#apple

Apple MacBook Pro Dead Battery Problem

If you’re having a problem where your MacBook Pro seems to randomly shut down when you’re running from battery, then you may have hit some dead cells and lowered the capacity of your battery. I had this problem a few months ago and got to chat to one of the Apple Geniuses (Geni-i?) about it. The problem manifested itself by just shutting down my laptop before it gave me a low power warning or anything at all. The way to tell if you have the same problem as me is:

  1. Click the Apple Menu
  2. Click “About This Mac”
  3. Click “More Info”
  4. Select “Power” in the left pane
  5. Under “Battery Information” look for “Full Charge Capacity (mAh)

Apparently this number should be up over 5000 on a healthy battery. When mine died, that number was around 3000 from memory. Currently mine is at 5440. If your battery has a low full charge capacity, then it’s likely it failed, and if you take it back to Apple they will (hopefully, as they did for me) replace it with a brand new one, free of charge.

Hope that helps someone.

Why I Hate Macs

Their keyboard navigation sucks. I mean certain programs have great keyboard shortcuts and all, but I’m talking standard stuff, like tab between buttons in a window and hit enter/space to do something. Launch a file from Finder. There are some basic things that they’re missing here, and it’s killing me.

Having said that, I did just buy my second Mac laptop (15″ PowerBook G4), which I totally love; except for this horrendous shortcoming. And if it’s possible, it actually got worse between my iBook and this PowerBook. A bunch of the programs which got updates have now stopped offering the alternative default outlined buttons in dialogs which I could hit space to activate – which was pretty much the only thing that was better than Windows’ keyboard nav.

Maybe I’m missing something.

UPDATE 2005-12-13: So I figured out how to ‘launch’ an item that’s highlighted in Finder, and it’s almost worse knowing than it was not. Apple-down-arrow. WTF???

Today, Fuck You Apple

WARNING: Explicit language ahead!

I’d like to officially put out a big “fuck you” to Apple today, and here’s why…

  1. Imported some photos into iPhoto this morning, and deleted them from my camera when I was done (never had a problem with that before). I rotated a few of them because they were around the wrong way, and then iPhoto decided that it would lose track of a bunch of them, and corrupt the originals. I have 8,415 photos in my library, and now it looks like new imports are going to be a problem. Fuck you iPhoto.
  2. iTunes said it needed to be updated, so I went ahead and updated it. Re-opened iTunes, and it decided my library file wasn’t valid, so it created a new one, and lost track of all of my playlists. Fuck you too iTunes.
  3. I emptied my Trash yesterday. I don’t know how much stuff was in there, but there was a lot. Next time I tried to shut down, FileVault wanted to reclaim a bunch of space. No problem, does that every time I shut down. It tried for over an hour, before I turned off my PowerBook and gave up. I can’t turn FileVault off either, because it claims that I need a spare 4,088 GIGABYTES (!) of space to create an unencrypted copy of my home folder. Now every time I try to restart/shut down, same thing happens, and it sits there for a long time – so I can’t shut down cleanly. Also, a big “fuck you” to FileVault.
  4. And now, for the grand finale. Mac OS X 10.4.3 System Update. Wow. Complete the update “successfully”. Restart. No Keychain. No Dock. No Accounts in Mail. No application preferences in pretty much anything. In short – fucked. Overall – a MASSIVE FUCK YOU to the Apple Mac OS X 10.4.3 System Update.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go waste half my day reconfiguring everything because Apple decided my settings weren’t important.