$10k Later, an Apple Store Genius Diagnoses a $0 MacBook Pro Problem

https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/11/macbook-pro-problem/

by jonny_eh • 7 years ago

46 20 7 years ago

aphextim2• 7 years ago

In high school we had a P.C. tech class where we learned how to build computers which were donated to the school from various churches and businesses doing upgrades in the area.

All the hardware was about 3-4 years behind current tech at the time (2001-2002, so computers were from 1998ish), however it was a great way to learn the fundamentals and this was back when you could fry a motherboard by connecting the PSU to it incorrectly.

Long story short as one of the exercises we would break workstations that other students would then have to troubleshoot and fix.

Some were annoying, pop off keyboard keys and put back in proper positions.

Others were simple but annoying when you are learning such as finding the jumpers in the wrong spot on a hard drive.

One kid in our class definitely did this 'trick' where they turned the Monitor brightness off. It was the last workstation to finally get fixed that day and this story reminded me of that day I had forgotten about.

acheron• 7 years ago

this was back when you could fry a motherboard by connecting the PSU to it incorrectly.

In 2001? From what I remember, everything was using ATX power by the late 90s, which could only be connected in one direction. I thought the possibility of connecting power incorrectly was more of an XT/AT 80s/early 90s thing.

I could totally be misremembering though.

In any case, that does sound like a fun class. Kind of stuff I had to learn on my own. Speaking of connecting things incorrectly though: my ongoing issue was that every time I disconnected the ribbon cable to the floppy or hard drive, I would inevitably reattach it backwards, no matter how much I told myself to make a note of the correct direction.

aphextim2• 7 years ago

We live in a small town of 8,000 or so. Our electronics were behind the times a few more years.

Most of the computers we worked on first year I believe were 486 machines because as people were learning they would ruin them and it wouldn't be a big deal.

I remember an entire closet filled with old components/computers stacked on shelves to the ceiling with the yellow cigarette tar faded color on everything.

I Googled a 486 motherboard for fun and this is what I remember working on where the PSU had a 2 part connector for the motherboard which if you did wrong you would smell burning pretty fast.

https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/163311603533_/Vintag...

I do remember all of them did not even have an AGP slot for graphics and most of the machines we experimented on were much older than anything we would use for the software side of the class. (Almost all only ran DOS or Windows 3.1 maybe a win 95 outlier)

I remember when we went to build 'modern' computers it was much easier than the older machines we were working on because of the dummy proof ATX boards and AGP slots for graphics cards, notched IDE cables etc.

I haven't messed with anything that old in a while I just remember a tip my teacher said. "Make sure that the red stripe was on the same side as the PSU connector"

When looking at the back of a floppy drive if the power connector is left of the IDE cable slot make sure the red stripe is on the left side. If the power connector is on the right side of the IDE cable slot make the red stripe face right. (Not sure if this works 100% of the time but it was the method I used and it got me through the class).

Now everything has dummy notches so at least putting computers together nowadays is as simple as building a Lego house in my opinion.

I remember that teacher was amazing, in part probably because of my bias towards liking the class anyway.

Teacher notices all kids would play this RPG maker thing in their 30 minutes of free time (2 hours class, 1 hour hardware, 30 minutes test on what you learned, 30 minutes of free time).

Assigned a project where everyone in the class had to make a playable RPG and listed components needed such as 5 triggered events, 10 battles etc.

We all got to play each others RPG's live in class to show them off.

Best RPG was from this one kid who seriously must have spent 80 hours +. It had every person in the class in it, started with the kid waking up at home, going to school with battles on the bus ride. The character attended the PC Tech class with the final battle being fighting Captain (The Teacher) There was even a decent story about the teacher using the students to program a virus that would shut down the entire worlds infrastructure - and the one kid that was the main character of this RPG discovers this fact, eventually takes on the teacher and when it was over the Game Over / Credits screen was a silly little animation symbolizing the protagonist zeroing out all the hard drives.

A teacher who sees what the kids are interested in and then ends up creating an assignment based around that is a good teacher.

eerikkivistik• 7 years ago

Yeah, so this happens to me about twice a week. Most recently yesterday morning. Don't need a flashlight anymore though, got used to the gesture of blindly moving my pointer to my avatar and clicking on it.

kingnothing• 7 years ago

You can also type the first letter of your username then hit Enter.

zeristor• 7 years ago

alt-command down works for me, I had an monitor that took a minute to warm up, actually I grew to like the cyberpunk vibe.

