That has to be the ugliest-looking keyboard I’ve ever seen. And those Intel and Windows stickers plastered all over it really add to its sexy appeal.

They must really be getting desperate. Let’s hope Apple doesn’t sue them for copying their innovative style, eh?

[via Daring Fireball]

Getting music onto the device wasn’t as straightforward as I had hoped. Most Android phones have limited internal storage capacity and are built with the assumption that the user will store media on a microSD card. The Xoom, however, has lots of internal storage and, at the present time, no working microSD slot.

This is an issue because Android typically doesn’t allow the user to mount the system’s internal flash memory as a conventional mass storage device. You can’t just plug the Xoom into a USB port to drag and drop your music onto the filesystem.

The Xoom uses the MTP protocol to expose the user-visible parts of the device’s internal storage to a desktop computer. MTP tends to work pretty well-out-of-the-box on Windows, but Mac OS X users will need to install the Android File Transfer program. Unfortunately, no such application is available for Linux users. If you want to access the Xoom’s internal storage through Linux, your best bet is to try mtpfs, a FUSE-based MTP protocol implementation.

And people moan about iTunes…

I use SSL for both sending and receiving email, and my mail server uses a self-signed certificate. It sounds like this is a common problem with iOS 4.2.1 and self-signed certificates. Some say it’s a bug, while others say it’s Apple’s intended behaviour with self-signed certs. One thing’s certain – it’s frickin’ annoying!

Anyway, after trying all sorts of things suggested in forums, including wiping my mail settings, rebooting, and so on, I finally came across the solution in this forum post. Here are the steps (slightly modified from Drarok’s post):

The steps assume that you already use Apple Mail to access your mail server via SSL, and that you’ve accepted the mail server certificates in Apple Mail. If you haven’t done this then the certificates won’t be on your Mac.

1. On your Mac, open your Applications/Utilities folder, and double-click the Keychain Access app to open it.
2. Find your mail server in the Name column. There may well be more than 1 entry. Find the entry that has “certificate” in the Kind column, and that has the most recent Expires date. This is the certificate you want. (You should see “This certificate is marked as trusted for…” in the pane at the top of the app.)
3. Right/control-click the certificate and choose Export “(mail server name)”:

   

4. In the File Format dropdown, make sure you select Privacy Enhanced Mail (.pem), NOT Certificate (.cer):
   
5. Save the file on your desktop.
6. Drag the file from your desktop to Mail to attach it to a new mail message. Send the email to yourself.
7. On your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch, open the email. After no doubt getting the annoying popup again (don’t worry, this will be the last time you see it!), you’ll see the certificate attached as a little icon:
   
8. Tap the icon. This will open an Install Profile window:
   

9. Tap the Install button to install the certificate on your device.
10. To get Mail on your device to pick up the new profile, you might need to quit and relaunch Mail. Double-click the Home button while on your home screen, then find the Mail icon. Hold your finger down on it till it wobbles, then tap the little red minus symbol to quit the Mail app. Then relaunch Mail from your home screen. (If you’re running anything earlier than an iPhone 3GS and don’t have multitasking, then simply reboot your device instead.)

You should now find that you can send and receive email without receiving the annoying popup. Woo!

By the way, if you ever want to delete the installed certificate, just fire up the Settings app and go to General. Scroll down, and you’ll see a Profile entry towards the bottom. Tap it, then tap the red Remove button.

My new MacBook Pro came with iMovie ’09, so I decided to edit some 3-year-old DV tapes of my son that I still hadn’t dealt with. The output quality was really bad – it contained what I can only describe as severe posterization or banding in the shadows, which also had the effect of amplifying the noise in the movie. When I tried the same thing on iMovie ’06 (or “iMovie HD”, to give it its proper name), the result was fine. Here are some stills from that movie:

Original DV footage (click image to enlarge):

iMovie ’06 (Exported with Full Quality option) (click image to enlarge):

iMovie ’09 (Exported with HD option) (click image to enlarge):

Take a look at the shadow below his head. iMovie ’09 has absolutely butchered (I don’t think that’s too strong a term) the footage.

Now if you scour the Apple forums you’ll find many people telling you this is because iMovie ’09 deals poorly with interlaced footage, by dropping every other field from the movie, effectively halving the resolution. However, I eventually realised that the interlacing is not the problem here. Even if I deinterlace the footage first with MPEG Streamclip (which produces a very nice result BTW), iMovie ’09 still butchers the deinterlaced video, producing the same horrid output.

Anyway, for my DV footage I gave up on iMovie ’09 and reverted back to iMovie ’06, and I’m very happy with the results. Ironic that a program from 2006 gives better results than one from 2009, but there you go.

iPhone 4 to the rescue? Erm, no

Recently, though, I got an iPhone 4 which shoots 720p HD. Surely iMovie ’09 should produce perfect results with iPhone footage, right? After all, they’re both Apple products!

