Skip to main content

Apple: MacBook Manual Surprises

This is a list of things that surprised me while reading the manual for my MacBook:
  • Use two fingers on the touchpad to scroll.

  • It doesn't come with a modem.

  • The lowest model MacBook can burn CDs but not DVDs.

  • Hit F3 (without fn) or F10 (with fn) to use expose.

  • Turn it off if you're not going to use it for a day or two.

  • Putting it to sleep decreases the chances of damaging the hard drive while moving it.

  • Use "fn delete" to delete characters to the right of the cursor.

  • The manual use to say that if you added memory yourself you would void your warranty. It now says that you'll only void your memory if you mess up ;-)

  • Hold down D while booting to use Apple Hardware Test.

  • The printed manual is only in English.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
One thing that surprised me on my iBook was: Hold down T on bootup for Target Disk Mode. Once you see the yellow firewire symbol on your screen, now your laptop has been transformed into an external firewire disk.

Fastest way to move data between two Macs.
11:51 AM
Eddy Mulyono said…
Does this mean you bought a MacBook, JJ?
1:42 PM
jjinux said…
Embarrassingly enough, yes. I'm trying to mix things up to recover from burnout. Hence, I'm switching from Linux to Mac, and I'm switching from Vim to Emacs. I feel very strange.
2:36 PM
Anonymous said…
I thought you were going to say you bought this for the family and not yourself :-) How much open source crap have you installed already :-P
7:24 AM
Alec said…
FWIW, I leave both my work and home macbooks (Original MacbookPro and 12-month old Macbook) in sleep mode all the time. I typically go 2+ weeks between actual reboots.
5:40 PM
jjinux said…
> How much open source crap have you installed already :-P

Ah, you know me well ;)

> I leave both my work and home macbooks (Original MacbookPro and 12-month old Macbook) in sleep mode all the time. I typically go 2+ weeks between actual reboots.

Yeah, that's my favorite feature so far. Going from 2 hours of battery life to 5 makes all the difference in the world. I no longer bother with bringing my power adapter with me when I go to the coffee shop or to meet with people.
10:28 AM
dm said…
I whimsically clicked on your "Apple" tag and found this post. Interesting contrast with your previous Apple post. What happened to loving the freedom, man?
11:30 AM
jjinux said…
I was desperately burnt out, so I started trying a bunch of things to get me over the burnout. I switched from Linux to Mac, Vim to Emacs, and Python to Ruby.

I ended up really disliking Emacs per my post here: http://jjinux.blogspot.com/2008/03/vim-why-i-like-vim.html I seem to go through an Emacs phase every couple years, and I always en up back with Vim.

I decided I still liked Python more than Ruby, but I was sick of Web development. Hence, my current job is mostly not Web related.

The Mac is nice. It's really the hardware I like best. 5 hours of battery life rules, and suspend works really well. I haven't really started using anything proprietary yet. I'm still all about Vim, zsh, Flock, Python, etc.
2:25 PM
jjinux said…
> What happened to loving the freedom, man?

I thought about it a lot, and I explained it here:

http://jjinux.blogspot.com/2008/02/hybrid-world-of-open-and-closed-source.html
2:27 PM
bsergean said…
Suspend to RAM works fine on Linux too. This article explain it all.
I just had to add two lines in my xorg.conf to get my lenovo with nvidia hardware to suspend / resume.

But I type this on a MacBook Pro ... I have to say it's a really nice hardware. One thing I really like is the screen, that is probably back-lighted so you can see it's content everywhere even when there is some sun coming in.
5:20 PM
jjinux said…
I know; I'm normally a Linux guy. The thing about MacBooks is that suspend works *reliably right out of the box*.
4:14 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ubuntu 20.04 on a 2015 15" MacBook Pro

I decided to give Ubuntu 20.04 a try on my 2015 15" MacBook Pro. I didn't actually install it; I just live booted from a USB thumb drive which was enough to try out everything I wanted. In summary, it's not perfect, and issues with my camera would prevent me from switching, but given the right hardware, I think it's a really viable option. The first thing I wanted to try was what would happen if I plugged in a non-HiDPI screen given that my laptop has a HiDPI screen. Without sub-pixel scaling, whatever scale rate I picked for one screen would apply to the other. However, once I turned on sub-pixel scaling, I was able to pick different scale rates for the internal and external displays. That looked ok. I tried plugging in and unplugging multiple times, and it didn't crash. I doubt it'd work with my Thunderbolt display at work, but it worked fine for my HDMI displays at home. I even plugged it into my TV, and it stuck to the 100% scaling I picked for the othe
1 comment
Read more

Drawing Sierpinski's Triangle in Minecraft Using Python

In his keynote at PyCon, Eben Upton, the Executive Director of the Rasberry Pi Foundation, mentioned that not only has Minecraft been ported to the Rasberry Pi, but you can even control it with Python . Since four of my kids are avid Minecraft fans, I figured this might be a good time to teach them to program using Python. So I started yesterday with the goal of programming something cool for Minecraft and then showing it off at the San Francisco Python Meetup in the evening. The first problem that I faced was that I didn't have a Rasberry Pi. You can't hack Minecraft by just installing the Minecraft client. Speaking of which, I didn't have the Minecraft client installed either ;) My kids always play it on their Nexus 7s. I found an open source Minecraft server called Bukkit that "provides the means to extend the popular Minecraft multiplayer server." Then I found a plugin called RaspberryJuice that implements a subset of the Minecraft Pi modding API for B
4 comments
Read more

Creating Windows 10 Boot Media for a Lenovo Thinkpad T410 Using Only a Mac and a Linux Machine

TL;DR: Giovanni and I struggled trying to get Windows 10 installed on the Lenovo Thinkpad T410. We struggled a lot trying to create the installation media because we only had a Mac and a Linux machine to work with. Everytime we tried to boot the USB thumb drive, it just showed us a blinking cursor. At the end, we finally realized that Windows 10 wasn't supported on this laptop :-/ I've heard that it took Thomas Edison 100 tries to figure out the right material to use as a lightbulb filament. Well, I'm no Thomas Edison, but I thought it might be noteworthy to document our attempts at getting it to boot off a USB thumb drive: Download the ISO. Attempt 1: Use Etcher. Etcher says it doesn't work for Windows. Attempt 2: Use Boot Camp Assistant. It doesn't have that feature anymore. Attempt 3: Use Disk Utility on a Mac. Erase a USB thumb drive: Format: ExFAT Scheme: GUID Partition Map Mount the ISO. Copy everything from
4 comments
Read more