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:
- Click the Apple Menu
- Click “About This Mac”
- Click “More Info”
- Select “Power” in the left pane
- 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.
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???
WARNING: Explicit language ahead!
I’d like to officially put out a big “fuck you” to Apple today, and here’s why…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
