another corporate show

Now that I’ve railed on Dell I need to return the favor to Apple. Well, not really, but I do wish to post about an issue I’m having simply because I haven’t found a solution, Apple read’s these posts, and a resolution is posted, I will joyfully note it for others to find.

I’m sure others have had this problem but it’s a gamble for me on if and how I plug my LED Cinema Display into my unibody MacBook Pro. This is really lame considering both have been out for months and Apple touts the simplicity of using the new display. There is a reason however, that their advertising has the macbookpro lid open and not closed, it’s really buggy. With laptop closed, when plugging in the cinema display there’s a chance that I will only get a blank screen — the laptop is alive because I’ll get sound feedback by pressing keys on the keyboard; from there, if I sleep (power button, tab key, space key), then when I wake the machine w/click or keypress, half of the time it will be frozen. The fans will light up but no more sound feedback and no video. My only course of action here is to forcefully power down the machine by holding the power button and thus, loosing any unsaved changes.

I know this is a bug between the laptop and display because I have one of each (laptop/display) at home and work and all have this problem. I would note that this would sometimes happen on the old macbook pros but those systems had the F7 key set to essentially ‘refresh displays’ and that would always resolve my problem. Now apple has changed the fn key bindings and that key is no longer available! I don’t know why they took it away because while they did add an expose button they only added ONE button for expose functionality. Needless to say I’m very glad Apple’s keyboard still has 15 functions keys.

If you’re holding out on a unibody MBP then I say keep holding out till these bugs are fixed. Aside from this issue, you *still* have to log out/log back in to change to/from “high performance” — annoying because I never know when I’d like to boot up vmware. Moreover, if you’ve got an older 15″ matte display then you’ve got a feature I personally miss (glare on the glass screens is horrible in any environment).

I really like the machine, don’t get me wrong, but my previous generation MBP would be fine [if I hadn't busted the display].