MacBook, MacBook Pro Software Update 1.1
Fixes bug where keyboard input stopped working on MacBooks and MacBook Pros. ★
-
Apple finally fixes some MacBook keyboard issues
Filed under: Laptops, Peripherals We're sure Apple had a fix in the works long before we got around to posting a poll about it, but if the response to Saturday's informal questionnaire was any indication, this update is long overdue. Apple just posted a new software update for MacBooks and MacBook Pros running Leopard, which solves the problem with the keyboard freezing up sporadically for a minute or so, which had at least two Engadget editors' keyboards in fits. Apple still hasn't addressed the issue with dropping the first character when typing into a text box on certain MacBook Pros, but this is certainly a good move -- though would it have really killed Apple to be a bit more talkative about the whole process?[Thanks, Turgemanster] Permalink | Email this | Comments
-
Maccast 2008.10.19
A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Show 241. Strong Mac market share. An Ive for design. $999 White Macbook. The new 13" Macbook. The new 15" Macbook Pros. The 17" Macbook Pro refresh. Macbook Air updates. New 24" LCD Cinema Display. What did I like? What did I dislike? NVIDIA GeForce graphics details. Mini DisplayPort details. Other details not mentioned. Macbook and Macbook Pro software update 1.2. Apple offers fixes for NVIDIA flaws in older Macbooks. New Snow Leopard features detailed. USB Webcam follow-up. Don't discount Emoji. Time Machine resets on restore to new Mac Special thanks to our sponsors: Circus Ponies NoteBook - The Easy Way to Get Organized on the Mac. Try it FREE for 30 Days. New music, Sore Dog by Montgomery A Thousand (iTunes) EOL: Lego Apple Store There is no spoon. -- The Matrix (1999) Shownotes in: HTML or OPML Subscribe to the Podcast Feed or Get the MP3
-
Apple already releases updates for new notebooks
The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros were just announced yesterday, but Apple has already released Software Update 1.2, which contains a number of fixes for the new machines.Read More...
-
Firmware updates released for all new MacBooks
Apple tonight released a rash of SMC and EFI firmware updates for all the new “unibody” notebooks: including the (Late 2008) MacBooks, MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs. The updates are only for the new Late 2008 MacBooks though – not for all MacBooks. If you need the updates, they will show up in Software Update. For [...]
-
New MacBooks said to have issues with maxed out RAM, faulty NVIDIA GPU
While most of the complaints about the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros have focused on things like the screen or the absence of a certain much-loved port, it appears that another problem has been bugging some folks that went ahead and maxed out the RAM on their shiny new laptop. Apparently, loading 4GB of RAM (either from Apple or a third party) has caused at least a few MacBooks and MacBook Pros to freeze up randomly which, for the time being at least, can only be remedied by dialing things back to 2GB or 3GB of RAM (something tested by jkOnTheRun). While Apple isn't saying anything publicly about this just yet, one member of the Apple support forum claims to have heard from an Apple engineer who says that Apple is, in fact, aware of the problem and that a software update is on the way to fix it, possibly within a few days.In related MacBook news, The Inquirer is now reporting that the new MacBook Pro's NVIDIA 9600M GPU suffers from the same so-called "bad bump" problem that has plagued previous generation MacBook Pros (and provided plenty of fodder for The Inq) which can, in some cases, lead to blank screens and other video errors. It's not clear, however, if the problem affects all MacBook Pros or just a bad batch, although there does appear to be a somewhat sizable number of complaints cropping up.Read - jkOnTheRun, "MacBook fussy memory situation- maybe 4 GBs is too much"Read - the Inquirer, "Inquirer confirms Apple Macbook Pros have Nvidia bad bump material"[Via Electronista] Filed under: LaptopsNew MacBooks said to have issues with maxed out RAM, faulty NVIDIA GPU originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
-
Apple issues update for no-button trackpads, but be cautious
Apple has issued a Software Update for users of late-2008 MacBooks and MacBook Pros that purports to fix issues users have been having with registering clicks on the trackpad. But be careful, because one Ars staffer already ran into an issue during update.Read More...
