Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug Apple's "geniuses" spent two weeks and an estimated $10,000 in warranty costs fixing a MacBook Pro screen fault that was resolved with a single button press or three. That's the word from photographer Greg Benz who has outlined the whole sorry tale on his website this week. An initially frustrated and infuriated Benz reported …
I had a fun issue a few weeks ago. Sunny day outside, unlocked my phone as normal then turned it on its side to take a photo and the screen went blank. Huh?
Pressed the power button a couple of times and turned it vertical, lock screen appeared as normal. Unlocked it and tried again to rotate it for a picture and again the screen went blank.
After a bit of head scratching I figured it out - I was wearing some new polarised sunglasses and the screen on my LG G4 is also polarised. When I turned it on its side, the two polarisation layers were at 90 degrees from each other, so I couldn't see the screen any more.
I had a similar issue but I found my twilight app (makes the screen redder in the evening etc was set to alway on instead of by daylight. Though since I live in Dundee that means I dare not look at the phone screen in the night as after about 2:40am it goes bright blue again . . .
I woudln't be surprised, the amount of times HP "smart buttons" have caused a user to switch their display to external only is depressing.
Now with recent models they are on the Fx keys and you have to press fn to press an F key >_< (So I stab the sleep button over and over the press F12 to PXE boot, which is annyng as older models the sleep button was fn + F1 >_<)
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I sense the whiff of BS too...
I would have expected them to reset the NVRAM as a first step before switching out any physical parts... thence any new logic board(s) would have different settings saved in NVRAM and should have been reset on first use too.
Also, for a problem with the screen failing to light up, I would have more likely switched out the screen before the logic boards.
Definitely doesn't pass the sniff test...
"Fanbois do make some really strange assumptions. I call BS on your assumption."
It's not assumption. First step in resolving screen issues is to reset the PRAM (for monitor depth/resolution issues) then the System Management Controller (for backlight) before even THINKING about replacing hardware. The first-line Apple techs follow a script so they can't even 'forget' to do it.
Apple would only have handed it back if they thought it was fixed, the 'bug' they couldn't find is why it was repeating . If scripts say reset as a first step then the screen brightness problem disappears before before they start looking for the problem and doesn't get noticed. Very hard diagnosing a problem if it's no longer present!
Still an idiotic design decision.
I prefer that option. It lets me temporarily disable the screen for various reasons. For example, if I want my laptop to keep computing on something while I sleep nearby (for instance if I'm in a hotel), I don't have to see the lighted screen. I could configure it not to sleep when it's closed, but I like having that capability. A simple key press that turns off the screen can be useful. Of course, if that's going to be part of your typical operating procedure, you should ensure you know how to turn it back up, which in this case would be reseting the NVRAM (hold command, option, P, and R at boot time).
For example, if I want my laptop to keep computing on something while I sleep nearby (for instance if I'm in a hotel), I don't have to see the lighted screen.
My Thinkpads have energy management set to switch off the screen after 10 minutes (and it locks in 5) when on AC, but they keep running and crunching data even when the screen saver (and the screen lock a little later) has kicked in. No need to explicitely switch off the screen. So unless you definitely want to go to sleep in less than that after starting whatever you want to run overnight, it will not disturb you in any way.
Just checked my Lenovo running Linux. The Fn F5 (*-) does indeed turn brightness down to black.
If you then do a power-off/on the screen will be at full brightness again during POST and boot until power management starts. Depending on the model you'll have "Thinkpad" or "Lenovo" displayed, plus some text as to which key to press for entering the BIOS setup or selecting a boot device. Corporate lappies may have that last bit disabled, but those nearly always display what company they're owned by so there's nearly always text on the screen.
And an option to disable 'sleep when lid closed on AC/docked' is apparently offering too much choice to Apple users.
Why is the brightness even storedi n RAM? Macs are supposed to be multiuser machines - MacOS is a version of unix after all - so why on earth would the loginc screen brightness be set to that of the last person who used it? The user brightness setting should be stored in their user settings on disk and loaded when they've log in, not before.
Had he followed the apple approved way of pressing the brightness controls nothing wrong would have happened, that user should have paid attention to apple's instructions. Ignore apple's special instructions, pay for it!
It's all the user's fault, got what he deserves!
It's really easy to do with the stupid touchbar thing.