Wrong. The posterization is still there in the shadows. It’s usually not so noticeable because the iPhone 4 is higher res, and also much less noisy, than my old DV camera. But it’s definitely there.

Incidentally, although I’m using iMovie ’09, the banding is apparently just as bad in iMovie ’11. (I’ll buy iMovie ’11 at some point – if I can bring myself to – just to confirm this.)

Here’s an example. Here I’ve deliberately used some fairly low quality source footage with subtle, noisy shadows to make the effect clear. However, the effect is noticeable, to a greater or lesser extent, in areas of subtle shadow in most 720p footage.

Original iPhone 4 footage (click image to enlarge):

(Download/view movie – 5.6MB)

iMovie ’06 (Exported via QuickTime, H.264, Best quality) (click image to enlarge):

(Download/view movie – 11MB)

iMovie ’09 (Exported via QuickTime, H.264, Best quality) (click image to enlarge):

(Download/view movie – 9.3MB)

Check out the trackpad and surrounding area. Dear oh dear. As you can see, as well as introducing ugly banding, the posterization effect kind of amplifies the noise, making it much more noticeable and annoying:

(By the way, I got a friend to run these tests using Final Cut Pro. The resulting quality was pretty much identical to iMovie ’06 – i.e. acceptable.)

Many people on the Apple forums have reported this problem when using still photos within iMovie (see here and here), but the truth is it happens on any image (still or video) that contains dark, subtle gradients. Unfortunately, many photos contain dark, subtle gradients – and, since they aren’t moving around, you notice the problem more.

For more examples see Clay Alchemist’s post, Why iMovie is a FAILURE, as well as this review of iMovie ’11 by HDSLR Review.

What’s interesting is that you don’t get the banding when exporting any iMovie-rendered content such as maps and globes. So it appears to be a problem with the way iMovie transcodes from the source video to the output, rather than a simple output encoding issue.

A bit of perspective

Now many would say I’m being picky here, and they’d probably be right. Colour banding is an inevitable result of transcoding highly compressed footage. Even Final Cut ends up with a bit of banding in many of these scenarios.

iMovie ’09/’11′s banding problems won’t bother many people. They only happen on certain types of footage (subtle and/or noisy shadows), and they look a lot worse on a high-res Mac display than they do on a TV (which is where many people will be watching home movies). In fact you can hardly see the banding on a TV a lot of the time.

Another thing I realised is that if you calibrate your Mac display properly then the banding is less noticeable. My MacBook Pro display was overly bright and washed out; once I calibrated it properly then much of the posterization and banding were “lost” in the shadows. (In fact, if you’re reading this blog post with a properly calibrated display then you may well be wondering what all the fuss is about! Try turning up your brightness…!)

But it’s still bad…

That said, the banding is definitely there in the output, and it’s definitely worse than either iMovie ’06′s or Final Cut’s output. And I want the best possible quality output I can get for my home movies. These movies of my kids are irreplaceable, and what’s more, I might need to transcode them to another format in 20 years’ time. I don’t want to start out with an inferior quality movie.

I’ve tried messing around with virtually every export option, including QuickTime H.264, AIC and None. They all produce the horrid banding. It definitely seems to be a problem with the way iMovie processes the source video, rather than an export issue.

A workaround (YMMV)

The only thing I’ve found that helps is to increase the brightness of the source footage, taking the shadows above the threshold that causes colour banding. You have to do this before you import the footage into iMovie (increasing the brightness using iMovie merely brightens the banding, since iMovie has already butchered the shadows by that point).

The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to use MPEG Streamclip:

1. Open the original footage in MPEG Streamclip
2. Choose File > Export to QuickTime
3. Select H.264 compression (you can also use Apple Intermediate Codec, but H.264 seems less blocky)
4. Set the Quality at 100% and the Limit Data Rate to 10000 Kbps
5. Leave Frame Size at unscaled
6. Now click Adjustments, and drag the Brightness up to, say, +20
7. Click OK, then Make Movie
8. Import the resulting movie into iMovie, and you should get better results.

You may have to play with the Brightness and maybe Contrast in MPEG Streamclip to get something decent – don’t up the brightness too much or you’ll see artifacting in the blacks in the movie.

For example, here’s the MacBook Pro movie from earlier, with the brightness increased by 15 in MPEG Streamclip before importing into iMovie ’09 and exporting (click image to enlarge):

(Download/view movie – 2.4MB)

You can usually do the same trick with still photos before bringing them into iMovie: Open them in Photoshop, use Image > Adjustments / Shadow/Highlight to brighten the shadows, then drag into iMovie. Another trick is to select the shadows using Select > Color Range, then add some noise (Filter > Noise > Add Noise > 5%, Gaussian, Monochromatic). This particularly helps with smoothing out the banding in large subtle gradients.