-
Apple (probably) prepping a patch for mysterious clicking issue on new MacBooks
Filed under: Laptops, Peripherals We're normally fans of "quirky," but there's nothing more frustrating than a quirky clicking experience, as has been reported by many of the ungrateful bastages who've snapped up the new MacBook and MacBook Pros since launch. The primary reported problem was with certain physical clicks not registering on that schmancy new glass trackpad, no small annoyance. Earlier this week an email from a disgruntled user to Mr. Customer Support himself, Steve Jobs, was responded to by a call from Apple's customer relations saying that they were "researching" the issue, and a couple days later a similar request from another user was met with a terse email from Steve: "Software fix coming soon." Of course, these conversations could all be the delusional fantasies of click-addled attention hounds, but we're going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that Apple does in fact have a fix in the works for this problem. So, while they toss that presumed update together, how has the new trackpad been treating you?View PollApple (probably) prepping a patch for mysterious clicking issue on new MacBooks originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
-
MacBook/Pro trackpad fix coming soon
Filed under: Hardware, Software Update, Steve Jobs, Macbook Pro, MacBookSeveral people who own the new, unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros are reporting trouble with the glass trackpads. Specifically, it's been failing to register clicks, seemingly at random. One user even told PC Pro, "I don't even attempt to use this machine unless I'm at a desk using a mouse."One user sent a complaint to Steve Jobs via email, and (reportedly) received the brief reply, "Software fix coming soon." We couldn't confirm that Steve himself actually sent this message, but he has responded to user emails in the past. Personally, I've only used a new MacBook for a few hours and didn't experience any issues. We'll let you know as soon as this update becomes available.[Via AppleInsider]MacBook/Pro trackpad fix coming soon originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
-
★ The iPhone 3G
Pt. 1: Macro Let’s just say it up front: the iPhone is the greatest piece of consumer electronics that has ever been made. If I could travel back 20 years and show my then 15-year-old self just one thing the future of today, it would be the iPhone. It is our flying cars. Star Trek-style wireless long-distance voice communicator. The content of every major newspaper and magazine in the world. An encyclopedia. Video games. TV. Etc. None of these features is quite what an imagination of the ’80s would have predicted. The TV, for example, is far from the imaginary “pocket TV” of my youth, which was rooted in the concept of broadcast TV channels. But it is a TV. In some ways it is worse; you cannot use an iPhone to, say, watch a live broadcast of a sporting event. In many ways, though, it is better; it stores content, including full-length major motion pictures, which you can watch whenever you want. A pocket full of movies was simply unimaginable 20 years ago. And it’s all in one easily pocketed gizmo. Each of these features is of course available in devices other than the iPhone. A checklist of the iPhone’s features is not, in and of itself, impressive. Some competing devices, in fact, offer all the same fundamental features of the iPhone. The difference is in the overall experience. (Even a $10 Nokia dumbphone, combined with today’s worldwide cellular and satellite phone network, can do the Star Trek-wireless voice communicator trick. That alone would be impressive compared to the brick-sized fabulously expensive cellular phones of the ’80s.) Everything Apple as a company has ever stood for, good and bad, was to get to the point where they could make this. It’s a computer you can take with you everywhere, so small you wouldn’t really even want it much smaller, even if it were possible. In software, Apple went back and rethought certain priorities with the iPhone compared to Mac OS X. On Mac OS X, scrolling prioritizes visual fidelity but can be painfully slow. (Not so much with today’s Mac hardware, but in the early days of Mac OS X, scrolling or resizing windows could be molasses slow. iPhone scrolling, on the other hand, is almost always fluid and perfectly responsive, but the content often doesn’t keep up. The checkerboard background in MobileSafari is the most obvious example of this. The illusion that your thumb or finger