Having just spoken about photography, a few hours ago Apple released Aperture 3. One thing of note is the white box instead of black, shock of horrors! Of note for my own personal circumstances was the phrasing of the system requirements:
Aperture 3, which runs as a 64-bit application on Intel Core 2 Duo Macs running Mac OS X Snow Leopard [...]
When I finally got around to installing the new VMware Fusion 3.0 update I downloaded yesterday I expected to get a slight performance improvement for my FreeBSD guests, but not as much as I would have got had I been running a Windows guest. The VMware Mac team have made it clear in their advertising they consider Fusion to be a product to run Windows on your Mac, and while other operating systems such as FreeBSD and Linux are supported, they’re not a priority. I’m really pleased and relieved to say I was wrong!
Without home internet and the huge difficulties I’ve already eluded to with publishing blog posts from the university computer pools I didn’t think I could be bothered going through the rigmarole (sounds like a dip), but this warranted the effort. This entire post summarised in one line: the new MacBook Pro inverter I ordered arrived, and it fixed the dead screen problem! I have my travel companion back!
Yesterday I talked about how my MacBook Pro’s screen backlight seemed to have died. It’s as if the brightness has been set to 0 and no amount of keyboard button pressing or changing the brightness slider in the Display prefpane made any difference. If I shine a torch at the screen I can just barely make out a picture though, which led me to believe it wasn’t the display itself that was dead.
I contacted an Apple support representative this morning and described the symptoms and initially he wanted to know if I’d installed Snow Leopard. Turns out some people’s MacBooks and MacBook Pros from 2006 have been having problems with black screens, but that a restart fixed it. Unfortunately I had already rebooted several times and reset the PRAM and PMU with no effect but because I could still make out images on the display he told me it was probably an issue with the inverter board and not the display.
This seems to echo what iFixIt says:
My screen looks black, but I can see very faint graphics on it.
Symptoms of this are a dark screen, but everything else seems to be running. If you get in close with a flashlight, you can usually see the image faintly.
If your backlight isn’t working, the inverter may be bad. Other parts that may be bad are the display or the logic board. If your backlight fails intermittently while moving the display, the problem is with the inverter cables.
I try to see the positive side to everything (even if most of the time I fail miserably) so I’m just glad it’s not a problem with the display itself or the graphics chip which would have cost well over a thousand dollars to fix. A replacement inverter is less than $50, but apparently they’re very complicated to install, so I’m going to drop it off at the Apple repair centre in the city on Monday and (for want of a better phrase) count my blessings. I could try to fix it myself, but I don’t want to end up with more problems!
The timing could not have been worse, but there you go.
When I turned on my first generation Core Duo MacBook Pro I got in early 2006 this evening the backlight refuses to turn on using the function keys on the keyboard. All other keyboard functions are fine.
If I shine a torch at the screen I can just barely make out the windows and can adjust the brightness slider in the Display prefpanel, but nothing happens. Using an external monitor I can use the machine, but the internal display is still black.
Not sure whether this is a problem with Snow Leopard, I sure as heck hope so but it’s looking increasingly unlikely. I didn’t have the backlight Snow Leopard installation problem, but could this be related?
Things I’ve tried so far and have failed:
This is really serious. I need to take this machine to classes. If it’s a hardware failure and I can only use an external display, I’m in big trouble.
I often find I can understand things better myself when I explain what I’m attempting to do. Spock would probably say this illogical, I’d retort that not all of us have the benefit of being half Vulcan. Thank you.
Since attempting to boot my MacBook Pro with OpenSolaris and since writing about it here an hour ago I’ve learned more about the problem I was having with the partitioning stage.
I found this page and on their instruction I installed the Sun Device Detection Tool which checks the hardware of machines and determines whether or not OpenSolaris and Solaris have appropriate driver support. Aside from the gigabit Ethernet card, I was told my original generation MacBook Pro had full hardware support. Cool.
Returning to the aforementioned page I saw the screenshot shown above and recognised the errors instantly from when I tried to install OpenSolaris myself. Turns out OpenSolaris needs to be installed on the first partition to work; I was attempting to install it on the third partition after the EFI and Mac OS X Leopard ones respectively.
I could mess around for another few hours to try and figure out how to overcome this limitation (when I was an early teenager I was quite the dual-booting wizard) but I’m thinking I’ll save myself the headache, backup my data and repartition this machine from scratch.
As I said in my previous post about this, this semester I’m working almost exclusively with Java and Oracle software and I’m SSH’ing into Solaris machines at the campus here already, and I’d like to be able to use a similar setup on my own machine too. Also I love trying new things :).
Given I’m working almost exclusively with Java and Oracle software this semester at university in three of my four courses I thought it’d be fun and worthwhile dual-booting OpenSolaris with Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro and use them both in a more “native” environment. You can download the ISOs for free from their servers, via bittorrent or you can even order a CD to be sent to you gratis. Pretty cool.
Problem is, I’m stuck. I’m attempting to install OpenSolaris 2009.06 which is the latest version at the time this post is going live. These were the steps I took:
Barely a few seconds into file copying stage, the installer #fails (uh oh I’ve started inadvertently using Twitter hashtags in regular blog entries, this does not bode well for my mental state!). When I clicked the log file button these were the last few errors:
>> Could not crate VTOC target
>> TI process failed.
I thought it could have had something to do with ZFS specifically, but doing some research online I came across this discussion thread where Basant suggests the problem is with the EFI partitioning scheme employed by Bootcamp.
Prime cause why it was failing was because of EFI partition. After I reset the partition id of EFI partition (#1) using "setpid 1to AF" and rebooted, my problem went away and opensolaris installed and booted just fine. I had also marked the partition as Active from Linux fdisk command so I didn’t need to do the fdisk.real hack.