At the end of the day, though, these are all just band-aids for the fundamental problem – iMovie ’09/’11 is brutal with the tonal range in shadows.

The way forward

The only permanent solutions to this banding problem seem to be:

• Abandon iMovie ’09/’11 and switch to Final Cut Express (or another NLE) that doesn’t exhibit this banding
• Stick with iMovie ’06, or
• Moan at Apple until they fix it

I’d love to stick with iMovie ’09/’11 since they have so many great features (particularly stabilization and – in ’11 – the rolling shutter fix), and they’re really quick and nice to use. But if the quality’s not there then what’s the point?

Does anyone have any other feedback, suggestions, insights, or workarounds for this problem? Please let me know in the comments. If you can fix the problem then I’ll be eternally grateful, and I’ll also buy you a couple of beers (or PayPal you the monetary equivalent!).

Unfortunately, when you import a DV clip into iMovie ’09 – whether from iMovie HD, or just a raw .dv clip – iMovie ’09 uses the clip’s file creation time as the recording (capture) date/time, not the actual time that the clip was recorded! Very annoying. (I assume that iMovie ’09 uses the correct time if you actually import from a camera, but I haven’t tested that.)

After much digging around, I found a solution to this problem. It’s a bit of a hack, but it works well. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Download a little Java program called DVRecordingDate by Jameel Syed. Unfortunately that download page no longer exists, but I was able to grab a copy via this blog post. (If that blog post and download link should in turn expire, I’ve mirrored it here.)
2. Unzip the file – you should have a DVRecordingDate-1.0 folder.
3. Import your .dv clips into iMovie ’09, if you haven’t already. Or, if you already have your .dv clips that were imported by another app, such as iMovie HD, you can use these clips instead.
4. Copy these imported clips to a new folder somewhere. (In iMovie ’09, your imported clips will be in ~/Movies/iMovie Events/(Event Name).)
5. Open up a Terminal window and change to your unzipped DVRecordingDate-1.0 folder, eg:

   cd ~/Downloads/DVRecordingDate-1.0

6. Run DVRecordingDate by typing the following:

   java DVRecordingDate -rename path/to/your/.dv/clips/folder/*.dv

   This runs really quickly. It reads the .dv files, extracts the capture dates, and renames each file according to the capture date, eg: “clip-2007-02-06 16;26;15.dv”. (iMovie ’09 recognizes filenames in this format as representing the capture date, and then correctly preserves the capture dates in the imported clips.)

7. Open iMovie ’09 again, and import these new clips (File > Import > Movies).
8. You should see the new clips appear in your Events window, all with the correct recording dates. (You can check this by right/control-clicking a clip and choosing “Adjust Clip Date and Time…”.)
9. All done! If you’re happy with the new clips then you can move your old clips to the trash in iMovie.

As it happens, I’ve since abandoned iMovie ’09 for editing my old standard-def DV clips, as it completely ruins them, producing worse-than-VHS-quality results! But that’s another story. However, if you are using iMovie ’09 for DV editing, and it’s working OK for you, then hopefully this tip will help you out with your capture times.

As regular readers will know, I recently decided it was time to replace my ageing 2006 Intel iMac 20″ with something more modern and zippy. At the same time, I was being booted out of the office to make way for offspring #2, so I needed to (a) move into the corner of our bedroom with a tiny desk, and (b) have the flexibility to move around (or even outside) the house when the noise of screaming kids became too much.

At the time, many readers recommended I got the 15″ MBP and an external big display, giving the best of both worlds: Portability when I needed it, and a big screen when I was at home. In many ways, this is a great philosophy. However, in my particular case it would mean that I was stuck with a small screen a lot of the time, when I wasn’t in the bedroom. Plus it would mean a huge screen permanently in the bedroom (not wife-compatible). It would also cost more than just a laptop.

So to me, the 17″ MBP seemed, in many ways, the ideal solution: A big enough screen to be a desktop replacement, but a small enough computer to take up minimal space in the bedroom, and also easy to carry into other rooms of the house, the garden, or even a café.

I’ve had the MBP for a couple of months now. Was it the right choice?

The short answer is: Yes, absolutely. The longer answer follows below…

Unboxing

As I mentioned in my previous post, I bought a refurbished unit, saving myself around AUD $500. Unlike new Apple computers, refurb units are rather unceremoniously boxed (well they have to save money somewhere I guess). In fact, what I assumed was just outer packaging turned out to be the actual box itself, as you can see in the pics below:

The MBP box, as it arrived from Apple

Inside the box

The MacBook Pro with all its bits and pieces

As well as the basic box, the manuals have obviously been used before, and you don’t get a screen polishing cloth (the outrage!). Everything was plastic wrapped as new though.

