September 17th, 2009

Battery preservation and 'Desktop Mode'

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 10:09 am

Categories: Battery, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro

Tags: Desktop, Battery, Engineering, Jason D. O'Grady

In The correct way to use your MacBook’s battery I wrote that Apple techs recommend that you regularly charge and run down the battery in its notebooks for maximum battery performance and lifespan.

In other words – don’t leave your MacBook plugged in all the time. In Apple’s eyes having more charge cycles is better than having less, in fact, it can even deny a battery warranty claim if your battery has less than 75 charge cycles.

That post resonated with several readers that emailed me to complain that Apple should handle the whole battery charge/discharge process in software, rather than relying on users to remember to do it.

Bruce Kieffer wrote:

I’m listening to PowerPage Podcast Episode 114 and the discussion on batteries. I must say it’s a disappointment that the Mac OS isn’t smart enough to deal with all power situations. Why should I have to mess with cycling my battery? Why can’t the OS know my power habits and take care of conditioning the battery accordingly? I have a PowerBook G4 and I keep it plugged in 24/7. I think in that case the OS should be smart enough to cycle my battery for me.

While I agree with Bruce, the devil as they say, is in the details. After all, how would Apple implement such a technique that keeps the battery optimized while ensuring that you’re not left without charge at the worst possible moment in time.

Apple would have to run the battery down (via software) despite the fact that you have it plugged in.
That would invite a whole host of problems with users that need to spontaneously grab their machine only to discover that the battery is completely dead.

My suggestion is that Apple implement a “Desktop Mode” in Mac OS X that would prompt you, saying “I noticed that you haven’t unplugged your AC power connection in 30 days. Would you like me to go into Desktop Mode? More info… Yes/No”

It could explain that Desktop Mode power cycles the battery “in order to maximize its useful life” or something like that and warn users to make sure to disable Desktop Mode (in Energy Saver > Advanced?) at least 8 hours before running off battery.

Bruce responds:

The best solution would be batteries that don’t need to be cycled. Until then, I like your “Desktop Mode” idea, but it too has its problems. Most often I know in advance when I need my computer on the road. But if I have to take it out on a last minute notice, I could be in trouble if the battery was near the end of a discharge cycle. Maybe the Apple folks could set it up to discharge during down times. Say schedule it for midnight to 6 am. As it is now, I will continue with it plugged in all the time since anything else is too much work relative to any benefit I might get in extending the battery life.

What’s your solution? Do you regularly run down your MacBook battery or are you a “leave it plugged in all the time” type of person?

September 16th, 2009

Time to ditch the optical drive, once and for all

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 9:03 am

Categories: Hard drive, MacBook Pro, SSD

Tags: Hard Drive, Apple Macintosh, Optical Drive, Blu-Ray, Personal Technology, DVD, Home Entertainment, Jason D. O'Grady

Once heralded as the second coming of data storage, the sun has finally set on the optical drive as an effective vehicle for data storage and delivery. Optical drives are simply too small and too slow to be practical. Single layer discs hold 4.7GB while double layer discs can hold 5.4GB.

Blu-Ray has more capacity, but its 25GB (single layer) and 50GB (double layer) doesn’t hold a candle to the capacity of even a medium-size hard drive, let alone the 500GB monsters that have dropped as low as $100.

Apple hasn’t released a Mac with a Blu-Ray drive, nor does Apple have support for Blu-Ray baked into Mac OS X. So even if you attach an external Blu-Ray drive to your Mac, you can only use if for reading and writing. You can’t play a BD movie, for example, on Mac OS X unless you install a virtual copy of Windows. If Apple released Blu-Ray drives in Macs tomorrow, a case could be made for keeping optical drives in MacBooks a little longer — for watching movies on a plane, for example.

At best the venerable optical drive is showing signs of age, at worst, it has one foot in the grave.

Apple needs to bury the optical drive next to the floppy drive, which Steve Jobs summarily killed with the announcement of the original bondi blue iMac in 1998. The future is to replace optical drive with flash media and downloads.

Snow Leopard should have been distributed on a flash drive and via BitTorrent.

I decided to take a leap of faith and installed an OptiBay hard drive (pictured above) from MCE Technologies in my MacBook Pro (late 2009) in place of the optical drive. Prices range from $189 for 250GB to $279 for a 7200RPM 500GB and the installation itself was easy. Just remove the bottom case, remove three screws, the optical drive and put the OptiBay in its place. Having a second hard drive in my MBP gives me gratuitous amounts of storage in place of an optical drive I barely used. From the OptiBay product page:

Now you can have unheard of capacities in laptop disk storage and space for everything you need to store… digital video, music, photos, etc. Two bootable hard drives inside your system provide a freedom and flexibility never before experienced in a Mac laptop… have one disk a scratch disk and the other your system/applications disk, RAID configurations, one disk Mac and the other PC, extra photo storage for digital photographers, extra music storage for digital DJ’s, and more.

