Thanks for your reply. To answer your questions…

Well, as I say in the story. I reported it to Apple, but they dismissed it out-of-hand. Although I was sure it was a fault, they refused to accept it and made excuses for why it may be making sounds (things like it could be warming up/cooling down etc).

I was in Spain, having bought it in the UK, and Apple do not make it easy to return items within the EU.

I didn’t expect to just walk in to a store and have them accept it was a design flaw. I’d also spoken to Apple on the telephone about it, researched it on the internet and found others with the same problem. It wasn’t a random ‘Hey guys, look at this broken screen, it must be a design flaw, give me a replacement’.

It took a LOT of work on my part to push Apple to look in to this before they finally — months later — accepted it was a flaw.

As for Apple Care, nope, not going to happen.

We have very strong consumer laws in the UK and the EU. We already pay way over the US price for the hardware (at today’s exchange rate, a US Macbook Pro 15" with touchbar works out at $5319 USD in the UK, compared with $4199 in the US). Apple Care is $379 in the US, and $440 in the UK.

In the UK, consumer law gives us SIX years protection — https://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/

So no, I can’t agree that I should have bought Apple Care. Apple should have done their job properly — both in designing and building this model, and providing support afterwards.