Design

Photos of this machine don’t do it justice. In fact it can look a bit ugly and boring in photos I’ve seen online – especially the antiglare display version (which I have). In reality though, it’s a thing of beauty. The aluminium enclosure looks and feels great, and is absolutely rock-solid – you can’t flex this thing at all. It feels like it could take a great deal of punishment, and makes my old iMac look flimsy by comparison.

I’d read many reports about the front edge of the unit being remarkably sharp – one reviewer even cut his finger on it, while another enterprising soul took a file to his. So I was a bit apprehensive about this. In fact, though, I don’t find it a problem at all. Yes, it’s certainly a very hard line, but I wouldn’t call it sharp. You’d have to really press with all your might and rub very hard to cut your finger on this thing. Maybe Apple have made it less sharp in recent months. I don’t know.

Setting up

Plugging in and powering on is much like any other Mac, of course. You’re walked through the usual Snow Leopard setup process, and it’s not long before you’re logged in and viewing your desktop.

My old iMac was full of all sorts of cruft, and had a few annoyances such as my username never appearing in the Login Window user list (still not sure how that happened!). So rather than use Migration Assistant to import the apps and data from my old iMac, I decided to start with a clean slate, then just manually install and copy over what I needed later.

(For the record, I used Migration Assistant later on to transfer stuff from my first MBP to the replacement unit. It worked like a charm, even transferring DRM-encumbered apps like Photoshop with no problem.)

It’s funny setting up a new Mac after all these years. You forget all the little default settings that you need to tweak to get things how you want it. For me, this includes:

• Speeding up the slow mouse pointer
• Turning off DHCP (I have servers on my network and like to be in control of my IP addresses!)
• Getting Mail to put the recent messages at the top of the list, not the bottom
• Turning on Full Keyboard Access so you can actually tab through all dialog widgets
• Tweaking the Terminal key bindings for things like page up/down and home/end so that they work sensibly

The setup process didn’t take too long, though, and it wasn’t long before I was up and running with my new MBP. I copied over my Documents, Pictures and other folders from the old Mac (connected via gigabit ethernet cable to save time – it still took hours), and installed the apps I needed. Nice job!

The display

I had my doubts about the readability of a display that was both smaller and had more pixels than my iMac (1920×1200 vs 1680×1050). Indeed, when I first fired up Mail I couldn’t believe how small the message text was! Fortunately you can change the various font sizes used in Mail (Preferences > Fonts & Colors). Other apps like Firefox, Safari, TextEdit and iWork also let you zoom in, so the high pixel density isn’t such an issue.

In fact, I found after about a week that I got used to the smaller default text sizes. Now, when I look at text on my iMac screen it looks comically big and blocky by comparison!

The bigger screen real estate (in terms of pixels, if not inches) is really nice. Lovely to be able to look at more windows side by side. I’d find it hard to go back to a lower res now.

From my web designer perspective, one interesting side-effect of these newer high-res displays is that web text and images look a lot smaller, which makes me want to use larger fonts and graphics when designing and building sites. Also, web pages designed for 800×600 (like, er, my current blog design) now look ridiculously thin. 800×600 has become the new 640×480. Likewise, 1024×768 is the new 800×600.

The display itself is gorgeous, bright, and clear. It is to my iMac’s display what my iMac’s display was to my old crappy PC CRT monitor. In other words, it makes the iMac’s display look dull and yellow by comparison.

The keyboard

My old iMac has the old-school Apple keyboard with the clear plastic surround (picture here), so I’m not used to the new low-profile Apple keyboards as featured on the latest iMacs and this MacBook Pro. Call me an old fogey, but I felt more comfortable with the old style keyboard, at least in theory. The new ones remind me of a ZX Spectrum when I look at them.

In fact, though, the MacBook Pro’s keyboard is absolutely lovely – much better than I thought it’d be. The somewhat reduced travel is odd, but once you get used to it you can actually type really fast, since your fingers don’t need to press down as much. The lack of numeric keypad is OK (I can understand why Apple missed it out – the keyboard and trackpad would be off-balance if they added one, and it would also feel cramped). Having no page up/down/home/end keys is a bit odd, but I’m adjusting to using the bottom-left “fn” key to access these functions.

I’d say I can actually type faster on this laptop than I could with my old iMac keyboard. So call me a convert.

The multi-touch trackpad

Again, the trackpad was yet another area where I was very sceptical. I’ve always hated trackpads, right from when I first used one in an Apple store circa 1995. They’re imprecise compared to a mouse, they jerk the pointer around as you try to click something, they only have 1 or 2 buttons and no scroll-wheel, and you end up swiping and swiping and swiping to move a cursor across a large screen. They suck! Give me the old IBM TrackPoint “nipple” any day.

Therefore I assumed I’d be using my MBP with a mouse most of the time, and only using the trackpad when I was out and about.

