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



## alra111 (Feb 26, 2008)

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


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## lurk (Feb 27, 2008)

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.


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## macworks (Feb 27, 2008)

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


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## alra111 (Feb 27, 2008)

macworks said:


> 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


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## Lt Major Burns (Feb 29, 2008)

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.


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## Mikuro (Feb 29, 2008)

Lt Major Burns said:


> 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.


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## icemanjc (Feb 29, 2008)

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?


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## Lt Major Burns (Mar 1, 2008)

Mikuro said:


> 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 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.


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## Mikuro (Mar 1, 2008)

Wow. That's....shocking. I assume you're using good brands (Verbatim or nothing, I say, but Sony, Apple and Panasonic have good reputations as well) and verifying data after burning, right? And are you talking about R or RW discs?

Personally I've never had a DVD±R fail on me after data verification. Bad brands will usually give me some bad sectors, but those are revealed immediately after burning, during verification (and they produce errors during copying, so it's impossible to ignore them when using the discs). That's why I only buy Verbatim now. I very rarely even have bad sectors with good brands of discs.

I have had CD-Rs fail, but those were old CD-Rs from the 90s, and the manufacuring process has greatly improved since then.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have complete faith in DVDs, either. If I have any important files that exist only on DVDs, they're on _several_ DVDs. I feel very comfortable using both HDs _and_ DVDs as backups. I would not feel comfortable using only HDs.

Now, if I could replace my DVDs with fast, cheap, expansive _online_ storage, then that would be great. If Apple introduced such a service, and integrated it with Time Machine, then THAT would be a complete backup solution. It would raise some privacy/security concerns, though (no form of encryption can be expected to hold forever).




icemanjc said:


> 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?



It shouldn't affect DVD playback or burning. Current Blu-ray drives can read and write all DVD formats (even including DVD-RAM). The only problem would be playing HD video from commercial Blu-ray discs.


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## Lt Major Burns (Mar 1, 2008)

all disks were automatically verified on completion, and successful.  it's really very subtle corruption, if i go back and recopy that song off the back up, it'll still come out corrupt, but slightly differently.  

personally, i will only feel safe when my back up solution is online, in the care of a professional server farm with tons of RAID solutions, but my experience so far with online back up is the first step is almost impossible to leap past (the initial back up.  a full ~500gb backup simply takes months, and is wholly impractical).  a system where someone comes round to your house to collect the initial back up would be the best way, followed by incremental back up over the web...


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## Kees Buijs (Mar 4, 2008)

Lt Major Burns said:


> all disks were automatically verified on completion, and successful.  it's really very subtle corruption, if i go back and recopy that song off the back up, it'll still come out corrupt, but slightly differently.
> 
> personally, i will only feel safe when my back up solution is online, in the care of a professional server farm with tons of RAID solutions, but my experience so far with online back up is the first step is almost impossible to leap past (the initial back up.  a full ~500gb backup simply takes months, and is wholly impractical).  a system where someone comes round to your house to collect the initial back up would be the best way, followed by incremental back up over the web...



How long does a 500gb backup to internet takes and which provider will give you that much space.

For that amounts of data they have developped TAPE streamers, DVD / CD are for smaller backups only.

If you feel good by only 1 backup, come into my shop and talk on a weekly base to all the customers losing their data on their harddisk only and also several, which had a external harddrive backup available.

I like to have multiple backups (like making it once a week) and store them on several locations (like 5 miles away for the business) in case of fire, flooding etc.

I do not need to have backups available, because i do not require them after making them despite the fact that on a regular base harddrives fail. I have also for this purposes a local harddisk backup on other computer (beside the fileserver and database server). This makes me a little slobby by not making backups for several weeks in a row, but eventually i pick up again.


It is important to make multiple backups and on different media, stored on different locations. You fill in the locations and media, but have multiple of them and do not only have one version (most recent) available, because when you find out something is wrong, it is usual also wrong on the most recent backupand even already on the one of weeks/months old.


Good luck, Kees


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