I thought it was dead too, I plugged it into a monitor in the end to see if it was booting up and then when I plugged it into the power socket too, it lit up and realised what the "problem" is.
I hate my MacBook Pro, would much rather be using an XPS 13, but need a Mac it to build iOS apps.
I've had similar with a couple of Dell laptops running Win7. I realised there was a problem with the screen brightness and the ambient light sensor auto adjust feature because the display wasn't totally black.
The easiest way to resolve it was to power off, remove the battery and hit the power button a couple of times to ensure capacitors etc. were drained. After reassembly, it would power up using the restored default screen brightness settings.
I am typing this on a mid 2010 15" Macbook Pro, the one with the kernel panic issue if the graphics card is used over the internal graphics chip. I have to select 'internal only' on gfxcardstatus then start Thunderbird which locks whatever it's set at. The seconds during restart before I can set it right are dodgy as a result. It's a handmedown machine from the youngest who had motherboard swaps done under warranty as did lots of folk. To this day Apple still don't understand what the problem is.
I did try doing that to begin with, I really hate Apple and all Apple products.
But because I need to be using the latest version of xcode and can't stop working because of any issues with running an out of date OS.
Also emulation runs piss poor using VM and doesn't play ball with a real iOS device connected to the USB ports.
This bug has been happening for at least as long as Apple has been making aluminum unibody laptops. It doesn't even require the user to turn down the brightness - sometimes the laptop just won't turn on the backlight for login. You shine a bright light at the screen, if needed, so you can navigate the login. Other option is a hard reboot and PRAM zap.
> What idiot thought that was a good idea?
Some idiot probably thought "the user has customised their screen contrast and brightness settings, so I will store them and re-use them when next powering on so that they have the best experience of this device possible, and don't curse the Cult of Jobs for having to re-do the contrast and brightness settings every time they switch on"
A different idiot possibly thought "At the login screen, only the alpha-numeric function of the keyboard is needed - let's load the bits of the display driver (and linkage to keyboard keys) that controls brightness when they've logged in - it might even be more secure"
By definition, it's a multi-user system since it boots to a login screen
Well, not necessarily. You may want a login screen to make sure only you can access the data on it. As a result it may make the system multi-user, but an encrypted partition also presents what could be seen as a login screen while still not enabling the system for multi-user access.
But yes, cranking up the brightness at that point like that seems a sensible step.
It seems very odd that Apple goes out of its way to disable so many things on the login screen. If you have an external display or keyboard, there's probably a reason for it... if you sit down at the computer and find the brightness is wrong then you'd probably want to adjust it before logging in... but it seems Apple know better.
Oh, and genius bars seem to have problems following step one in diagnosing screen/backlight problems.
What? You mean shine a flashlight at the screen to see if your getting an thing on it incase the back light decided to pack it in? Hell got bored one day so I made something that spreads the light out and I can hold against the screen to do this easier.
User: "my screen doesn't work!"
Me: already opening the drawer I have it in if they answer the first question of, are you sure it's on, correctly.
I used to be a certified Apple tech, for a third party shop.
Step one verify the fault.
Step two of every diagnostic, press and hold Command, Option, P, R, and the power button. Wait for it to chime twice. After that the screen will come on.
You would be shocked to know how many times that fixed the issue.
If you read TFA - he has a T2 chip in the laptop and a password set. It turns out that PRAM reset doesn't work if you have that. People tried PRAM resets; they didn't make the backlight come on.
There are very many levels of fail in the whole sorry story, but it boils down to modern Apple - each major hardware iteration gets worse and more expensive; each major software iteration gets more buggy, gaining new bugs that are never fixed; the once-industry-leading documentation is getting sparse to non-existent.
@Andrew Hodgkinson
"If you read TFA..."
First up, this highly relevant bit of info isn't in the article - it's at the end of the linked blog. Most people won't read that far.
Second, it's still easy to reset the PRAM and SMC on a T2-equipped Mac, it's just a different key combination. The Apple techs will have known this, and if they didn't, the script they follow will have told them as soon as they plugged it into their diagnostics station.
Turns out by reading the linked blog, the Apple techs weren't quite as idiotic as the Reg article would have liked them to be in order to justify the "Apple 'geniuses' fall for Dim Backlighting issue" headline. They want it to read like a real-life BOFH article.
