Apple’s new Mac products might have a serious audio glitch for professional users. The company’s newest Mac products with its T2 security chip suffer from a software-related bug that leads to issues with audio performance.

The issue seemingly affects devices with the T2 chip — that includes the iMac Pro, Mac Mini 2018, MacBook Air 2018, and MacBook Pro 2018. Although Apple’s T2 chip is designed to offer improved security, it’s affecting users in the pro audio industry.

As CDM reports, there is a bug in macOS that leads to dropouts and glitches in audio whenever a Mac automatically updates its system clock through the system time daemon. Users have been reporting the issue across a bunch of different pro audio forums for months, and it seems like the issue has never been acknowledged by Cupertino. The issue here is pretty simple to understand, as explained by a DJ software developer on Reddit: whenever the system time daemon automatically updates the system time, it somehow sends a “pause-audio-engine” message to the kernel, leading to dropouts and glitches in audio.

There is a solution — however: all you need to do is switch off Mac’s ability to set the date and time automatically through System Preferences, and it will stop the system time daemon from messing with your audio streams.

Still, when Apple is aiming devices like the MacBook Pro and iMac Pro at professionals, issues like this are not acceptable at all. The company has faced a lot of backlashes over the last year because of similar quality control issues, with the latest being a FaceTime privacy bug that lets users hear the recipient’s microphone before they even pick up the call. And what’s even surprising is that the new audio bug also affected the iPad Pro, though Apple later fixed that through an iOS patch.

Now that the new audio glitching bug is getting more attention on the media, Apple will hopefully take actions to address the issues on the Mac as it’s been going on for months. At the end of the day, though, these quality issues aren’t acceptable at all when you are spending thousands on a computer. At least not from Apple, a company that claims to focus extensively on its product quality and customer experience.

Tagged with Apple, Apple QC, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, macOS, T2