What is this "LED" screen in the new Macbook Pro?

alra111 · #1 February 26th, 2008, 05:42 PM

What is the "LED screen" option they mentioned in the new Macbook Pro introduced today? Are these as bright as LCD displays? I know one of the upsides is extended battery life...what are the downsides, if any?

Thanks,
Alra111

lurk · #2 February 27th, 2008, 09:30 AM

Actually, it is just the light source for the backlight, the screen itself is still LCD. What they did was replace the cold cathode florescent light they used to use with a LED. I have a 15 incher with this feature and it is noticeable, when you wake the machine from sleep for instance the screen just pops to its normal brightness. Previous screens would take a little bit to "warm up" before reaching their full brightness. Aside from that I cannot say for sure that there is anything else different about it. It is a pretty screen and it may prolong my battery life but I haven't done any real tests of that.

macworks · #3 February 27th, 2008, 02:09 PM

Further, florescent backlights fade (get darker) over time. Whereas LED should not.

alra111 · #4 February 27th, 2008, 05:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by macworks

Further, florescent backlights fade (get darker) over time. Whereas LED should not.

Thanks for the tips, everyone...LED sounds good and it's not that much more expensive...but macrumors.com alludes to new Macbook Pros in June so I may just wait for those...I'm still waiting for a Mac...any Mac...with a built-in Blu-ray player/burner. HD DVD's recent, rather sudden demise should be a catalyst for this...

Alra111

Lt Major Burns · #5 February 29th, 2008, 03:57 PM

i wouldn't hold your breath for built in blu-ray, to be honest. apple likes to make well-thought out but radical jumps forward, and i think it's a fairly high possiblity that apple may forego Blu-Ray altogether, relying on faster internet and wireless capabilities and plummeting hard disk and solid state storage prices, which are increasingly being seen as the future. Blu Ray would be useful for both backup and for distribution of HD content, but with 8mb broadband becoming standard, and much higher speeds also being available (most companies, certainly here in UK, already offer 20mb speeds at sub £20/month), HD content is already perfectly streamable: i've had 8mb for nearly a year now (i'm currently spending £7.50 a month for it) and apple's recent 720p macworld stream was instant starting and flawless, it's only a matter of months before 1080p streaming content finds broadband speeds to carry it.

As for back up, most home hard drives now exceed 250gb, with many people rapidly filling terabytes now. a mere 50gb is already too small, let alone in years to come. apple has their back up strategy in place already, and it revolves around hard drives and external mass storage.

Mikuro · #6 February 29th, 2008, 06:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lt Major Burns

As for back up, most home hard drives now exceed 250gb, with many people rapidly filling terabytes now. a mere 50gb is already too small, let alone in years to come. apple has their back up strategy in place already, and it revolves around hard drives and external mass storage.

The problem is, that's a flimsy strategy! Hard disks are not really well-suited for backups. They're prone to failure without warning. They fail especially quickly when they are used every day. They're convenient, but they should be used in addition to permanent media like DVDs, or else stored in a safe place and used only for data retrieval in emergencies. They should not be considered a complete backup solution.

Hard disks are even susceptible to software failure, which is reason enough to back up to optical media. Does anyone remember the iTunes update that had the little side effect of kinda-sorta completely erasing entire volumes with certain naming patterns? Or the 2 or 3 different Panther updates that completely destroyed FireWire hard disks with a particular chipset? Those are just examples of catastrophic software failure from Apple. Any errant third-party program could nuke a hard disk just as easily.

I'm afraid that Time Machine will lull users into a false sense of security, setting up the Mac world for some nasty problems a few years down the line.

So, I don't see hard disks as any kind of alternative to DVD or Blu-ray. Aside from the reliability issues, they're still much more expensive per GB than DVDs.

Having said all that, I don't expect Apple to be quick on the uptake here, either. They never have been. External drives are available already, so I don't see it as being urgent. There are also technical and legal barriers to playing Blu-ray movies. There's currently no way to play Blu-ray videos on OS X, even if you have a Blu-ray drive. I think Apple will need to make changes in both hardware and software before HD Blu-ray playback will be possible/legal. And until they do that, they probably won't include Blu-ray drives, because Blu-ray drives that can't play Blu-ray movies would cause a PR mess.

icemanjc · #7 February 29th, 2008, 10:47 PM

Isn't Apple on the board for Blu-Ray, so wouldn't you think they would they would just put it into the 17 in MacBook Pro since it has an HD screen, but would that disable the DVD playing and burning? Also, does anybody know how long SSDs last over HDs?

Lt Major Burns · #8 March 1st, 2008, 06:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mikuro

The problem is, that's a flimsy strategy! Hard disks are not really well-suited for backups. They're prone to failure without warning. They fail especially quickly when they are used every day. They're convenient, but they should be used in addition to permanent media like DVDs, or else stored in a safe place and used only for data retrieval in emergencies. They should not be considered a complete backup solution.

Hard disks are even susceptible to software failure, which is reason enough to back up to optical media. Does anyone remember the iTunes update that had the little side effect of kinda-sorta completely erasing entire volumes with certain naming patterns? Or the 2 or 3 different Panther updates that completely destroyed FireWire hard disks with a particular chipset? Those are just examples of catastrophic software failure from Apple. Any errant third-party program could nuke a hard disk just as easily.

I'm afraid that Time Machine will lull users into a false sense of security, setting up the Mac world for some nasty problems a few years down the line.

So, I don't see hard disks as any kind of alternative to DVD or Blu-ray. Aside from the reliability issues, they're still much more expensive per GB than DVDs.

Having said all that, I don't expect Apple to be quick on the uptake here, either. They never have been. External drives are available already, so I don't see it as being urgent. There are also technical and legal barriers to playing Blu-ray movies. There's currently no way to play Blu-ray videos on OS X, even if you have a Blu-ray drive. I think Apple will need to make changes in both hardware and software before HD Blu-ray playback will be possible/legal. And until they do that, they probably won't include Blu-ray drives, because Blu-ray drives that can't play Blu-ray movies would cause a PR mess.

I stopped backing up to dvd a few years back, after i realised that optical media is just not as reliable as it claims to be. what appears to happen on a massive data write is a small amount of corruption, that i've only ever happened across on DVD's, and it's not isolated cases, or isolated batches of dvds. it is most apparent in music, which is what i back up, mostly.

here are two examples of what happens, about 10 seconds into the song, a 3-4 second snippet from a song that was close in the filesystem of the dvd to the affected one:

http://anotherwebsite.net/files/sureshot.mov
http://anotherwebsite.net/files/break.mov
(i'm hoping this isn't seen as attempted piracy, the songs are not complete, or in a premium state, and are only being used as examples)

i would say this happens to about 5-10% of files backed up to dvd, across about 30-50 dvd's, created using both Finder dvd burning and Toast, and created over a number of years, using a number of different dvd types. it's dozens, if not hundreds of songs have been damaged by dvd back up. i don't trust optical media.

on the flip side though, in 10 years of using computers, i personally have never had a desktop-class hard drive fail. i currently have 4 hard drives attached to this mac, all getting spun regularly throughout the day, every day. i have experienced two ipod drive failures though, but i would attribute that to it's nature of being far more delicate parts in a much more hostile environment.