Yup. In my first job in IT - which was 1990 - I supported Pick systems. All user access was via dumb terminals. A colleague asked out loud one day "what do you do if you try to log in but there's no response and the screen is completely blank?". Someone ten feet away repled "turn the brightness up".
I had that problem a couple of times with the lights in my living room after I moved here. Never turned the dimmer down that far, but it somehow reached that state.
Just last week I thought my radio had died, when I turned it on and got silence even after turning the volume up. That turned out to be a power cut.
Familiar things that go back a long way. No excuse for anyone under 100 not to have grown up with them. Confusion is natural, but never more than a few seconds of it. So long as the underlying product isn't so perverse as to refuse to adjust ...
Couple of weeks ago the kitchen light wouldn't work, I swapped the starter (fluorescent), took the tube out and reset it, no luck. Eventually figured out the upstairs lighting had fused and the kitchen, in the extension is on the upstairs fuse. The tube had started to take a bit longer to start up so I jumped to the obvious diagnosis and kept digging without considering the wider picture.
Maybe that explains Elon Musk. An English guy says he needs a torch. Musk thinks, hey, I can one-up any old torch and I'll sell a flamethrower!
That of course assumes that Musk, raised in Canada, knows it as a flashlight like we do in the US, and thus a torch means actual fire.
Back in my college days we a DEC PDP 10k that ran multiple terminals. The problem was if you had to take a break someone would take your terminal and you had to wait until another one opened up. So you would type Set TTY No Echo log out, and say " it's broken". This would give you enough time to run to the restroom. Then you come back, log in and type Set TTY echo.
The older iMacs have no problem with this either. I have a 2007 (or thereabouts) iMac that uses a massive Sony TV as a screen (don't ask, ok?) and the big screen is set as the default display. Guess what... it gets woken up by the login screen and... *gasp* It displays the logins available on the iMac on... *gasp* *shock* *horror* the Sony TV! As it should, obviously. Seems to me that something is dodgy there, but hey... I don't usually do idiotic things like dialling my brightness down to zero.
There are plenty of ways to keep the machine from going to sleep without disabling the display and leaving it almost closed!.
Sometime in troubleshooting, you can't account for what users do!
Now this is out in the open, I'd expect a Kbase article or 2 or perhaps a minor design change regarding to monitor brightness on T2 chipped machines.
PS: Whenever doing large unattended copies which cannot be interrupted (which I'm forever doing), the terminal command "caffeinate" is your friend.
> Windows regularly mixes up desktop icons if you plug and unplug external displays.
If all the external displays are of the same resolution as the built in display, this doesn't seem to happen (as often?). Equally, I've seen people having mixed success in Windows remembering docked settings, even if I rarely have trouble with it (occasionally it fails to detect external displays, or detects them and renders the wallpaper, but does not let me move the mouse/windows on to them - fixed by unplugging & replugging in the dock)
> Windows regularly mixes up desktop icons if you plug and unplug external displays.
If all the external displays are of the same resolution as the built in display, this doesn't seem to happen (as often?).
Funny that you should mention that, currently sitting here with a Windows desktop with two plug-and-play displays (of the same resolution) with the taskbar on one display and the desktop icons distributed across both displays, with Windows refusing to group all the icons on the same display as the taskbar...
No high horse at all. Just a genuine question, as it seemed a basic function so was wondering if that feature was available on a Mac but the protagonist did not realise it or if it genuinely wasn't an option on Mac OS.
I've only ever used iMacs so never connected a second display.
On Windows I rarely have many icons on my desktop anymore since using Windows 10 + Office365 whereas I used to use the desktop as my work-in-progress area and have screens full of them, so don't notice the shifting icons issue. However plugging into the same external display didn't seem to change the icons around previously.
My windows desktop set up is into a docking station with 2 external monitors connected and the laptop screen open and in use. When I am at home it is the same with one external monitor. In both I have the desktop extended across all screens.
It always knows where it is and sets up its windows perfectly, no icon moving.
However, the external monitors are blank until I have logged in on the laptop panel. This might be to with he Intel HD Graphics settings which seem to override the windows ones.
Windows mixes those icons if the communication between monitor ans gfx-card completely dies in sleep mode.
I know several monitors of that type: Monitor goes to sleep, and upon activation all your windows are resized to 800x600 instead of the actual monitor resolution.
In the end: Errornous DVI/HDMI/Displayport implementation on the monitor side.
Luckily I don't have to work on those so often.