The fdisk.real hack being referred to turns out to be this official workaround in response to a recognised bug in OpenSolaris.
Going to take another plunge, here’s hoping one of these tricks does the… trick.
Having got fed up with the woefully bad battery life in my second MacBook Pro battery, I decided to bite the bullet (or the bank card as it were) and procure myself a new battery. The previous battery I used was a third party unit I bought at Sim Lim Square in Singapore which when new had amazing life but degraded into a device that could barely hold a charge in far too short of a time. This new Apple battery might have cost an arm and a leg, but provided it wasn’t manufactured by Sony in 2006 it’s far more reliable.
I’m getting on average about 3:30 of power a charge which is enough for most lectures and classes with this new battery. Not having to arrive to classes nine hours early every day so I can guarantee myself a power point seat is such a refreshing change!
I’m in the process of writing another post on priming batteries and getting more life out of them, but I want to hold off publishing it until it’s finished; I’ve been told publishing things before they’re finished is a tad silly and nonsensical, and heaven forbid I ever type any nonsense here.
One quick tip I can provide though in this post to maximise battery life is to not turn on your MacBook computer at all. You’ll need to commit everything you type to memory so you can reproduce it accurately when you’re at a mains source of power which I admit could be construed to be a disadvantage by a vocal minority, but I guarantee you the battery life of your machine will be stellar. Unless you have the screen brightness set too high. Wait a minute.
As an aside, I learnt in chemistry that batteries are a series of cells, and that most batteries people buy are technically "cells" not batteries. If you are a chemist and this is the only bone you have to pick with regards to what I’ve typed here, I’m both fascinated and worried at the same time.
Given my very vocal opposition to Apple removing the FireWire port from their MacBooks and subsequently adding them back, I’ve been fairly quiet about the removal of the ExpressCard slot from all but the 17″ MacBook Pro. I intend to rectify this, because as Madonna said, everyone is entitled to my opinion. In short: removing the ExpressCard slot from the 15″ and not having them on the 13″ despite calling it a Pro is right up there with the removal of FireWire ports in silliness, perhaps even more so.
I remember when I discussed the removal of FireWire and I was called out because Apple has been know to remove legacy ports and devices such as floppy drives. As I responded before, the problem with this analogy is the replacement ports and devices were equal or superior to the ones they replaced, and they allowed a certain level of backwards compatibility. If you needed to read floppy disks, you could get a USB floppy drive.
As with the loss of FireWire when Apple forced users to a slower USB 2.0 interface, Apple has replaced the ExpressCard slot on their premier notebook computers with an SD card slot in the hopes (one assumes) that customers will use the FireWire 800 port for their data transfer needs. Once again they’ve removed an interface and replaced it with a slower, inferior one.
I also just can’t wrap my head around their decision to add an SD card slot of all things instead. Firstly, professional users probably have high end equipment that use CompactFlash cards instead, and people like me with Nikon D60s use a USB cable and Image Capture.app. Who are they targeting this at?
What about the need for many in Europe to have ExpressCard slots for their wireless modem cards? What about media professionals who buy MacBook "pro" portable Apple computers expecting them to be… well, professional computers?
On a more personal note, ExpressCard (and PCMCIA Cardbus before this) slots have also allowed me to extend the life of expensive hardware. My venerable first generation MacBook Pro from early 2006 is still going strong and feels just as fast as it did new, but in April 2007 the FireWire 400 port was shot by a defective external hard drive. Repairing it would have been prohibitively expensive, so I bought a FireWire ExpressCard and continued on as normal. I’ll admit having this ability taken away scares me silly. Perhaps that’s their intention; to force people to buy new computes?
Apple’s stock performance and increases in market share despite a global economic downturn are a testament to the fact their products are superior to every other mainstream PC manufacturer; a slick new Apple computer with Mac OS X absolutely trumps all the competition in most areas. Given this I think Apple has a greater than average responsibility to produce good products and to listen to their customers (I can already see the sarcastic comments in response to that…).
They listened and gave FireWire back, now we need them to give us ExpressCard slots back. Welcome back to work Steve, can you get on this for us? :-)
If you’re interested in Apple hardware you’re probably already well versed in the changes Apple announced and the last thing the blogosphere needs is another personal blog talking in detail about changes you could read about in hundreds of other sites.
What I will say is that it’s fantastic that Apple listened to their customers and once again includes FireWire 400 or FireWire 800 on ALL their models now. If you recall late last year I had an entire series of posts tagged the MacBook FireWire Debacle where I was discussing what a terrible decision it was to remove FireWire from the MacBook at the time:
I seem to recall there were several people posting comments on my blog here disputing what I was saying by claiming FireWire isn’t necessary anymore, and that Apple was removing a "legacy" port. I like Apple products but I’m not an apologist; I called them out for this bad decision and it’s good to see they’ve corrected their mistake.
What I am disappointed about is despite the improved screen technology in the 15 inch MacBook Pro model, it is STILL only 1440x900 resolution. It baffles me that the 17 inch model was updated from 1680x1050 to 1920x1200 without problems, but the 15 inch model is still stuck with essentially the same resolution as the PowerBook line from years past. As I’ve said here, I’ll upgrade when this changes.
Overall I’m impressed with the new lineup, but as a proud owner of a first generation MacBook Pro from 2006 with a 2.0GHz Core Duo CPU I still don’t feel as though it’s worth upgrading yet. Looking forward to Snow Leopard!
I'm Ruben Schade, welcome to my labour of love mix of tech, anime, thoughts and nonsense from Singapore and Australia. Thanks for stopping by.
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