I got to learn how to log in blind since my 2010 MBP takes a few minutes to settle down once started.

xen2xen1• 7 years ago

And that's why having remote control software on your computers is invaluable. You can always check to see if it's reporting to your app and that can answer many, many questions.

jjwhitaker• 7 years ago

This sort of happens with Ubuntu installs on HP laptops, at least in my experience. The default brightness is 0 so you can install Ubuntu, restart to log in, and the screen will come up black. External displays work fine, caps lock toggles on, fan noises and everything are fine.

You just need to increase the display brightness using the F keys and it's fine.

User23• 7 years ago

I used to turn the brightness down to 0 on my mac 512ke when I wasn't using it. That was a physical knob. Since it was convection cooled there wasn't any noise, and it saved the not inconsiderable time of booting from a double sided floppy.

gnode• 7 years ago

You’re not going to believe it: The screen brightness was turned all the way down (not merely dim, but off).

Funnily enough, this is the first thing I suspected, given that it's happened to me (under Ubuntu in my case).

Although even if experience didn't lead you to suspect a software issue, I would have expected one of the first diagnostics given these symptoms to be to shine a bright light into the screen to see if there was anything being displayed. Jumping to replacing logic boards is just clutching at straws.

karmakaze• 7 years ago

This has happened to me multiple times because I use an external monitor mirrored with the laptop display dimmed to zero because there is no 'don't use this display' setting for it. The first time or two I hard power-cycled it, because by the time I have the laptop at another location I've forgotten the context where it was last used. Then I realized it's just the brightness.

sharkmerry• 7 years ago

>> So he routinely leaves the machine open, but turns down the screen brightness to zero (backlight fully off) to avoid distraction.

Did he tell the apple people about this fact? It doesnt mention it, but I am not sure how he couldve forgotten that

mrguyorama• 7 years ago

The fact that you can't change your brightness before logging in is pure stupidity on Apple's part

roflchoppa2• 7 years ago

doesn't PRAM reset address this on the following boot? Why was that not done before/after running Apple Service Toolkit?

dcohenp• 7 years ago

7. The Apple troubleshooting guides are out of date. They do not note that if you have a firmware password on a T2 Mac, you cannot reset PRAM as expected and therefore cannot resolve screen brightness issues this way. You also cannot run diagnostics due to the black screen.

dfraser992• 7 years ago

TLDR: Apple's QA processes need improving?

FYI: I have a 2010 iMac and it still runs great. I am behind a few OS versions, but it does not matter for what I do. I do wish they would release a fix for this "Recent Items" issue but am not willing to upgrade. I plan to never upgrade actually, until I really need the latest Linux box for some reason. I'm not thrilled with the slow decline of Apple over the years, but it happens to every large corporation.

PS: I've been in QA for years, so my initial reaction was ... ok.... It is such a strange problem that I would try to see if I could remote login vs/ replacing motherboards.

duxup• 7 years ago

Those series of complicating factors are quite interesting.

I wonder what the reasoning is for no brightness adjust when in recovery mode or similar situations.

spiznnx• 7 years ago

Everyone likes to complain that android devices are too bright when booting, but at least they'll never have this problem :)

RenRav• 7 years ago

This reminds me of being stranded in another country trying to charge my smartphone via solar. If I still had power, I could charge it, because I could enable energy saving, airplane mode, turn off the screen, etc. It would slowly charge up.

But if it was completely empty? It would permanently set the display at max brightness politely informing me it was charging, that I had to wait, and would actually drain more power than the solar panel could provide.

I eventually had to pop off the back case and physically detach the display cable to get it to charge up.

I always wondered why it displays anything at all when out of power, just a flashing pattern of the LED would have been enough, many portable chargers use that exact method to read out the charge, usually in 25% increments.

villgax• 7 years ago

Something along the same lines where mine wouldn't light up because I kept it on top of my magnetic sleeve case & the MBA thought it was folded because of the false magnetic reading from a lid being closed was replicated by the case on top of which the laptop was put. Freaked me the heck out.

$10k Later, an Apple Store Genius Diagnoses a $0 MacBook Pro Problem

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