is actually moving the screen contents is astoundingly effective. Mac OS X values the visual over the feel; iPhone OS is vice versa, and I prefer it. In hardware, the radical reduction of physical buttons has proven to be genius. The iPhone not only eschews a keypad and keyboard, but also those green/red place-call/end-call buttons that you see on nearly every other phone in the world. The iPhone has just four buttons: power, volume up, volume down, and home. That seems just right. I’ve gotten satisfyingly proficient typing with the on-screen touch keyboard. My single biggest gripe is that my right thumb often hits the Return key when I’m trying to hit the space bar. In another five years, one of today’s iPhones will be no more than a sentimental curiosity, painfully slow both in terms of networking and computation. The iPhone has significant and obvious shortcomings. But it is an order of magnitude better than anything that came before it. Pt. 2: Micro I bought my original iPhone on day one. When the iPhone 3G arrived, I figured I could wait. In early August, one month after they went on sale, I upgraded. In a nut, the iPhone 3G is aptly named, in that it isn’t much more than the iPhone plus 3G. If they’d called it “iPhone 3G (and GPS)” the name alone would have completely described what was new, technically at least. The iPhone 3G uses the same CPU and has the same amount of RAM (128 MB) as the original. It is an iteration. If you’ve got an original EDGE iPhone, the only factor that really matters with regard to whether you’d be happy after upgrading is the quality of the 3G service where you live. I, apparently, am lucky. 3G service in center city Philadelphia, the surrounding suburbs, and at the New Jersey shore has been terrific. Even before the 2.1 OS update, I had few complaints about dropped calls, and network speed has far exceeded my expectations. Browsing with 3G on the iPhone generally feels just about as fast as browsing with Wi-Fi — the CPU often seems to be the limiting factor in MobileSafari’s rendering speed, not the network. In addition to the faster data speeds and higher-quality audio, 3G offers one additional advantage over EDGE: 3G can take an incoming phone call while simultaneously using the data network. I missed a surprising number of calls on my old iPhone while dicking around waiting for pages to load in Safari. The main problem I initially ran into with 3G networking was that it would occasionally get stuck. I’d try to load a web page, and the inside-the-location-field progress bar in MobileSafari would simply never get past the “h” in “http:”. In most cases, turning the iPhone completely off and back on would fix this. Even better: I have not seen this problem once since upgrading to the 2.1 OS. Tethering my 3G connection with NetShare — sadly, no-longer-available from the App Store — my MacBook Pro achieves download speeds of 700-900 kb/s, and upload speeds of 200-400 kb/s. Tethering with EDGE, I see download speeds of about 200 kb/s. Thus, for me, networking far exceeds Apple’s marketing claim of “double the speed”, and for that alone the upgrade price and slightly higher monthly plan are well worth it.1 (NetShare is simply remarkable, and deserves a full digression. After just one month of owning an iPhone 3G, the $10 I spent on NetShare is some of the best money I’ve ever spent. The multi-step process required to get it working, which you can only partially automate, is a hassle. If Apple can build a feature like this into the iPhone itself, it will be a smash hit feature, and, if it were something that only worked with Mac OS X, yet another impetus for iPhone/iPod users to switch from Windows. (My use of “can” is a reference to the challenge of getting phone carriers on board with it, not any technical hurdle.) The biggest limitation using NetShare is that because it’s a SOCKS proxy, it mostly only supports HTTP/HTTPS networking traffic. iChat can be configured to use a SOCKS proxy, but I’m aware of no way to get Apple Mail to use a SOCKS proxy for IMAP or SMTP, which means Mail doesn’t work using NetShare. But for web surfing, NetShare is a spectacular success. Yes, I’m aware that you can buy external Mac-compatible EVDO dinguses from Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint, but those are separate services that cost like $60 per month. With NetShare, I paid $10 one time and I can use it with my existing iPhone data plan without paying one additional cent. Performance is way better than the Wi-Fi service in most hotels.) The 3G’s ringer is louder. (I sometimes missed