If you’re worried about losing your optical drive, fear not. MCE includes an external optical drive enclosure for your removed SuperDrive so that you’ll still be able to load software and read and write CD/DVD discs to your heart’s content. Just pop your old optical drive into the enclosure, install two screws and you have a USB powered external SuperDrive. I’m keeping mine in my backback for a while, just in case.

Immediately after formatting the OptiBay 500GB HDD (a speedy Seagate Momentus 7200.4 mechanism) the first thing I did was move my music (100GB) and photo (30GB) libraries to my new found storage. Next I moved a 40GB VMWare virtual machine to the second hard drive for a combined savings of about 170GB. Whew! My SSD finally has some breathing room and I don’t have to constantly use Disk Inventory X to save space.

For people used to large mobile hard drives, a second HDD may not exactly be compelling. However, if you’ve made the jump to using an SSD as your boot drive, a second hard drive in place of the optical drive is a practically a necessity. SSDs can instantly double the performance of your Mac but they cost significantly more than HDDs. The great news is you don’t have to sacrifice capacity in exchange for raw speed. You can have the best of both worlds with an SSD and an OptiBay HDD installed in your MacBook Pro.

 Loading ...

August 18th, 2009

Will your Mac boot 64-bit Snow Leopard by default? Not unless it's an Xserve

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 8:43 pm

Categories: 10.6, MacBook, MacBook Pro

Tags: Apple Xserve, 64-Bit, Network Technology, Processors, Semiconductors, Hardware, Components, Networking, Jason D. O'Grady

If the current developer seed (build 10A432) of Snow Leopard is indeed the Golden Master version (as has been highly rumored) only Xserves will be able to boot into 64-bit version of Mac OS 10.6 by default. All other Mac users will have to hold down the “6″ and “4″ keys at boot to load the 64-bit kernel and kexts. Every time.

OS News reports that some Macs with 64-bit processors won’t be able to load the 64-bit kernel because they have a 32-bit EFI. The seed notes explain which Macs can boot into a 64-bit kernel and drivers by default (Xserve), and which ones are only “capable” — meaning you have to hold down the 6 and 4 keys at boot.

Here’s the list:

Still not sure if your Mac has the 32 or 64-bit EFI? You can check your machine’s it by entering the following command in Terminal:

It will return either “EFI32″ or “EFI64.”

OS News notes that only Macs with a 64-bit EFI are able to boot the 64-bit Snow Leopard kernel and kexts; an artificial limitation imposed by Apple, even though a 32-bit EFI can boot a 64-bit kernel “just fine.”

What’s worse is that even if your MacBook (non-Pro) has a 64-bit EFI, it will only be able to boot the 32-bit version of Snow Leopard because of a limitation that Apple imposes on MacBooks. The biggest roadkill on Route 64 is the original Mac Pro (which was discontinued January 8, 2008) it won’t be able to boot the 64-bit kernel and drivers either.

If you’re worried about being stuck in the slow lane with a 32-bit EFI, there’s hope. The Netkas blog has posted some workarounds for booting the x86_64 kernel on a 32-bit Mac. Also, keep in mind that it hasn’t been confirmed that 10A432 is the GM version of Snow Leopard and Apple could change the limitations above any time via an EFI update.

July 24th, 2009

Upgrading to Final Cut Server 1.5? Check the best practices note first

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 12:02 pm

Categories: Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, Software, Software Update, Video

Tags: Database, Codec, Server, Apple Inc., Best Practice, Backups, David Morgenstern

Apple on Thursday released a new version of Final Cut Studio, its video production suite. In a technical support note posted the same day, the company reminded IT managers running Final Cut Server, of some “best practices” when installing the software.

On second look, we would do well to think “best warnings” as much as “best practices” here.

For example, if the install is unsuccessful, “you will need to restore the database from the user-accessible backup made during the Final Cut Server 1.5 install.” But wait!

-If the user-accessible backup creation is unsuccessful, do not uninstall Final Cut Server since there will be no backup to restore from during installation. Try creating a backup from the Final Cut Server preference pane on the existing Final Cut Server installation.

-If the installer does not complete while processing the database migration, it’s likely that there is not enough space to generate the database dump or the upgraded database. In this case, attempt the install again after creating additional space on the startup disk.

Read the rest of this entry »

July 22nd, 2009

WiFi drop-off problem still dogging MacBook lines?

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 9:59 am

Categories: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, WiFi

Tags: Router, Apple MacBook, Wireless LANs, Wi-Fi, Notebooks, Wireless And Mobility, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, David Morgenstern

Owners of the latest MacBook models are still complaining about erratic WiFi performance and drop-offs. While the postings in the discussion boards keep piling up without resolution, some point to new solutions.

