"Just a little detail that wouldn't sell anything"

https://unsung.aresluna.org/just-a-little-detail-that-wouldnt-sell-anything/

by bobbiechen • 5 months ago

127 24 5 months ago

unsung.aresluna.org

ViktorRay• 5 months ago

This is a neat article.

I don’t think I ever thought much about that light but now after reading this article…it really was a pretty cool and useful detail.

The info about how the light’s rhythm was meant to be similar to human breathing is cool too.

bmacho• 5 months ago

That last ~gif~ mov really looks like a sleeping robot from a Pixar movie.

I think all my laptops' LEDs first blink wildly when I close them, then change to a slower rhythm, that's not an Apple feature.

sidewndr46• 5 months ago

The sleeping light - because what all hardware requires is blindingly bright LEDs that are always on. Even when that hardware is asleep

bayindirh3• 5 months ago

As the post states, it was almost always accompanied by a light sensor. It always got dimmer either by that sensor or internal clock.

My desk was at the end of my bed. The MacBook with sleep light was always on that. It was never bright at night. Dimming half a second after I turn the light off. Even if the lid was closed.

Oh, also, you can swap batteries of Macs during sleep if it has a removable battery, without losing state.

This is why Apple is Apple.

Night_Thastus• 5 months ago

*Was

That era is long dead and gone, regardless of the current state of such a light.

jordanb• 5 months ago

Yeah the "off light" has always really bugged me. It's like Homer Simpson's "everything's OK alarm."

kristianp• 5 months ago

The dot in the "i" in "Thinkpad" on my laptop's lid does this, copying the mac, I expect. It's red, mimicking the trackpoint.

bayindirh3• 5 months ago

Trackpoint’s red color is also a story worth reading.

No, I won’t spoil it here. :)

agent86• 5 months ago

I couldn't find something to read about it, but I did find this to watch and learn about it.

I won't spoil it here either :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwV1lEDJH9Y

tim-tday• 5 months ago

I think the sleep light on the white plastic iBook was the first product feature I truly loved. My greatest hope is that I should be so lucky as to invent a single thing as great over the course of my lifetime.

cyberge99• 5 months ago

Refining more beauty or elegance into anything existing counts. Beautification is a form of invention.

bitwize• 5 months ago

In the Choose Your Own Adventure novel Supercomputer, you receive as the grand prize in a contest an AGI-capable computer and go on various adventures with its advanced thinking capabilities. One of its features is said to be a "smile light" which illuminates in a pleasing greenish color when the machine is happy. The breathing light always reminded me of Conrad's "smile light" and just went to show that Apple engineers were reading the right type of science fiction novel.

bayindirh3• 5 months ago

I loved that book! It also has some endings which familiarizes the reader with ethics.

jonah-archive• 5 months ago

This someone jogged a memory of an all-time favorite line from a 2005 laptop review (well, more of a rant than a review): https://web.archive.org/web/20090709072628/https://arstechni...

[The power] light informs the user that the X41 is on—no, really. There should be an ontological indicator next to it to let the user know the computer really exists.

alnwlsn• 5 months ago

That light was a big deal - I remember when I got into Arduino years ago this was one of the common projects people would do to add a breathing LED to everything, including a pumpkin:

https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2010/a-pumpkin-that-sleeps-...

MerrimanInd• 5 months ago

It could absolutely be false nostalgia since I was a Mac fan from about 2005 to 2009 with an MBP that had the breathing feature but this really felt like a high point for computer hardware. It felt slick and performant but still serviceable.

Ironically, after a series of uninspiring Windows machines the next laptop that made me feel any level of enthusiasm like that Mac is my current Framework 13 running COSMIC on NixOS. Quite an about face!

woadwarrior01• 5 months ago

The Macbook battery indicator that's mentioned in the article, was so very good.

mrexroad• 5 months ago

One of my early mentors worked on it. They mentioned the pulsation for the sleep indicator was modeled not just on the human respiratory rate, but specifically that of a sleeping adult. It came up when we were playing around with on/off dimming curves for a room based video conferencing product and discussing physical analogies we could model a curve on. Fun afternoon exploration, but in the end we just stuck with ease-in/out. I miss when you didn’t need to overly justify taking an afternoon detour to explore whether something could be improved.

sublinear• 5 months ago

Interesting. I grew up kinda rural seeing red "breathing lights" on radio antenna masts at night all the time way before Apple did this.

Didn't seem like anything special and I always just assumed it was inspired by something like that since it's another type of indicator.

greatgib• 5 months ago

Not specifically for the Mac light, but nowadays I find it very annoying that everything as a small led light for sleep or just indicate power, or power plugged.

At night it is very hard to have a dark room to sleep in small apartments or bedrooms when you have so many of them. Tv sleep lights, set top box, computers sleep and power plugged lights, small electronic devices and appliances like the one displaying time. Power multipliers that often have a safety power on light, ...

bombcar• 5 months ago

Electrical tape was my go-to in the dorm room.

layer8• 5 months ago

While I generally like physical such hardware details and lament their decline, a pulsating sleep indicator in my field of view would drive me mad.

JSR_FDED• 5 months ago

The breathing light and MagSafe connector were two delightful things to discover when I bought my first PowerBook.

It just signaled “we care” so well!

"Just a little detail that wouldn't sell anything"

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