15" Macbook Pro 2011 - Screen too Dark

Hey Daniel,

You can already read in this discussion what causes the difference in whites and brightness (and contrast, and color and...). The LG Philips panel has perfect whites and the Samsung panel is yellow (and has lots of other problems). I had to return 3 macbook pro's before finally getting one with the LG Philips panel.

It was worth the hassle!

I am very happy now :-)

Good luck.

I didn't see an answer to my question about Glossy / Non-Glossy HD. Does this issue affect both HD screen choices or only Glossy ?

Thanks.

It doesn't have anything to do with glossy or antiglare. The difference is in the brand. Samsung is yellow, LG Philips is white.

Guys I need some help here. I just returned my first CTO Macbook Pro 2011 15" due to overheating issue AND screen issue, and the replacement is on it's way. It was Hi res antiglare screen, It leaked light in a middle. Due to that problem I started to concern about Display brand. Can you please tell me how do I check the brand of a screen on my machine? MAC OS shows nothing but "COLOR LCD", Windows 7 shows "Generic Display". Apple engineers refused to reveal the brand. My Machine was $3100 and I'm not willing to accept any flows at such a high price. Please advice.

All you need to know is in this thread. If you are so desperate, why don't you read the all info available to you?

Good luck!

Hmm..I wasn't aware of a heat issue. My 2011 15" CTO MBP normally hovers around 160-200F. 2.3 I7 QUAD. 180-190 is probably the norm. I have a late 2008 15" 2.8 Core2 which used to get the same temp stats.

Do you have any more info about the "heat issue" ?

1) I experienced heat issue on my CTO MBP 15", maximum confiruration (With SSD). When the machine was on IDLE, the temperatures were around 55-60C and sometimes more. Never ever went lower than 50C. Even after I custom configured fan speed. Before that it was running hot as ****_.

2) I experienced LCD Screen Light leakage. - Issue number two, which make me think about LCD vendor and doubt about a quality.

Honestly, the only good thing about MBP is a design and materials (Aluminum), which I love. Display honestly far not the best one on a market. MAC OS just simply awful and made only for kids and light users. Every advanced user will admit that. I used it for 5 days and noticed tons of stupid unacceptable mistakes and flaws. When you have problem in Windows, you can fix it, in MAC OS - you will have it forever, because system is made very simple for non-advanced users.

Keyboard su*ks too. Very important keys are surprisingly missing. All designers would agree with me. Home button is vital, END button is vital. DEL button - W_T_F? I really don't see the point to remove all these. Next time they will probably remove half letters and you will have to hold FN key half of the time.

If you are into jumping icons and other cartoon effects, then your choice is MAC OS, if you are conserned about safety and perfomance of your machine then you know what to do 🙂

The bottom line is that is very sad, that there is no PC machine on a market that will match Apple's MBP housing quality.

Ouch.

A few things.

1. The comp is sitting here "idle" while I type this. I have Outlook/skype/Adium a few browser tabs open. It's hovering at around 71C. What did they say was supposed to be acceptible in regards to temp ? I also have 8gig and 500gig SSD.

2. My screen seems to be "ok". It's probably got a yellow tint, but overall, I'll deal with it for now. I def. noticed it when hooking it up to my LCD at home as a 2nd screen and then looking at the MBP with the LCD in the background you can see the the "yellowness" in the whites.

As to the rest of your comments, I'd say that you are primarity a Windows user ? There is "nothing" you can't do with OSX. if you know how to use the command line you can compile pretty much anything out there, proxy servers, webservers of any flavor, SQL etc. I work in the hosting business and having terminal access for awk, grep, whois, curl, cron, access to all system logs and native SSH etc. is worth GOLD. Running Windows in Vmware ontop of stable OSX is a winner ( if you need Windows ).

It's taken awhile to learn allot of the shortcut keys, but once you know them you can fly around without having to click, click, click all the time. Especialy if you using the Notebook without a Keyboard. For work I throw it in the doc, hook up an external monitor, mightly mouse connects every time and the Mac BT keyboard has all the keys you think you are missing + it all WORKS. I'd say that once I made the move and spent the time to get to know the OS, it's a far superior operating system. That being said I come from a linux/BSD background so it was "easy" for me to make the move.