It can be the GFX-card fault as well, but that is rare.
If I don't turn on one of my screens within about 3-4s of turning my home computer on, then Windows won't recognise it until its completely logged in. The other one can be turned on at any time.
I think it's something to do with the DisplayPort connection and the AMD drivers, but I've just learnt to turn the monitor on first before I hit the power button.
(If the damn monitor didn't pulse it's power LED when it's in standby mode, then I'd never have to turn it off in the first place. But that's a different rant)
You'd think that wouldn't you.
I run a PC in a church with three displays and a clever bit of presentation software. One screen is for the application control. One screen is for the display for the congregation and one screen for those at the front.
Every time windows does a patch it will jumble the order of the screens and we spend the first 20 minutes every month running around shouting where the mouse pointer is so that we can get the displays re-ordered back to what they should be.
We managed three Sundays in succession this month where the screens worked every time without getting re-ordered. This is unheard of.
There's still a helpful setting in Accessibility options (Windows) where hitting the CTRL button shows a decreasing circle, like a RADAR ping, of where the mouse pointer is. Godsend on 2+ displays.
Same setting is on OS X (macOS / System was replaced by OS X, despite what Cupertino now wants us all to believe...), but the knowledge of where it is has faded / been superceded by the passing of 3 and a half years and 4 OS "upgrades" since I worked in the Fruit Factory.
that when I plug my work laptop in at home, there's supposed to be two 1600x1200 screens attached to the docking station.
If it detects both, at least one will be just 640x480 and no amount of detecting screens, switching them off and on again or unplugging and replugging, including all combinations of those actions, will change that.
It may also detect just one, at the same resolution as the laptop screen itself. There's a 50% chance that after a protracted bout of navel-gazing it will divine the correct resolution, but it will still only have that one screen active.
The only solution is a full IT Crowd treatment.
Credit to them for getting it fixed. What other company would go to such lengths and costs to make a customer happy?
Reminds me of back in my school days and being a bit nerdy hanging out in the computer classroom with a couple of mates, just trying to change stuff and see what happens. Was a common hack going around that would set all the colours of the desktop in win 3.1 to black. When the next person logged in, the entire screen was black and the head of computing had to come and reset it.
Every laptop reseller is legally obliged to in civilised countries. I don't really think that "obeying the law" is very special.
Dell also do this on site, next day if you buy the enhanced service pack.
I've had a few laptop motherboard changes over the last decade. A nice guy turns up with a screwdriver and a box of parts, and maybe half an hour later you're up and running again.
- Admittedly, a couple of those repairs didn't go so well. One forgot to peel off the stickers protecting the heatsink compound (so it overheated and shut down under load), another snapped off the pins for the microphone array without noticing.
The day after I discovered each of these, another Dell technician turned up, apologised and swapped out the motherboard again.
All sorted, and more quickly than Apple can do - Dell machines are designed to be repairable, you see.
>Dell machines are designed to be repairable, you see.
Depends which ranges you are referring to, however in my experience not to the same extent as the old IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads - you still can buy significant parts/sub-assemblies for a T60/T61 (manufactured circa 2007) - in fact you probably can still buy all the necessary parts and assemble your own new T60/T61 (albeit for significantly more than it would cost you to buy one off ebay)... Try doing that for a Dell Latitude D630...
Don't rely on it.
I had a Dell server, and got excellent service on it, including a replacement motherboard when it proved necessary.
Then I got a consumer-grade Inspiron laptop. It was a total PoS, clearly faulty with some Heisenconnections inside, but Dell support refused to do anything. I'm sure the law would've been on my side, but cheaper just to get a ... erm ... macbook.
When I were a lad, bike lights always suffered from Heisenconnections. Nowadays they're so much better (not to mention lighter, and much, much easier on the batteries), but the mounting for my front light has assumed the mantle of trouble and unreliability.
What other company...?
All of them! For example, someone else has already mentioned Dell. They do stuff for us. Anyone else who supplies equipment with warranties. That would include people like HP, Asus or whoever you care to name. I bet if I bought a second hand laptop from CEX, it would expect them to cover faults while their warranty is in force.
Or perhaps I missed the sarcasm in luminous question?
"All of them!"
For consumer hardware?
I think we're all a bit biased, since paid for professional support is generally VERY good. Dell, HP, Lenova and Apple have all had techs out to me within an hour if needed. Or will courier me over the part and instructions.
