265 words on Apple defects
I finally got my MacBook back from repair on Friday. While I can use the kitchen PowerBook and the office Linux machines as replacements, doing so really starts becoming unnerving after a day. Those machines lack the correct software and due to Apple’s commitment to incompatibility it’s effectively impossible to synchronise a work environment from my usual X.6 machine to a X.5 machine or even a Linux machine. In this situation the whole ‘cloud’ promise by Google and friends - which I don’t believe in - certainly has a certain appeal.
I couldn’t ask what exactly they repaired in the MacBook, but it most definitely has a new backlight as the backlight is now much brighter than the old one was. I noticed that when replacing my previous machines as well: Those modern backlights seem to wear out very quickly. The loss of brightness after just a year is quite significant. I used to run the old display light at full brightness in a normal desk work environment and the new one seems too bright at that level and is fine at about two thirds of the maximum.
This seems like a fact worth keeping in mind when questionable (i.e. any) web sites ooh and aah the ‘much improved’ brightness of the new machines they are ‘reviewing’. Perhaps they are just comparing them to old and used displays. Somehow those oohs and aahs never seem to be based on actual measurements, just on side-by-side comparisons made at that moment.
Anyway, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the machine doesn’t show further breakage in the future.