Despite acknowledging the problem 12 years ago, Apple still hasn’t fixed a bug in macOS that caused audio balance to turn off on Macs under certain conditions. A developer named Fabian highlighted this issue in a post published today. X (formerly Twitter) claims that Apple “still hasn’t fixed the left/right audio balance bug in macOS. I still have to use the app to fix it automatically. The app has been around since 2015, which means we’re approaching our 10-year anniversary [помилки]”.

Balance Lock is the program in question, available as a free download from Tunabelly Software. That the bug still exists was confirmed by other users who responded to X’s post and commented on it on Hacker News. But the problem seems to have persisted longer than Fabian first assumed.

A user writing on Stack Exchange in 2013 claimed to have experienced the same error on multiple Macs since 2003. Whether or not that’s the case, we know that Apple acknowledged the bug on the Mac on February 12, 2012. The OS X 10.2 support document is no longer on Apple’s website, but is available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. In it, Apple states:

In some cases, the sound balance may unexpectedly drift towards the left or right channel. This may occur if you press the volume up or volume down keys quickly when the computer’s microprocessor is under heavy load.

To fix the problem, Apple advises users to open the Sound panel in System Preferences (now System Preferences) and “drag the sound balance slider to the desired position.”

Considering Apple’s advice at the time, the company’s failure to come up with a suitable solution when a support document was published raises questions about whether this issue has been resolved. Still There is no solution for this bug, which is why the company has allowed this bug to remain in later versions of Mac OS X and macOS until today.