Getting that level of support for consumer or a small business is much trickier. At least Apple have a walk in service centre (it's not a bar, there's no beer) in most of their stores.
I've also had much more success with getting Apple kit bought in one country and repaired in another. Far too often you are expected to kick the machine back to original seller, or there are different models for different markets, so spares have to come from the original market.
As for the actual story, can anyone replicate this on another machine? The OP hasn't been able to yet, he uses various third party applications (including a screen calibrator) and has password protected firmware.
As an ex service guy, the first thing I always used to ask my users was "What was the last thing you did before it failed?"
Ah, turned down the brightness, eh. That might give me a clue.
Also, the user must have been pretty dense not to realize it had something to do with his process, unless it was a deliberate windup... "Let's see how long I can waste everyone's time..."
Finally, Apple are stupid not to have a fixed minimum setting for the display, and a reset when the system is rebooted.
Another example of how the 12 year old 'whiz kids' who design this sort of thing don't have a clue (or care) how people work in the real world.
Yes exactly what I try and do. Unfortunately you get some users who really have no idea what they were doing at the time.
Supporting such users over the phone, listening to them gasping and exclaiming as things happen that they are triggering but have no idea they are doing it. That reminds me of windows 8.
'As an ex service guy, the first thing I always used to ask my users was "What was the last thing you did before it failed?"'
Except it wasn't the last thing the user did! He'd been using for a period of time, probably hours, possibly days, since he turned the brightness down. Later, the machine was shutdown, using the attached monitor and keyboard. On restart, there's the problem: system was working when he shut it down, now it appears dead.
The faults with Apple.
Its quite clear that the product has a bug that simple testing would have showed up. In fact just enabling the external monitors for login would have helped show the bug is with the built in screen back-light as it suddenly starts working after login. But seeing as Apple couldn't even use common sense to enable an external output at login diagnosis was much more difficult.
I suppose external monitors are not enabled before login as it would be something like HDMI or DisplayPort over thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is a massive security hole so likely is disabled after boot and before first login. So apple, was it a neat idea to get rid of a dedicated output only monitor port? Mini HDMI isnt pretty big and mini DisplayPort is tiny!
> Its quite clear that the product has a bug that simple testing would have showed up
Personally, I think it's more a loophole in conflicting usability requirements leading to undesired behaviour, and it's not entirely obvious that this needed to be a test scenario.
QA engineers need to have nicely warped minds to break things, and IANAQAE....
I remember something not dissimilar happening with some, I think it was Acer, laptops while the free upgrades to Windows 10 were first rolling out. They worked fine on battery but as soon as you plugged them in they turned "off". Turned out Windows 10 inverted the brightness controls for some reason and the default when plugged in was to go to full brightness...
Users repeatedly changing things (we wrongly assume they know what they change and understand what they did) without telling support (we wrongly assume they would tell us anything relevant) and then complaining about something unrelated (we wrongly assume the complaint is about the actual problem) and never remembering what they actually did (we wrongly assume sanity on the user's part), is one of those instances that tech support procedure may not neccesarily account for. We assume /some/ level of creedence to a user's claims, or we should just hand them a Ubuntu Live CD.
I have literally had the "can you help me with the printer, it stopped working"... and being wise to users now, I asked (word for word)
"When are you *going* to buy the printer?" But even then, half heartedly expecting a "don't be funny with me" reply...
Nope, the reply was "next week, how did you know?"
Yes, the printer they had not yet purchased had "stopped working". :/
Zero chance this is real. One of the first, and simplest, things to do to resolve a screen issue is to reset the System Management Controller; this brings all parameters including backlight back to factory values. There is absolutely no chance this wasn't done at some point during the diagnostic phase.
"how do you do that? can you do it with no screen?"
Easy.
SMC Reset:
1. Apple menu > Shut Down.
2. Press and hold Right Shift + Left Option + Left Control for 7 seconds. Then keep holding those keys while you press and hold the power button for another 7 seconds.
3. Release all three keys and the power button, then wait a few seconds.
4. Press the power button again to turn on your Mac.
PRAM reset:
1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Turn it on press & hold Option, Command, P, and R for 20 seconds.
3. Release the keys and power on as normal.
This is for a MacBook Pro with Touchbar and T2 chip. Procedure is slightly different for other Macs.
Yeah I call BS on you being sure of that.