calls with my original iPhone because I didn’t hear or feel the phone ringing in my pocket.) The speakerphone sounds much better. As noted shortly after the 3G shipped, the color temperature of the display is different — warmer if you like it, yellower if you don’t. I prefer the original (cooler) temperature, but it’s only noticeable to me when compared side-by-side. Temperature aside, the screen seems identical to that of the original. Looking at the front face, the form factor is practically unchanged. The 3G is slightly wider overall, but since the display is the same size, there is now a small black border between the screen and the chrome, where previously the screen ran nearly chrome-to-chrome. The back is completely different, plastic instead of metal, and differently shaped. (I chose black, of course.) Aesthetically, I prefer the original iPhone case on all counts: shape, appearance, touch. The original iPhone is, to put it bluntly, sexier. I even liked the black plastic panel at the bottom of the original iPhone — it made it easy to tell which way the phone was oriented without looking at it, such as when pulling it from a pocket. From a practical standpoint, however, the all-shiny-plastic 3G has one significant and perhaps very valuable advantage: it is not slippery. There’s a tackiness to the iPhone 3G in hand. There is something to be said for the fact that the phone with the strongest brand in the world has no visible branding whatsoever on its front face. The home button on the 3G seems to require a more forceful push. The clickiness of my original iPhone’s home button is better. On the other hand, the clickiness of the 3G’s volume and sleep buttons is better. Apple sometimes seems to be the lone consumer electronics company that pays any attention at all to the tactile response of buttons. Battery life is the single biggest shortcoming. The simple truth is that the iPhone pushes the limits of what a device this size can do. Power consumption is perhaps Apple’s single-biggest engineering concern with the iPhone — both in software and hardware. Last year, when criticism of the original iPhone centered on the lack of 3G, Steve Jobs said it was about power. He was right. The iPhone 3G consumes power faster. However, the 2.1 OS update improved battery life dramatically. In particular, after upgrading to OS 2.1, the iPhone 3G does not seem to lose much power while idle. Part of it, too, is that because 3G is faster, you can do more in the same amount of time. So if you measure by time, yes, one hour of web browsing on EDGE will leave you with more battery life than one hour of browsing on 3G. But if you measure by the page, I think loading and reading, say, 15 web pages on 3G stands up just fine against loading the same 15 pages on EDGE. It just happens faster. Pt. 3: Coda “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” — Andy Warhol So too with the iPhone. A billionaire can buy homes, cars, clothes that the rest of us cannot afford. But he cannot buy a better phone, at any price, than the iPhone that you can have in your pocket today. Once you get used to 3G performance, you’ll agree with this tweet from Adam Lisagor: “They should change the symbol for EDGE to stink lines.” ↩
-
Rumormill churning out new material - claims Apple will update almost everything in Sept.
The rumor mill is starting to get its wheels spinning as the month of September rolls on closer. Now there is word circulating that Apple letting select retailers know that they should hold off before placing orders for Mac Minis, Macbook Pros, and Cinema Displays. First, it should be mentioned that rumors for almost EVERY Apple event for the past two years have said something was going to happen with Mac Minis and Cinema Displays - and so far it hasn't happened. Sure, they're due…but I'm just pointing it out. We don't know exactly what is going to happen in September, but based on Apple's history we can speculate that the iPods will be the focus of the September event, but between now and then I can bet you that there will be a variety of online outlets that are speculating Apple will update: iPod Classic, iPod Nano, iPod Touch, iPhone OS 2.1 software, iTunes, Macbooks, Macbook Pros, Macbook Airs, Mac Minis, Cinema Displays and (of course) the iTablet. Could Apple actually update all of that at once? I suppose they could, but it isn't there style. I don't expect it to happen, but we'll see. The iPods are what I'm interested in, and I'm ready for this September event to be announced, so we can all get a look at what Apple has up their sleeve.