You know what? I’ve never plugged the mouse in once. The trackpad is that good. The multi-touch redeems it. Being able to scroll up/down/left/right with 2 fingers is actually nicer and smoother than using a mouse ball, and the iOS-style inertial scrolling is really, really nice (and works on all apps too). Other gestures like pinch to zoom also work well.

It seems a lot more precise than trackpads of yore (being larger probably helps). Also there are no separate buttons – you click by pressing down on the trackpad itself, which behaves like 1 giant button – which means no awkward finger/thumb contortions are required when dragging. You can also click and hold the bottom left area with your thumb and repeatedly swipe with another finger to drag, which means you can drag things as far as you want.

The trackpad is also nice and programmable via System Preferences – you can set up the bottom right corner of the trackpad to function as the secondary click, as well as tweak how dragging works.

Very impressed. In fact if I ever bought another iMac I think I’d use Apple’s new Magic Trackpad most of the time, and save the mouse just for gaming (where it still reigns supreme).

Battery life

When it’s sunny, I frequently unplug the laptop and take it outside to work on the deck. I find I can easily work for 5 hours on battery power before it starts getting towards empty. This is pretty good going – 5 hours of productive work in a day is about as much as I can hope for anyway!

I’m not that familiar with laptops, but I understand that 5 hours is pretty good for a laptop these days. I wouldn’t want it to be any less than that, especially as the battery isn’t interchangeable.

Speed demon – or is it?

One of my primary reasons for wanting a new Mac was performance. When you find yourself waiting as you switch between apps, and you’re getting beachballs when you have all of your apps running, then it’s probably time to upgrade.

My new MacBook Pro should, on paper, run rings around the iMac:

Since it’s so much more highly specced, I guess I expected everything to happen pretty much instantly on the MBP. In fact, I was a bit disappointed. For example, OpenOffice (yes I know it’s a hog) still takes 22 seconds to open, vs. 32 seconds on the old iMac. I still get beachballs every day, and I still occasionally get annoyed at the little lags and pauses that sometimes occur when using apps and switching between them.

That said, Windows XP in VMware is now perfectly usable, and doesn’t bring the entire system to a crawl (although Mac apps do become a bit more sluggish when it’s running). Photoshop filters are also noticeably quicker (not that I use them much), and HandBrake encodes are much faster. So the increased RAM and faster processor are definitely doing the job.

I guess I would say that the speed of the MacBook Pro is “acceptable”, versus “intolerable” on the old iMac. But then I am extraordinarily impatient.

(It’s odd how a computer always seems fast when you first buy it, but 4 years later the exact same computer – even after reinstalling the OS – seems sluggish. Must be a perception thing, I guess.)

Portability rocks!

I am so glad I bought a laptop, rather than another iMac. Being able to flick out the MagSafe plug, snap the laptop shut, stick it under my arm and take it into the living room to work is just brilliant. I get bored easily, and find I really like to change my working environment constantly, so this works really well for me. It’s also great for those times when the noisy kids just get a bit too much and I need to retreat to the shed to work!

Many people consider the MBP 17″ to be too unwieldy, with the 15″ being the sweet spot. I disagree. For me, the 17″ feels like the perfect size for a laptop. I think it’s partly down to Apple’s clever engineering that makes the unit look and feel smaller than most other 17″ laptops. Sure, it’s a bit on the weighty side, and if I was lugging it around on the train to work every day then it might be a bit much. But for moving around the house and the odd trip to a café, it’s no problem at all.

Do I miss the bigger 20″ screen? Not really. It helps that the MBP’s screen actually has more pixels, I think. It’s perfectly fine for pretty much all of my work, and I don’t pine for that big screen like I thought I might.

That said, I wouldn’t want the MBP display to be even 1″ smaller than it is. The 15″ would drive me nuts for day-to-day work.

Conclusion

In case you hadn’t already guessed, I’m very happy indeed with my new MacBook Pro. Sure, there are a few drawbacks compared to a desktop computer, such as the physically smaller screen and inferior ergonomics (although being able to move around a lot helps with this). It’s also not as powerful as a modern iMac, although I reckon it’ll see me right for the next 3 years at least.

But many of the things that I thought would be drawbacks – such as the keyboard and trackpad – actually turned out to be advantages. Plus, being able to work wherever I want, on my main work computer, is really liberating.

Price-wise, it’s pretty much the most expensive Apple laptop you can currently buy. But here’s a funny thing. Even when you add in the expensive AppleCare for laptops, I paid almost exactly the same for this lappy – AUD $3,200 – as I did for my old iMac 4 years ago. In fact, the iMac was $50 more expensive. Sure, the MBP is a refurb, but it really shows how the price of Apple stuff has come down in recent times.

I might move back to a desktop computer at some point – such as when I have a dedicated office room again – but right now, this laptop hits the spot for me, and I am slowly but surely falling in love with it. Top marks Apple!

