Gah! OK so seriously - the auto-dimming MBP feature sucks. Big time!

I love my MBP. I hate the ambient brightness dimmer thingamybob. It sucks. My fingers stray over the speaker vents when I type, and my screen brightness goes up and down and up and down. I'm so much happier now I turned that feature off. I KNOW I'm not the only one who thinks this feature needs work. Why couldn't the sensor be further to the edges of the notebook, or in the hinge or screen somewhere? Good grief! Anything but the up and down and up and down of the brightness.

*kills self*

Oh, and Microsoft Office 2004 sucks. The text is very jerky appearing on the screen. Clearly not designed for Intel machines. I can't believe I'm excited for Office 2008...

 

You know you can always turn it off. But I must say, I have never had a problem like that. Do you have large hands? The way I type, my hands don't cover the speaker grills.

 

Yes, I said I turned it off.

And yes, I have larger hands. But seriously! This is racism! (probably)

 

It's not really racism, since large hands aren't tied specifically to one race.

 

Yet you continue to post on NBR from beyond the grave!

Office 2008 will be released on January 15.

I turned off the light sensor the very first day I got this MBP; it annoyed me for about 10 minutes. For anyone that wants to know how to turn off this feature, System Preference > Displays. Select the Display tab and uncheck the "Automatically adjust brightness..." box. It looks like this in Leopard:

 

LOL.

Also, has anyone else noticed the screen turns off after several minutes all by itself? I found this thread on the Apple forums about it, and I guess it's a Leopard bug. There are a few pseudo-workarounds, but it's still bugged. Ah well....

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1210178&tstart=0

 

Is that a bug? Isn't that...just power saving?

 

Yep... that's just the power saver... not a bug.

 

No it's not. I've set my screen to do nothing at all, EVER, and it still goes black. It's a bug. Read the thread.

 

Weird, mine never does that. Are you sure you made the custom setting for it, or running it in "Normal" mode?

 

Now that you mention it my MBP running Leopard does seem to do that. It never bothered me and I always just assumed that it was a power saving feature.

 

Weird about the screen turning off thing.

I do agree with the auto-dimming in the MBP though - its really not that well implemented. Its too sensitive, even when you move your hand close to the bottom of the screen on either side edge, it will activate and the screen will get suddenly really dark. Kind of annoying, to be honest, but from what I've heard, Dell and the others who have tried it have not done it properly either.

What they need to do is have multiple light sensors in various places - under each speaker, next to the webcam, one on each side, maybe one on the lid, next to the IR sensor, etc. Have each of those work together to figure out whether or not the room actually is dark, and if so, how dark it is. It wouldn't difficult to add to the MBP, either.

 

Nope it's a bug, and only with Leopard apparently. Not the end of the world - but if you find yourself leaving your system for a few minutes and coming back, it's a bit annoying. Apparently Apple are aware of it and a fix might come soon if they care enough.

 

Agreed 100%. There's a ton of ways this could be implemented... maybe the next revision?

 

No guys... its handism... duh.

 

I have a hard time visualizing just how big your hands must be to trigger the light sensor. Either that or the way you position your arms is unusual.

 

Well my hands are clearly big enough, since I point it out. It's my left pinkie, apparently, causing the issues.

 

i don't even want to imagine how strangely you must type if your hands are hanging off of the sides of the keyboard when you do so. haha.

so what is this thread even about?

 

It's not that weird. When I hit the Q key or the A key or shift or caps lock on the left with my pointer finger, my pinkie hangs over the edge! I mean, duh!

 

I have been running the Caffeine program to help until Apple releases a fix for Leapord. It's worked out really well and have it set to start up on login. Here is link if anyone else is interested:

http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

 

Learn to hit it with your pinkie or your ring finger, duh!