You assume that the techs are doing the right thing, assume that they know what they are doing.
The techs that swap parts in almost all other cases of issues. Regardless of the actual cause. Its well known that to save money you dont train your techs to diagnose and repair, you just get them to swap.
The techs that were caught up selling customers to new really expensive models as their old model was "unfix-able" and it only really needed a CABLE TO BE RESEATED.
And when they do try a repair, these are the techs that look at solder and still wonder what it is after they had their so called "training".
The classic one from the Geniuses is "But there's no way to recover your data."
Naturally this was not true. The simplest way was to remove the SSD from the old board and put it on the new one.
It is assumed that forcing life to conform to Apple's Genius Script was why they started soldering SSDs onto the boards.
Now there really is now way to recover your data... unless you have a soldering iron.
I had an Apple "Geenyus" (1) tell me the hard drive on my wife's MacBook Pro was dead, and showed me their diagnostic results to prove it - the single word "FAILED" in a red banner across the screen. It had been working fine until an OS update, then ran about 1% of the previous speed. I successfully backed up the entire hard drive after the "failure" with no errors (just really, really slow). The Geenyus' explanation? "Sometimes major OS updates reveal previously-undetected hardware failures." Yeah, right. That's not what a hard drive failure looks like. But as it wasn't under warranty, it was MY problem and at MY expense!
Apple Geenyus: a 16-year-old reading a script, not someone who actually knows what they're doing.
(1) Misspelling intentional, think "genius" as pronounced with a strong southern US accent.
I might snigger at Apple geniuses (because), but I've had a similar story with a flatbed scanner. Great piece of hardware (seriously), completely let down by consistently shitty software and firmware(s). At certain points, completely at random, it would scan - black. Solid black, black-hole black, nodoub-it's-black-black. You could turn it off and on again as many times as their "customer support" suggest, you could try ANY type of other, equally cutting edge solutions, it would stay black-on-black. Until / unless you noticed that, in a certain settings tab, where you have the brightness slider, it's at a % (brightness) position. Because this (and 100% brightness, what else), what you would use to capture those images. And, as far as I remember, it does exactly the same, i.e. re-set parameters, whenever you update the driver / soft (which is what the genius tech support strongly recommend as the 2nd bestest solution after turning it off and on). Judging by complaints on amazon, some people, when it happened to them, fiddled with the settings, missed the slider, and promptly sent the scanner back to the "manufacturer" and, as per comments, with solid customer non-support, they got their refunds and bought a competing product.
As a post-scriptum: having reported the issue to the manufacturer at least twice, a couple of years ago, this "feature" is very much alive and well and present in the current software variant, with a few new bugs thrown in, like when it resets the output jpg quality to 1 (on a scale of 1 - 10, when 1 = lowest quality, highest compression), so that, when you miss this slider, you can admire your pretty pic turned into a blocky piece of art. It is, as if, they tried, in a Monty Python style, to present their customers with a "poser". Or two.
Does it matter? Absolutely not, and the company happily continues to churn out their product line. Plustek, I salute you for the steady course!
Apple
Why does an external monitor NOT WORK when the machine has booted to the login prompt?
- Everyone expects this to work on all other makes of laptops, our users only open the laptop to press the power button.
Why do the brightness controls not work at the login prompt?
- Maybe users login in might like to combat the strength of the sun or not blind themselves at night?
Why, if the controls are intentionally designed not to work at the login prompt, do you not set a default login prompt brightness?
- Need I add more to this bit of common sense?
Who tested the login process? On a real machine?
How did your UAT tests go? I would have failed it the moment the external monitor wasn't working.
Apple? Apple? ... Silence
Well guess thats another win for my Dell ;)
And quite a comprehensive review on his blog.
But if it is true, why did it not show after the NVRAM reset?
Years ago I went through a similar problem with my Mac Pro, which was entirely my fault for tinkering. it was booting but the screen was black. A little button located on the motherboard near the battery reset the SMC after which it behaved.
Exactly.
I tested this earlier today, admittedly on my non-touchbar MBP. It did the whole 'black display before logon' thing (which I admit is completely daft), but after an SMC reset (not PRAM) the backlight came back to 50%. There's no reason why an SMC reset on a touchbar MBP would be any different.