I wrote about this issue more than a year ago.  At the time, some of the suggested fixes were to check interference by other routers in the area, and to forget about 802.11N compatibility. This latter issue appears to no longer be an issue.

But some owners say this problem is still be present, even on new MacBook Pro models and the MacBook Air.

Several readers found that their PCs held a wireless connection better than their Macs. Horrors! For example, here’s a letter from Canadian reader Mtbguy:

Any updates about the Mac WiFi problem? I have a PC beside my MacBook Air and it’s painful to see my Mac dropped connections and slow downloads while my PC flies like a bird on the waves of WiFi. I have tried everything and still the PC way outperforms the Mac. Mac is supposed to be the jewel of the multimedia age, but it isn’t since I can’t connect to it on Wifi, and in Mac wisdom they did not put an Ethernet connection on my new MacAir.

There are hints at fixes.

Read the rest of this entry »

July 19th, 2009

Users petition Apple for anti-glare screens

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 7:16 pm

Categories: Display, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Screen, Apple Inc., Blogging, Notebooks, Desktops, Internet, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Jason D. O'Grady

If you’re like me — and by all accounts 75 percent of you are — you don’t like glossy screens on your notebooks. The reasons are obvious and have been enumerated on this blog ad nauseum, but suffice it to say, glare.

The Queensland University of Technology has published health and safety considerations for Macs with high gloss screens in which they note:

Reflections and glare on high gloss monitor screens and their relation to the angle of the monitor screen, could cause the operator to adopt awkward postures when viewing the monitor screen and using related equipment.

Its recommendation?

Consider the purchase of other types of monitors which are not high gloss.

And they’re not alone. Plenty of articles have been written about the safety and aesthetic reasons why glossy displays simply don’t make sense on notebook computers.

If you’re also in favor of Apple bringing back anti-glare notebooks be sure to visit and post a comment at the MacMatte blog.
Photo: Digital Versus

 Loading ...

July 15th, 2009

Apple reconsidering anti-glare screen options; users rejoice

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 9:28 pm

Categories: Display, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro

Tags: Apple MacBook, Apple Inc., Apple MacBook Pro, Notebooks, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Jason D. O'Grady

Apple slowly been converting all of its notebook and iMac displays to highly-reflective glass surfaces shortly after the release of the original iPhone in 2007. It really hit me where it hurts when Apple released the MacBook Air (my dream Mac) exclusively with a glossy screen. I complained about the issue in a January 2008 post Death to the glossy display!

The glossy screen annoys me so because of the incredible amount of glare that it reflects. Sure, it might be ok in a dimly lit studio, but as soon as you’re near an outdoor window it’s as reflective as a mirror. This effect is exponentially worse when used outdoors or in a car, train or airplane–the prime locations for using a notebook computer. Have you ever used a glossy display during the day in a vehicle? It’s horrible. Especially if you have a light-colored shirt on.

Almost 6,000 of you voted in a poll I posted on the topic with two-thirds of you claiming that you disliked glossy displays with the other third being evenly split between loving them and not caring either way. I’ve added a new poll at the end of this post to see if opinions have changed in 18 months.

In R.I.P. matte screen displays (posted October 2008) I wrote about Apple’s troubling trend toward glossy displays and how the company seemed to be ignoring the majority of its customers.

What started as an option on the MacBook Pro, became the only choice on the MacBook. Then the iMac. Then the MacBook Air. Now Apple’s gone 100 percent glossy across their entire line.

Later in October 2008 an Apple Core reader emailed me a picture which pretty much summed up how bad the reflection/glare problem can be with a glossy screens on a notebook, writing:

On the flight I decided to get some work done and was amazed at how unusable this is in non-optimal situations.  Like an airplane!? … for this picture I turned the brightness (up to) 100%, shut the window shade and this is an accurate picture of what I saw.

In January 2009, Apple appeared to concede the point that glossy screens aren’t for everyone when they announced the new 17-inch MacBook Pro with a matte screen option. The $50 upcharge for anti-glare was a bit of a slap in the face, but at least it gave users a choice. Then everything went completely down hill when Apple released the rest of the unibody MacBook Pro line with glossy-only displays.

I don’t argue that some users prefer glossy screens. I can tolerate them in indoor environments and in low light conditions. Heck, I’ll even agree that colors can appear more saturated when viewed on a glossy screen. That’s why I’m not calling for Apple to dump glossy entirely, but rather to give users the choice of anti-glare and glossy screens — for the same price.

A story published yesterday on AppleInsider gives hope to fans of anti-glare screens everywhere indicating that Apple may have realized the error of its glossy ways. AI reports that Apple is “mulling the possibility of extending anti-glare display options to more of its Macs” and that “the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros would be the most likely candidates.”

Choice is always good for the consumer, pure and simple. No matter where you stand on the glossy vs. matte debate, its hard to argue with choice.

