13, 2018 5:09 AM

First thing to check is if you have the latest MBP High Sierra Updates. There have been two supplemental updates. 1st for the CPU throttling, and 2nd for the speaker glitching.


It is going to be a cpu threading issue if both of the updates are installed and you still experience the glitch. Most likely cause is the battery manager running all of its command checks. It polls the battery state, and that poll method runs where all of its command checks lock out the cpu core it is threaded on until they finish. The process belongs to the IOKit framework, which CoreAudio also belongs in, and CoreAudio streaming and system bus processes all share the same code WorkLoop so they get threaded onto the same cpu core. There are other system bus processes too that can run a higher priority than audio. So when you get something with all these lined up, scheduled to run on the same core, then eventually the audio buffer overloads as it takes the lower priority to get done, which can cause the CoreAudio process to reset, and you get the glitch.


It's a limitation of the IOKit stuff. They just have so many processes running in the background now. Certain things definitely cause it more often. I recommend using a different browser and close Safari. Safari, iTunes, iCloud and Siri can all get a lot of background processes running that will eventually coincide with the battery manager cycle. If you have any system bus monitoring software, like a fan controller or third party battery manager, those will definitely cause the issue, so turn them off. Also check to see if you have a Bluetooth PAN network device and remove it. It is constantly pinging any iOS device around and can cause issues. It's a pain for sure. If in doubt take it back to the store, but a new unit won't fix the issues. It's OS related.

75 replies

Mar 14, 2019 8:26 AM in response to skylar73

im on a mbp late 2013 and this problem started 3weeks ago and i dont know what to do ...


when im searching for new music on the net it ramdomly dropout sometimes 5min sometimes 20-30

and i gotta reboot for the sound to come back?

im using firefox as a browser


it does it listening to music from the mbp itself too and using a external usb soundcard samething

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MacBook Pro (2018) Audio on videos cuts out randomly

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