Archive for the ‘MacBook-Pro’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/24
When I have an external monitor connected to my 2015 era Retina MacBook Pro machines, I wanted some apps to appear on the laptop screen and others on the external one.
That was harder than I hoped for as no single solution works in all cases.
What I do now is to make sure the icon bar is on the monitor where I want applications to open. Not perfect, but works for most cases.
Here are some links that helped me:
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Posted in Apple, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Pro, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/10
TL;DR: it is impossible on a Mac to accurately measure power usage by attached USB devices. Only a general indication is possible, but it is unreliable.
[Wayback/Archive] How to monitor USB power consumption? – Ask Different
- System Profiler needs manual refresh and is a very rough indication
- iStatMenus is a graph, but not very accurate
- Activity Monitor is even rougher than the above
Related: [Wayback/Archive] View energy consumption in Activity Monitor on Mac – Apple Support (UK)
Via: [Wayback/Archive] macos view usb power usage – Google Search
–jeroen
Posted in Apple, Mac, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Pro, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/03
Written a while ago, but forgot to schedule this in the blog queue.
This is in reverse chronological order and only for the models I have, had, or considered buying.
Table
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Posted in Apple, Mac, MacBook, MacBook-Pro, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/08
Posted in Apple, Apple Silicon, iOS, iPad, iPhone, LifeHacker, Mac, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Pro, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/03
While recovering from cancer treatments and moving, I heavily cut down on spending money for my IT infrastructure as you can only spend money once.
Now that I have recovered quite a bit, and also gaining more income, I got more recent Apple hardware and could start to use this: [Wayback/Archive] Use an iPad as a second display for a Mac – Apple Support
It’s called Sidecar in Apple terminology and actually quite neat, though you need extra software to use the iPad in portrait mode (it is hard coded to landscape though a 10-inch iPad Pro fits very nicely in portrait position next to a 16-inch M1 MacBook Pro).
If I persist, I need to look at solutions like [Wayback/Archive] Rotated Sidecar · waydabber/BetterDisplay Wiki · GitHub ([Wayback/Archive] GitHub – waydabber/BetterDisplay: Unlock your displays on your Mac! Flexible HiDPI scaling, XDR/HDR extra brightness, virtual screens, DDC control, extra dimming, PIP/streaming, EDID override and lots more!)
Sidecar is part of Handoff, so these preconditions apply: [Wayback/Archive] Use Handoff to continue tasks on your other devices – Apple Support.
In the end, I think it is all based on AirDrop, especially because of the first Apple Support link above mentioning these “Additional requirements”:
Via:
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Posted in Apple, iOS, iPad, Mac, MacBook, MacBook-Pro, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/28
The winter after I bought my first ARM based (or Apple Silicon powered) MacBook I noticed that often about half an hour after sunset, within 10 seconds all the screens (the built-in and external ones) would get a red teint on them.
[Wayback/Archive] MacBook Red Screen Issue – SimplyMac was the very first search result, and mentioned this:
Adjusting Night Shift and True Tone
Night Shift and True Tone features can affect the color temperature of your display. Night Shift reduces blue light in the evenings, which can make the screen appear warmer. True Tone adjusts the display’s color temperature to match the ambient lighting. If these settings are misconfigured, they could contribute to the red screen issue. Check your Night Shift and True Tone settings in the Displays section of System Preferences to ensure they’re set correctly or turned off.
I had to turn off both Night Shift and True Tone to get rid of this artefact, though for some people that didn’t solve the issue: [Wayback/Archive] Screen has red tint at night (True Tone and Night Shift are Off) – Apple Community.
I fully agree with [Wayback/Archive] Am I the only one who prefers True Tone?* : macbookpro
The only thing I like about true tone is how great it looks when I turn it off.
…
I was soooo disappointed with how crap the display was on my M1 Max that I thought about selling it as soon as I got it. Decided to play around with display settings and found True Tone. Turned it off and felt immediate relief. That’s how bad I think True Tone is. Absolutely flabbergasted that Mac’s come out the box with it enabled.
My 2015 MBP screen looks better to me than a M series screen with True Tone on.
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Posted in Apple, Apple Silicon, ARM Mac, Mac, MacBook, MacBook-Pro, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/04
For cleaning an Apple Silicon MacBook there were already solutions to either disable the keyboard or to blacken the screen:
- [WaybackSave/Archive] GitHub – shauninman/Little-Fingers: Little Fingers lets you lockdown keyboard and trackpad input with a globally accessible keyboard shortcut (open source)
- [Wayback/Archive] folivora.ai – Great Tools for your Mac! KeyboardCleanTool blocking all keyboard and TouchBar input. (free download)
- [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – jacklandrin/OnlySwitch: ⚙️ All-in-One menu bar app, hide 💻MacBook Pro’s notch, dark mode, AirPods, Shortcuts (open source and available as [Wayback/Archive] only-switch — Homebrew Formulae)
In Version 2.3, Only Switch brings a new feature, Screen Test. It provides a pure color view in full-screen mode, you can check dead pixels via it. Press the left and right arrow keys, the color will change from black, white, red, green, and blue. This functionality also can be used for screen cleaning, as you can see the stains on the screen.
For keeping a Mac turned off however, there hadn’t been a solution for a long time.
Now there is, but you need to have the most recent update of macOS Sequoia 15 by adding a nvram BootPreference setting: [Wayback/Archive] Prevent a Mac laptop from turning on when opening its lid or connecting to power – Apple Support
Via
- [Wayback/Archive] Fefes Blog: [l] Satire und Realität sind nicht mehr unterscheidbar. Heute: Apple.
- [Wayback/Archive] Für Tastaturhygieniker: So bleibt das MacBook beim Öffnen aus | heise online
- [Wayback/Archive] Created a Keyboard Lock App for Safe Cleaning—Seeking Your Thoughts and Feedback! 🚀🔧 : macapps
--jeroen
Posted in Apple, Apple Silicon, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook-Pro, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/06
Having used the fully loaded Intel 15″ Retina MacBook Pro machines (the ones without dreaded touch-bars or butterfly keyboards – note the IBM ThinkPad 701 butterfly keyboard – also known as TrackWrite – was perfectly fine) from 2015 for 9 years, it was finally time to upgrade to an Apple Silicon one, but again: not the touch bar models.
My work is mainly CPU and disk intensive and often based on remote logon to more powerful equipment, so GPU cores and performance only marginally matter for web-browsing and local electron based applications (hello vscode!).
Going from 4 hyperthreaded CPU cores (8 parallel threads) to at least 8 full CPU cores, I didn’t want to pay full price like back in the days, and wanted it to be less than my car (EUR ~4000), so these links helped me find refurbished ones in The Netherlands:
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Posted in Apple, Apple Silicon, M1 Mac, Mac, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Pro, Power User | Tagged: 21771 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/05
After installing my Apple Silicon MacBook, I found out my machine had gotten named automatically in two different ways:
- readable name Jeroen’s Macbook Pro
- full name Jeroens-MacBook-Pro
- local hostname Jeroens-MacBook-Pro.local
- actual
hostname Jeroens-MBP
- HostName from
scutil
A few reasons I dislike that:
- Having 5 different names for the same machine creates a mess
- They chose for me where I like to choose myself
- They use spaces, quotes and hyphens where I like single a complete word
- They use mixed case where I like single case (preferably lower case) as not all other computers handle mixed case well
Finding out how to fix all this was a tedious job as I had to keep refining queries:
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Posted in Apple, Apple Silicon, ARM Mac, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook-Pro, Power User, Terminal | Leave a Comment »