And what of the dear old iMac? Don’t worry – it’s still serving a useful life, as a media server for our new Apple TV (of which more soon!).

When I last wrote, I asked the question: What sort of new Mac should I buy? After much discussion and deliberation, I decided to get a MacBook Pro 17″, with a 2.66GHz Intel i7 CPU, 4GB RAM, 5400RPM drive, and – because I’m a bit of a traditionalist – I ponied up the extra cash for the antiglare display. (The glossy just doesn’t do it for me.)

Superb Refurb

In fact I managed to get a real bargain by waiting patiently for the right model to turn up on Apple’s Refurbished Mac list. When it did, I snapped it up for A$2749 instead of A$3259 for a new model – saving myself A$510. I’d have liked the 7200RPM drive but, apart from that, it was the exact spec I wanted.

Now I must say that I think Apple’s refurbished products are great value for money. I’ve now used 2 refurbished MacBook Pros (more on that later!) and they’ve both been as good as new. There’s been the odd very minor blemish on the case, but nothing that it wouldn’t get within a week of normal use anyway. Both machines have performed solidly without a hitch, hardware-wise.

MacBook Rave

Anyway, I didn’t want to start reviewing the MacBook Pro – I’ll save that for a later post. The point of this post is to talk about this:

Check it out around 0:43. I first noticed this weird flickering/flashing of the display brightness when waking the MBP from sleep occasionally. I then noticed it as I returned to the Login Window and started closing the lid (the Apple logo on the lid flashes like crazy also). Eventually I discovered that if I set the Login Window brightness to be different from the desktop brightness (or if the ambient light sensor previously did so) then it reliably flickers. Sometimes it’s just 3 or 4 flickers; sometimes it can go on strobing for about 10 seconds, creating an impressive “disco” effect in my office.

AppleCare to the rescue?

At first it didn’t bother me, but it kept happening more and more. Thinking it might be a hardware issue, and because the MBP was still within the 14-day DOA period, I called AppleCare and explained the problem. The tech went through the usual diagnostics, PRAM/SMC resets, etc. He also got me to do an Archive & Install (or, more accurately – since A&I no longer exists – to reinstall Snow Leopard on top of itself). No change.

Eventually he gave up and escalated the case to senior tech support (i.e. someone actually at Apple instead of a call centre!). This chap, Sam, was very helpful, and walked through some more diagnostics. He’d never heard of this problem, and nor had any of his colleagues. Eventually he got me to try an Erase & Install, to rule out any possibility of my installed apps or system config causing the flicker.

Here’s where it started to get interesting. After an Erase & Install (10.6.3), I didn’t get the flicker (although there were occasionally 1 or 2 slight flickers/flashes as it tried to change the brightness level between the desktop and Login Window). However, after applying all the updates from Software Update, the flickering returned! So it was looking like a software issue of some sort.

Time to get nerdy

So this time, I went back to a bare-metal system with another Erase & Install, and installed the updates via Software Update one at a time:

• 10.6.4: No flicker
• Snow Leopard Graphics Update 1.0: No flicker
• Security Update 2010-005 1.0: No flicker
• Security Update 2010-006 1.0: No flicker
• iTunes 10.0.1: No flicker
• Safari 5.0.2: No flicker
• Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 2 1.0: No flicker
• Magic Trackpad and Multi-Touch Update 1.0… BOOM! (As Mr Jobs would say.) The flicker’s back with a vengeance!

I then repeated the experiment but installed only 10.6.4 and the Magic Trackpad update. (10.6.4 is needed in order to install the trackpad update.) Again, the flicker returned as soon as I installed the Magic Trackpad update.

Now, quite why a trackpad update would mess up the display brightness is beyond me – as is why I even need a trackpad update (it appears to do exactly nothing to the trackpad on my MBP). But it would definitely seem to be related to the problem.

A wave of the hand

Now at the end of this rather lengthy process, I noticed something else interesting. Generally the rapid flickers only happen fairly randomly – say, once every 3 or 4 returns to the Login Window. However, I noticed that if I happened to start closing the lid while returning to the Login Window, the flickers happened every time. How could moving the lid affect the flickering?

My first thought was the ambient light sensor. This is built into every MBP and it adjusts the display brightness according to the light in the room. However I’d turned this off as part of my testing (System Preferences > Displays > Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes), so I had ruled this out. What I eventually realised, though, is that the Login Window overrides this setting! So even if you’ve turned it off for your user account, it turns back on again in the Login Window.

And indeed, if I moved my hand over the sensor as the Login Window appeared, the flickering happened every time. It’s almost as if the light sensor algorithm is “fighting” with the algorithm to change to the new Login Window brightness level, causing the rapid flicker.

