Diagnosing a fault MacBook Fan.

Argh! One of the fans in my Macbook is humming away on its last legs.

On the plus side, this fan controller is great for diagnosing the fan in question as there are two in the device..

Mine is a MacBook Pro Mid 2012 and the right fan.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23049/smcfancontrol

The app could do with some better auto adjusting profiles based on temperature. It has three 'modes': AC-Power, battery and charging which can have separate profiles.

I can happily turn up the fans on any GPU / CPU intensive tasks now and keep the system cooler than Apple seemed to want to, prolonging the devices life in the long run!


For repairs on this laptop see iFixit!:
https://www.ifixit.com/Device/MacBook_Pro_15%22_Retina_Display_Mid_2012

Apple Mac OS X 10.9.3 to feature 'Retina' mode for 4K displays- The Inquirer

Apple Mac OS X 10.9.3 to feature 'Retina' mode for 4K displays- The Inquirer

Tesco to use eye-scanning tech to target ads at you.

Ok so it won't be identifying you by name but it's one creepy step in the minority report direction... 

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/tesco-to-use-eye-scanning-tech-to-target-ads-at-you-50012662/

I was wrong, you can upgrade the SSD on a Macbook Pro Retina mid 2012

I just wish it wasn't so costly. Comes with a 3 year warranty.



http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/SSDAP12K480/

Hints point toward a retina 27" display

So there are some hi-res images appearing from Apple indicating some new displays.

Although the rumours suggest this is for a 27" model / imac I could well see them going for some larger sizes as well.

I wouldn't be surprised as there old cinema displays were well received previously. Its a little weird to see large sony displays in the Apple stores when you pop in these days.

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/06/10/apple-posts-27-retina-imac-sized-os-x-mavericks-background/

Apple Mac, Wheres the hash (#) key!

I can't believe that in the age of Twitter Apple hasn't got round to printing the hash # symbol on the number '3' key. At least for the UK rMBP (retina Macbook Pro) keyboard i'm using anyway! They've done it with the euro € symbol...

It's Alt + 3 for anyone wanting to know what it is! 

Apple Vs Blu-ray

It still really annoys me Apple haven't given hardware support for Blu-ray in their product lines. Although saying that my Macbook Pro doesn't even have a optical drive.

On the flip side you can get third party drives and software from http://www.macblurayplayer.com/. I'd really like to see a thunderbolt blu-ray super drive though!

MacBook Pro retina.

Wow, that was a bit of hassel but i'm finally there.

MacBook Pro retina with boot camp windows 8 RC fully working!

I've got Guild Wars 2 working nicely as well.

The reason it took a while... The laptop came with lion, not mountain lion... I had to go off to Apple, apply for mountain lion with my serial to get the free copy (that was quick) and then wait for it to download the whole OS.

Next I had to download Windows 8 RC and boot camp assistant took an ages as well download windows content for the install. Once into Windows 8, the boot camp install took a while and me being me, took a while to realise i needed to hold 'alt' when booting the machine to get the boot choices (I'm used to GRUB just appearing with Ubuntu)...

[edit] Here is a quick screen grab one week in:

Apple MacBook Pro - opinion

I really like the look of the new Mac book pro, especially the cooling system, the display and the SSD design.

Although an optical drive is not included I'm still baffled that Apple refuse to throw in some major Blu-ray support anywhere, it'd be a dream in conjunction with the Thunderbold I/O

I would actually spend that amount on one as well (see pricing, expect it to be over £2k) because the design is truly intuitive and the specs are impressive. I would love to give the battery a run for it's money as well, 7 hours seems quite optimistic even with a lot of power saving involved at those specs. The graphics core would be working hard at those 'retina' resolutions!

See below for the video:

http://www.apple.com/uk/macbook-pro/#macbookpro

AnandTechs Retina Display Analysis

They did a quick analysis together while they are still putting together their no doubt detailed review.

Linky: here

When you look at the pixel density compared to the other devices on that list it really does suddenly seem pretty impressive. Apples cinema displays are bloody good! I can see them using this to pitch that it makes use easier on the eyes for all those iBooks / Kindle books.