I had a macbook - of the white plastic variety - whose backlight failed. Several other things had failed by then, so I treated that as the last straw, bought a new laptop[1], and transferred my data. I was able to use the screen by shining a bright light at it, but that's suitable only for an emergency rescue mode.
[1] A cheapo HP pavilion. Whereupon I immediately regretted the loss of the macbook's screen quality, and audio I could use without the need for earphones.
after kldload acpi_video is executed on boot, then execute a set level of brightness: sysctl hw.acpi.video.<device>.brightness=<level>
You could check for current brightness by using hw.acpi.video.<device>.brightness
You can enumerate supported brightness levels using hw.acpi.video.<device>.levels
Moral of the story: Never get a dim "super or not" 'genius' that can't seemingly understand the basics of unix and acpi_video controls...
I have an old iPhone I use for contributing streetview-type photos using the Mapillary app. That's all I use it for, nothing else installed, no SIM card, nada.
It sits in the car window taking photos until the memory fills up, then they all get uploaded and wiped from the phone.
Did this the other week; filled the phone up with photos, but didn't immediately upload them. By the time I came to do that, iOS had offloaded the app. If you're not familiar with the system, when you're low on space iOS can delete applications (but keep the data) to free up some room. When you next launch the app it automatically reinstalls the app.
Problem was this was the only app on the phone, the phone's storage was completely full, and the photos are part of the app's data (not normal photos in the camera roll), and the only way to access/prune out photos is via the app.
The app is offloaded, but won't reinstall because there's not enough room - space required to download, unpack and install is greater that the space freed up by deleting the app.
So I can't reinstall the app, I can't delete anything else to make room (because there isn't anything else to delete), and I can't prune out the photos taking up the space because that needs the app installed to do that. It thoroughly painted itself into a corner.
Sigh.
Ever since IBM ambar-screen days, people were even used to this procedure! Turn the brightness down! Crank it back up to use!
That's what you get for not hiring an old geezer to think about those usability issues!
Everybody else is using hoodies, mine is the only actual coat in there.
...did not have the revert timeout on changing screen resolution settings. Configuring an unsupported refresh rate, screen resolution or colour depth meant having to boot into Safe Mode to rescue the situation.
Re: I run a PC in a church with three displays and a clever bit of presentation software.
Isn't there the "Identify" button in the Display Control Panel utility which plasters the screens with big "1" "2" "3" numerals to show which is which on your system?
You guys need to employ Louis Rossman to write a weekly 'WTF did Apple do NOW??' story, somehow I don't think he'd run out of material.
If you're wondering who he is, he owns a business he started that repairs Apple Macs, in New York, and he hates Apple with a passion, as evident by his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup/videos where he often talks about the ridiculousness of Apple's designs whilst repairing them under a microscope (he has a camera one so you get to see what component he's actually replacing)
Currently his latest video is titled "How do I fix a black screen on my Touchbar MacBook Pro?" hmm...
Software design used to be thoughtful, considerate, intuitive and less buggy
Software updates used to be regular, but not so regular that applying updates became a full time job
What the hell happened?
Where did all of these moron programmers come from? What school of "software design" did they go to?
Somewhere in this story, there should be some feckless project manager, did I miss it?
As in programming, as in project management, forsight is needed
Where the fuck can they show they've demonstrated this?
Its almost as moronic as building aquaducts into a city but not sewers, oh wait, that did happen
Stupid humans, stupid. Fucking think!!!
The computer scientists and engineers of the early years think about the progress that has been made so far, whether they think things are just going backwards now.
I'm almost certain there was a naive belief that the computing revolution would bring about a better future for all, computers were our saviour, we would become so productive there would be more time for other personal pursuits. Instead we have Winwoes which on average consumes some massive number of Gigawatts around the world, just to do updates, we have some holier than thou company who like to smell their own farts and have a keynote speech to tell eveyone how great they are.
What the actual fuck happened?
Where is the progress?
Imagine if we allowed the skills range of airline pilots to be like the skills range of programmers.
From really awful, to really amazing.
Which piloted plane would you jump aboard?
This black screen story is merely shbowcasing the lack of forsight of many people, supposedly working as a team, in a company, worth over $1T, if you can believe it
As it turns out, the issues with my computer are isolated to my machine only and were created by 3rd-party software I have installed. This made it impossible for Apple Geniuses and tech support to diagnose the problem.
Please see the following clarifications: https://gregbenzphotography.com/photography-reviews/i-screwed-up
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