Well I felt I was now getting somewhere, but Sam at Apple was still stumped as to the cause of the problem. After discussing with his colleagues, they decided the best bet was to declare the machine DOA (dead on arrival) and replace it with a new one. This would rule out any problems with the hardware.

MacBook Pro #2

Now I’d already spent ages getting everything transferred over from my iMac (I have quite a complex setup), and knew it would take time to transfer it all again to a new MBP. So I managed to do a deal with Apple where they sent me the new MBP straight away, and I got to keep the old MBP for a couple of weeks while I set up the new one. (This doesn’t involve selling your soul to the devil, but it does require a bit of paperwork and a credit card.)

When I got the new MBP, I noticed out of the box that it did the slight flicker that happened after the Erase & Install on the old MBP. Then I installed 10.6.4 and the Magic Trackpad update and… the rapid flickering/strobing was there. It’s exactly the same as the old MBP!

So at this point it must be either:

• A software issue (most likely – but then why has no-one else noticed/reported it?)
• A hardware problem affecting that particular batch of Aussie MBPs (unlikely)
• I’m incredibly unlucky and got 2 dud machines (very unlikely)

At the moment the ball’s in Apple’s court. I’ve sent them a System Profiler report so they can see my exact setup at the time of the flickering (this is a great Mac OS X feature BTW). Sam has passed the info back to Apple engineering – they’ve managed to reproduce a “similar” problem on their test setups, and are looking into it further.

I’ve now reinstalled OS X on the new machine, applied all Software Updates except the Magic Trackpad update (to avoid the flicker), got all my stuff across, sent the old MBP back, and now I’m a happy camper.

Another minor plus for me is that the newer MBP (left in the pic below) seems to have a brighter, warmer display than the old one (right):

New MBP (left) and old MBP (right)

Was it all worth it?

I felt like I’d wasted a lot of time with this flickering problem. I spent hours and hours diagnosing the problem with Apple, then I had to deal with transferring all my setup twice – first onto the old MBP, then onto the new. That’s a lot of wasted work hours.

On the plus side, Apple were generally helpful and understanding throughout the process, I got another machine (albeit also refurb) with an extra month’s warranty and a nicer display, and they also threw in a 7200RPM drive for free by way of compensation (though I had to install it myself!). So now I have the exact machine I wanted in the first place. I can’t complain.

Flickering problems aside, the new MBP has been just as rock-solid as the first, and I’m very glad I made this purchase. I’ll do an actual review of the MBP soon.

Can you reproduce this display flicker problem with your MacBook (Pro)? I’d love to hear from others that have this problem in the comments below.

(There’s also a thread I started on the Apple Discussion Forums about this issue.)

But what new Mac to buy? I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts/questions, partly to help me think things through, but also to ask you, the reader, for your opinions. Also I hope this post might be useful for others looking to buy a new Mac.

My current old banger

My trusty iMac 2GHz Core Duo 20″ (2GB RAM) that I bought back in May 2006 is finally getting long in the tooth, I fear. The poor dear now grinds to a halt in daily use. Here’s what I tend to have running, on average:

• Mail
• Firefox with 10-20 tabs
• Safari with a couple of tabs
• Photoshop CS3
• OfficeTime
• Things
• iTunes

It just about copes with that (although it can take a second or 2 to switch between apps). But then if I need to open a couple more apps, like

• OpenOffice
• Chrome
• Preview

…then it really starts to slow down, with plenty of beachballs.

Then if I fire up WinXP in VMware Fusion 3 to test a website in IE… forget it! Might as well go and make a cup of coffee while it boots the VM.

Painful.

I suspect the main culprit with this old iMac is the 2GB RAM limit. Even before firing up VMware, I’m at about 70% RAM usage according to iStat Menus. Fire up VMware, and stuff starts paging like crazy.

(At the back of my mind, though, is this thought: My iMac was nice and fast when I bought it, so why is it so slow now? I’m still running pretty much the same stuff now as I was back then. I suspect a lot of it is down to VMware Fusion 3 being more power-hungry than my original Parallels Desktop 2, combined with software generally becoming more bloated over time, but I’m not sure.)

For the record, I’m a web designer/developer and use my Mac all day, every day for browsing websites, blogging, coding, browser testing and Photoshop work, plus the usual office type apps.

Out of space in more ways than one

On top of the slow Mac issue, I’m shortly getting booted out of the office to make room for offspring #2, so I’ll be ensconced in front of a little sewing machine desk in the bedroom. The missus doesn’t want me to take up much space in there, plus a big iMac screen would be quite imposing in the bedroom. Also it’d be good to be able to work elsewhere in the house sometimes (such as late at night when she’s trying to get to sleep).

Laptop here I come?

So this all points to *gulp* a MacBook Pro. I say *gulp* because those things are expensive! And I suspect I’ll need the 17-inch model too, since it will be my main machine and I tend to hammer my main computer fairly intensively (lots of apps & windows open). And I think I’d really miss the iMac’s 20″ screen if I went down to a MBP 15″.

