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Comment by unvs | Hacker News Reader

I bought the MBP 16” and when I work with an external monitor it’s like having a hair dryer on. I wish I could just go back to a desktop machine again.

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The concensus seems to be this is a GPU related driver or OS bug.

Trying changing resolutions or scaling or refresh rate. 2K moniter are supposedly worse than others.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265235

It is a joke that a high end machine has such a glaring issue. Then again, Apple got away from selling terrible terrible keyboards that were not easily replaceable for years.

Interesting! Thanks for the link. Not one of my coworkers is getting the 16 after hearing how noisy it is, and they ALL were planning on upgrading. Let’s hope a future software update might improve it.

Why not both?

For 60% of the cost of my MBP 16, I built a liquid cooled Ryzen 9 3900Z beast with 64GB of fast RAM, 1TB NVME SSD, RTX 2080 GPU, driving two 4k displays.

I run nixOS on it, my MBP only sees the light of day for things that absolutely require macOS, or when I’m out and about.

For normal, mostly stationary dev (Go, Rust), the desktop is miles better.

It’s been forgotten that PC parts are commodities.

I have the exact same issue on my 16". So much so that I've started preferring using my much smaller iPad as the second screen using the sidecar feature instead of my main 4k monitor.

Although I love everything else about the MBP 16, this issue drives me crazy.

External monitors force the use of higher-power discrete graphics. See an adjacent comment about eGPU if you want to control this better.

Edit: admittedly, this is a bit like returning to a desktop...

I’d be fine with having an eGPU at the office actually. That’s where the noise gets most out of hand and annoys my coworkers. It’s just a bummer to sink even more money into this machine.

It might be worth looking into an egpu if you mostly notice it on an external monitor

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