I agree.
I've had a few of these types of portable units. Noise is a major problem with most of them. It will drive you nuts if you have to use it a lot.
I have a Sharp 10,000 BTU unit it's been terrific. It's quiet mostly and chills the room pretty quickly and holds an accurate temperature. My experience has been buy a larger unit than you think you need. Manufacturers are notoriously false advertisers on these things.
F3HEAD
My laptop makes more noise than this unit.
As for false advertising these things are independently tested to british and EU standards by external labs on specific standardised tests so you can compare accurately inn different climates etc. They cant do any false advertising. Its all very much regulated at least here.
Honestly its so quiet that I cannot hear it unless I turn off the laptop. And even then its just a really soft air movement sound. Its so quiet I have to look to see if its actually on. It also murders this room. 500 watts is enough to heat it in winter. Under 1kw on the very coldest days. This thing can do more than this even at -20C (-5F) outside. So when heating or cooling 99% of the winter it needs much less than full power so will back to ultra low power/fan speeds after a few minutes. So the above is certainly not a problem.
With R32, and a proportional variable speed dual screw compressor, efficiency is very high on heating too. Not just when cooling. And it works down to -20C while still giving up to +170% of the input power out as heat. So even at -20C which doesent happen here ever as far as I know, its no problem. At an average 7C (our winter average) it is 480% efficient in heating. 1kwh electricity = 4.8kwh of heat output.
That means that I can save the planet by using electricity generated by burning millions of acres of forests across the world, coal, and natural gas shipped in at wildly inflated prices. All to make hugely overpriced electricity. While ignoring the cheap 100+ years worth of gas, and oil surounding us in our seas, or the 250 years worth of coal, gas, and oil we have under our feet. So we can say we are "green"