An entire website has been dedicated to this subject, but none of it seems to apply to me. The whine emanating from my MBP (15" 2.16Ghz, 2GB RAM, stock 100GB 5400rpm drive) doesn't seem to be related to CPU load, isn't effected by running with or without AC power, and none of the hacks and workarounds described solve it. It's a sound that's pretty quiet, but at a frequency that makes my eyes bleed and I don't think I can live with it for the next two years.

What does solve it is picking up the computer and tilting it about 45 degrees to the left.

Clearly this isn't a reasonable workaround.

I might need to return this thing.

{later...}

It's gone now. I played around with the screen brightness and it disappeared. This is evidently a symptom of a bad screen inverter or wabnash frobnozz or something according to Google. I'm gonna try to get it replaced.

{even later}

Went to the Apple store in Richmond with the intent of exchanging my current MBP for another. One guy there pointed me at a firmware update after telling me "he didn't think an exchange would fix the problem" (uh huh). Not the SMC firmware update, another one... firmware 1.0.1 or somesuch that doesn't get installed by Software Update. I thought I already had installed it. I wanted to stick around and just return the notebook if I heard the whine after trying it. It turned out I hadn't installed it before, so I installed it. But it was too loud in the Apple store to hear whether or not the whine was still there after it was done. So I took it outside and tried to hear it. Couldn't. So I said fine, maybe it really was the firmware. Brought it back home, and there's the whine again. Of course. This is a elecromechanical problem. It turns out that it's only noticeable in very quiet conditions (like my apartment at this time of night), and it goes away for a while if I sort of twist the screen by pulling its bottom-left and pushing the top-right a little, but it comes back as soon as I take my hands off the screen. Very, very annoying. This is such a stupid situation, because half the people on the planet probably can't hear this noise due to its frequency, and even if you are capable of hearing frequencies that high, you need to be in a very quiet place to hear it. Sigh. I'm just gonna have to take the damn thing back. Again.

{and even later}

Took it back again, this time they just gave me another one to get rid of me. It doesn't appear to make the same noise. Yet, anyway. I've only had it turned on for about 20 minutes. Area between between keyboard and screen hinge just as hot.

{and ultimately, two days after the return}

Noise disappeared. I think this was just a geniune isolated hardware failure, but the new Mac's serial number is W8621A7RVWX. I neglected to record the old machine's serial number.