Submission details
Macbook: Lowest brightness level (black screen) is a bit misleading
When you want to leave your Macbook on but turn off the display only, you have two choices:
- ctrl-shift-eject
- reduce display brightness to zero
The first one isn't obvious to a newbie, because it's a hidden shortcut. So I think people usually use the latter option. But there's a harmful flaw in that way. You see, when you get back to your computer and want to 'wake' it up, it doesn't seem to respond (naturally because the brightness is at zero). And you might not remember you put it on zero brightness at the first place.
So you have now only two options:
- either you remember to push the brightness up
- or you press the power button 5 secs and shut down the whole computer
That should't be so.
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Solution 1: In zero brightness, ANY key press should lit up the screen to the lowest brightness level. (This is harmful in case a person wants to keep the display off while typing the keyboard. That may be needed in a presentation situation or when using an external display, you never know)
Solution 2: In zero brightness, only the 'brightness up' key should be fully lit by its backlight led (no matter what brightness level your general keyboard backlight is at the moment)
Solution 3: When a person makes the last keypress to zero brightness, a hint should show up to inform about the ctrl-shift-eject way of turning the display off. (The hint should not have an 'OK' button or anything like that. It should be enough that you just push the lower brightness key one more time to close the hint and turn off the display if that's what you want to do.)
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Medium
Medium
Not fixed
Discussion (4 comments)
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Control-Shift-Eject is *not* a hidden shortcut in Snow Leopard (maybe it was previously). You can also easily get to this by pressing the power button and then selecting "sleep" from the dialog that comes up (or pressing "s"). Or you can just close the lid. To be clear, though... putting the computer to sleep and lowering the screen brightness are two very different things.
The first two options you pointed out aren't very good for the reasons you pointed out... they break assumptions people may have about that setting. To be honest, I don't like the third one (Windows does stuff like this, and it annoys me), but it's probably the best of the ones you list.
ebaur:
Can you specify how the ctrl-shift-eject is not a hidden shortcut for a newbie? At least I didn't know about this feature until I stumbled to it on internet accidentally.
And yes, you're right, I didn't in anyway refer to the sleep function. The concern was only about turning off the display while keeping the computer up and running.
Other solutions to the problem would be also welcome of course.
I often just set the display brightness to the lowest value. Though I've additionally turned on the screensaver (black screen and the password protection.
If I come back to my MBP and hit a key, the password box shows up and the display is automatically set to the second last value.
This behavior is new in Snow Leopard, afaik. In Leopard the screen stayed black.
I say it's not a hidden option because it's listed under the Apple menu like any other command key combination (in Snow Leopard). It is a sleep option, however... so if you don't want the computer to go to sleep then it won't work for you.
I haven't tested it specifically, but I think the behavior mojo2012 referred to is only when waking up from sleep. Not sure, however.
manujarvinen wrote on March 24, 2010, 11:27pm
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