MacBook Pro Monitor Brightness Scare at sablog.com

MacBook Pro Monitor Brightness Scare

Written by Shanti A. Braford June 21st, 2007in Linkfest.

Last night I was surfing the web on my new MacBook Pro.

All of a sudden, the monitor went completely black. I didn’t notice a subtle or gradual change — it was just, BAM, dark. Tried rebooting a few times but it didn’t seem to take. We’ve all heard the faulty Apple hardware stories so I was *really* hoping it wasn’t that. This puppy is only a few months old!

So this morning I flip the monitor open and finally see (now that it’s brighter in the room) that the screen is faintly on. Hmmm.

Newsflash to me: F1 and F2 on the MacBook automatically adjust the brightness of the screen.

I must’ve fat-fingered F1 down until the monitor was completely black in the dark, not realizing I had held that key down! The screen is also almost completely unusable at the lowest brightness setting — I can see why some people might like that, but it also seems a bit dangerous to me, especially coming from the user-friendly people and all!

… anyway … (little jingle) … the more you know!

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2 Responses to “MacBook Pro Monitor Brightness Scare”

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1 Reg Braithwaite on Jun 22nd, 2007 at 8:41 am

There F-keys toggle back and forth between being special keys for controlling the Mac and keys for applications (is there anything brain-damanged enough to use F1 for help?).

One thing I do is use System Preferences to require the fn key to activate all of the special features. The down side is that you have to use fn+F4 and fn+F5 to adjust volume. The up side is that you don’t accidentally dim your screen or adjust the keyboard brightness by accident.
2 Shanti A. Braford on Jun 22nd, 2007 at 4:21 pm

Reg - interesting. I didn’t know you could toggle that fn requirement via System Preferences.

At least it’s a lot less dangerous to a Mac noob like me now that I know about those special keys.