I need something that will last 3-4 years

Although my iMac is pretty damn slow now, it’s lasted me over 4 years, which is pretty good going. I’d like my new Mac to last the same amount of time. I simply can’t be bothered with the hassle of researching and buying a new computer every year or 2.

Glossy or antiglare?

Another issue I’m thinking about is whether to go for the glossy or the antiglare (matte) screen.

Is it worth spending the extra A$70 for the antiglare display? Is the glossy really hard to use in bright light (e.g. outside, or near a big window)? Is the glossy actually better than the antiglare in terms of picture quality? (On a related note, how do users of the new iMacs – which are all glossy screens – cope with glare and reflections?)

More worryingly, I’ve read reports that the glossy screen can cause headaches and eyestrain with prolonged use – not good for someone like me who uses their computer 40+ hours a week. Hmm.

4GB or 8GB?

Since I want this thing to last as long as possible, I’ll probably go for the faster Intel i7 and 7200RPM drive options. (My budget won’t stretch to SSD, sadly!)

But what about the RAM? After my woes with running out of RAM on my iMac I’m sorely tempted by the 8GB, but will I really need it? It costs a heck of a lot more – A$560 more, in fact. Will 4GB be fine?

Also, what if I wanted to upgrade to 8GB later? Presumably I’d have to buy 2 x 4GB modules (since the 4GB MBP comes with 2 x 2GB modules, and only has 2 slots), and throw the old RAM in the trash / sell it on eBay. (Sounds expensive.)

New or refurbished?

There are some tempting refurbs on the Aussie Apple Store, although it seems that you don’t get much choice. For example, right now there’s a 2.53GHz Intel Core i5 with glossy display, or a 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with antiglare. (Bizarrely they’re pretty much the same price – isn’t Intel Core 2 Duo pretty old tech these days?!) Still, I could probably save at least A$400 by getting a refurb vs the equivalent new model, so it’s tempting.

AppleCare, or live dangerously?

I got AppleCare for my iMac and did actually use it a couple of times (when the iMac’s hard drive and GPU failed). It definitely saved me money and hassle in the long run.

AppleCare for laptops is a lot more expensive though (A$579). What’s more it looks like, ironically, the MBP is a lot *easier* to open than my iMac was (just take the bottom plate off), which means it’d be easier to replace components myself if they fail.

I expect I won’t bother for now, but maybe buy it separately once the year’s warranty is nearly up.

Forget the laptop – buy a new iMac instead?

Ideally I really would like an iMac again. Lovely big screen (although glossy might not be ideal), nice and powerful, and much more bang for the (Aussie) buck! However it would mean that I’m basically stuck in one place (i.e. the bedroom). And if there’s one thing I’ve learned recently, it’s this: If you have kids, and not much space, it helps if you can move your office around easily!

I’m also a bit concerned about using a laptop constantly for 4 years. Will the keyboard drive me crazy? Will I be a hunchback at the end of it, or are laptops not as terrible ergonomically as they used to be?

So, what do you Mac users out there think? Desktop or laptop? Do you prefer glossy or matte? Is 8GB overkill, most of the time? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please sound off in the comments below! Thanks

(Photo credits: Bogdan Suditu, p_a_h)

I can understand how the old signal strength bars could make people think that the attenuation was bigger than it really is (although 24dB is still a big drop, whichever way you look at it).

I can also appreciate that all phones have antenna weak spots, and although the iPhone 4 attenuation is worse than most, this is counterbalanced by the improved reception overall.

Drawing attention to the weak spot with a black bar – X marks the spot, as Steve Jobs put it – certainly doesn’t help matters.

However, what I don’t understand is is this: Why did Apple put the weak spot where most people would touch the phone when using it? This, to me, is a design flaw.

Look at Apple’s own comparison with other phones’ weak spots. All the other phones have the weak spot on the top or bottom. These areas aren’t normally touched when holding the phone, so the weak spots aren’t a problem. Common sense.

So why didn’t Apple put the weak spot on the top or bottom of the iPhone 4?

I also don’t understand the whole “don’t hold it that way” thing. Many people on the MacRumors forums seem to think that most people wouldn’t hold a phone with the ball of their thumb touching the bottom left hand corner – unless they’re left handed. I’m right handed, and this is the natural position that I hold my iPhone 3G in when using it (and when making calls):

How else are you supposed to hold it? Like this?

I don’t get it.

I have no problem with a phone’s signal attenuating when held – that is to be expected. What I don’t understand is why Apple put the weak spot in such a commonly-held place on the iPhone 4, then told people to change the way they hold the phone. Just seems like madness.

Maybe someone who knows more about antenna technology than me (not hard!) can explain…?