The MacBook is back. The display is now not fucked up anymore - the telltale broken menu bar gradient is now smooth, and these 18-bit vs 24-bit images look different, so I have the full gamut at my disposal.
It turns out that the right fan was not broken. I was in fact informed that the MacBook does not have a right fan, which I guess explains the -1 RPM reading I got. It does however have a left fan, and my specimen in particular was clogged with dust. There were also thermal issues. The fans and cooling and a number of other parts were swapped. The yellowed topcase - what’s outside of the trackpad and keyboard, and in this case including them - was part of the last batch they ever sent with version one. I now have version two.
All repairs were free because they were within warranty. As pissed-off as I am that these things - except for dust in the fan - could at all happen in the first place, I am satisfied that they were fixed in a week, without needing to ship to the Netherlands for three weeks as all the old european Apple service horror stories go.
Or, in terms everyone can understand, the pony was delivered.
You state that your display has improved. How do you reconcile this with the 6-bit display debacle - have you been given an 8-bit display, or do you now surmise your previous display problems were due to some other issue? For what it’s worth, those example images look different on my 6-bit MacBook display, too (the 24-bit gradient appears continuous).
By Jim DeVona · 2007.05.24 01:27
There’s no evidence that this is anything but a 6-bit display. The service shop said they saw the issue and also added that it was the first of its kind that they had seen.
My guess is that, as I speculated on earlier, I hung onto the 6-bit hoopla as a likely explanation. After all, it did involve dithering, and the artefacts looked a lot like dithering, so it wasn’t a great mental leap.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll think the world will be a bit better if we get 8-bit displays in laptops, but as someone who, while I could discern thousands of colors vs millions of colors, could never discern “high color” (green component is “true color”) from “true color” (all components are “true color”), I’m no longer outraged that it’s not the case.
By Jesper · 2007.05.24 19:24