Want a Macbook, but nervous, went to Apple store to listen for whine...

Question

They had 6 MacBooks, 3 1.8s and 3 2.0s, and -every- -single- -one- of them had the whine.
Wow.
I'd never heard it before, just read about it, but it's really an unmistakeable sound. I personally could never live with it, but I could see how in a loud environment for some people it might be overlookable.
I really want to buy one and was hoping the ones that made the noise were few and far between, but I came away concluding that most likely nearly all of them do it, because the sound was nearly identical on every machine. Though putting the plug in on one of them made it go down a bit.
It's really surprising they released these as is, imo. You couldn't have one on in a meeting, for example. It would definitely disturb conversation.
On the plus side though, I didn't think the heat was too bad. Certainly hotter than my PB G4, and I wouldn't want to put it on my lap, but the and keyboards were not remotely too hot to touch. Granted they weren't doing CPU intensive stuff, but they presumably had been powered up all day.
Various Macs and PCs   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

I had occasion to visit one of our local Apple Stores (Bridgeport Village) tonite. They had 9 MBP's on display in various locations in the store. The store was practically empty and so I went to each one and listened closely including putting my ear to the speakers on each side, listening carefully for any noise. I can tell you that NONE (ZERO, NADA, ZILCH) had any audible sound, whine or otherwise. They were quieter than my machine, which is a week 8 and has no whine, just the usual fan noise.
This store had a pretty laid back staff. I was able to randomly determine S/N configs on about 4 machines - 8610, 8609, 8613, 8610.
According to the manager, they've had a few machines brought back in for heat issues, but the whine issue has been "...a big nothing". We've heard about it, but we've never seen a machine brought in with anything that approaches the descriptions we read about on this newsgroup. We try to check each machine we display and we've frequently opened machines and helped customers get set up. But that's the extent of our exposure. Our machines run 24/7 and while they get warm, we wouldn't call any of them hot, and, like you, we don't hear any whines.
So, obviously mileage varies widely.