 Loading ...

July 13th, 2009

Justifying non-removable batteries

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 9:38 pm

Categories: Battery, MacBook Pro

Tags: Apple MacBook, Battery, Apple Inc., Engineering, Jason D. O'Grady

Apple got the ire of its users when it released the original iPhone with a fixed, non-removable battery. The mainstream media and blogosphere (myself included) barbecued Apple for the omission as everything from flat out stupid  to a fatal blow to the success of the device. We see how far that went. Here we are two years later and the angry furor has died down to a dull murmur.

Apple followed by releasing the MacBook Air with a fixed battery and a near-riot ensued, but that too eventually calmed.

Then it shipped the unibody MacBook Pro 17-inch sans removable-battery and people went ballistic yet again. This time Apple spun it as a feature (not a bug!) — the MBP17 battery holds 40 percent more energy as a result of the removal of “unnecessary” latches and doors.

Then Apple hit me where it hurts, releasing the “Mid 2009″ 15-inch MacBook Pro — the workhorse of the lineup — with a fixed battery. “I won’t buy one. No way” I told myself. I simply need the ability to swap in an extra battery when needed, like on a long flight or while camping.

Well yes and no.

There’s no denying the convenience of a removable battery, what’s the actual use case for needing one when the new MBP15 is capable of “7 hours of wireless productivity,” with eight hours possible? You’re flying from New York to Tokyo and need to use your MBP the entire time? Please…

If you’re Warren Buffet, or some other over-achiever you probably can afford/justify a seat in business or first class where the in-seat power outlets live. If you can’t afford the upgrade you’re working far too hard on your MacBook Pro for not enough money. (Hey, wait a minute!)

I’m definitely coming around on fixed batteries, but a case can still be made for removable cells…

Read the rest of this entry »

July 6th, 2009

More about charging Apple's notebook batteries

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 10:13 am

Categories: Battery, MacBook Pro

Tags: Notebook, Apple MacBook, Battery, Apple Inc., Notebook Battery, Engineering, Jason D. O'Grady

On Friday I posted a piece titled The correct way to use your MacBook’s battery that was based on my experience with an Apple Genius and a two-year old MacBook battery that had failed while covered under AppleCare.

The long and short of it was that the technician covered and replaced my battery under warranty because it had been “used properly” — translation: it had a sufficient amount of charge cycles to indicated that it hadn’t been permanently plugged into AC power.

I thought that I’d clarify some issues that have come up in the comments about that piece:

Apple doesn’t recommend that you perform a “deep discharge” (running the battery all the way down to zero) each time you use it. As Apple notes in its battery tips for notebooks a fully discharged battery could fall into a deep discharge state, which renders it incapable of holding any charge. The Apple tech I spoke to told me to run the battery down until the reserve battery warning before plugging it into power again.

While it’s true that the “memory effect” suffered by older battery technology is largely gone in lithium cells, the purpose of running a battery down before recharging it is to keep the chemistry active inside the cells. If your MacBook is always plugged in and just topping off, the chemicals in the lower portion of the battery don’t get used as designed and can decay prematurely.

If you purchased one of Apple’s new “mid 2009″ MacBook Pros with the sealed battery, it’s especially important to calibrate the battery right away and then every few months after that. Apple also advises that if you normally leave your MacBook connected to AC power and rarely use it on battery power you may want to perform this process once a month.

It’s curious that Apple makes no mention of this “use it or lose it” battery guidance in the MacBook Pro user guide. How are people supposed to know about this technique if it’s not in the manual and not on their Web site? I know that I would be furious if it denied my AppleCare claim because my battery wasn’t “used correctly” when Apple never told me how to use it correctly in the first place.

You can keep tabs on the capacity remaining and the number of charge cycles in your battery by viewing the Power section in Apple’s System Profiler app or by using a freeware app like Coconut Battery.

July 2nd, 2009

How-to: Reset a noisy optical drive in the Mid-2009 MacBook Pro

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 3:13 pm

Categories: Hardware, MacBook Pro, Optical Drive

Tags: Optical Drive, Apple MacBook, Disc, Apple MacBook Pro, Jason D. O'Grady

While playing with my new 3GHz “Mid 2009” MacBook Pro I noticed that it made that weird optical drive load/unload sound three times in a row, instead of the usual one, any time the drive was used.

If you don’t have a CD or DVD handy you can invoke the sound by clicking on System Profiler > Hardware > Serial-ATA.

The solution, according to an Apple knowledge base article, is to reset the optical drive as follows:

1. Insert a CD or DVD almost all the way into the drive.
2. Remove the disc.
3. Insert the disc fully into the optical disc drive.

The optical drive is now reset and the noise should no longer be present when you start up or wake the computer.

A video of the procedure is also available and it worked like a charm for me.