I really appreciate your reply. Your MBP is running too hot as well. At Genius Bar they adviced me to replace mine, because it's abnormally hot.

some examples about MAC OS:

1) Once I installed ACDSee, my "applications" icon in the dock turned into a camera and surprisingly there is no way to change this back. System just not able to change icons.

2) Mozilla Firefox is absolute crap under OS X (i know, not Apple fault, but still) as well as many other apps. Mozilla app tabs just simply don't work under MAC OS as well as it forgots previously open tabs every time I close it. They are primarily made for windows market and when I started to use MAC versions I can say they all pretty miserable compared to Windows versions. Skype is not an exception by the way - missing many important functions.

3) How about maximize window size? You also think it's not nesesary? And every time I'm browsing I am forsed to have distracting part of a screen just because OS can not do this? And even more - when you do maximize a window manually all icons stay where they were before and half of window remains simply empty. Icons do not rearrange and they are supposed to. Surprise.

4) Force Quit does not work in MAC OS very well. I had frozen Excel tried to force quit - nothing happens. Had to restart machine finally. Windows might be laggy, but it does the job when you need it.

5) gadgets - not very intuitive interface. I did not even figure out how to remove sertain gadget. Why not to make a simple "X" button on it? Surprise.

6) Some native MAC OS apps do not have "X" button enabled and there is no way to exit them. BUT - you can do this by the right click on the app in the dock. ... so, what's the point? You say it's not a flaw? makes no sense for me.

I was very willing to switch to MAC OS as I really believed it's a much better and more stable system, but it's surprisingly not. I gave it a whole week even after all disappointment the system looks for me as a very very BETA version of some newly released OS with tons of flaws.... made by a highschooler or student 🙂

1. Check out http://www.davidgagne.net/2008/11/22/how-to-change-icons-in-mac-os-x/. If it's the DOCK I believe you have to flush the dock cache, or maybe reboot.

2. Eeeh it's a bit of a hog. I had a hard time with this as I use allot of plugins for Firefox and some are not supported in the OSX verion. I would suggest sticking to Safari or Chrome. Tab-mix-plus may help you with the FF issues you having. For the most part you should be able to copy your windows FF profile and dump it into the right place on OSX and it should pickup on pretty much everything ie. history, cookies, plugins etc. Except for anything that is not supported.

3. This works pretty well http://www.switchingtomac.com/tutorials/make-the-os-x-maximize-button-work-like- windows/

4. I'm not sure how you were force quitting, but probably the best way is from the Activity Window. If you were a commandline guy I'd say run: killall "Microsoft Excel", from the command line and it should close things. If it doesn't blame MS 🙂

5. When you open up Dashboard there is a "Plus" icon in the bottom left, click on it and you'll get the "X" on all the installed gadgets which you can click to remove.

6. Command-Q or File-Exit. It's a small price to pay.

I think pretty much everyone who has been using OSX for an extended period of time would beat you for saying that 😉 I did the same thing you did when I switched. I switched and then just "couldn't do it". Went back to Windows ( Vista days ) and then decided to give it some time. Now there is just no comparison, although MS latest OS has gotten good feedback. It's the switch from the MS world to the OSX world that is/was causing you issues. Apple is known for having "intuitive" products, but it's a different world and some things are different....you just have to commit to the change and embrace it 🙂

PS. I tried to figure out how to Private MSG you so I didn't clog up this thread, but I don't think it can be done. Appologies to other readers.

3) You gotta be kidding me. It's easier for me to build a rocket, than to setup that. <Edited by Host>. Of course I knew that there got to be a third party app for that. But the question remains - why does Apple have this stupid feature and switch option is not included in system settings?

1) Go to (3) 😀 Manually reset cache every time? 🙂 Come ooooon, give me a break 🙂 Reboot doesn't help, btw.

2) Firefox is only the top of the Iceberg, you know that 🙂 I have my custom software for my business which I simply can not use on mac as well and have no idea how to compile it for MAC.

6) It's all about being "intuitive" right? I do not seat with both hands on a keyboard all the time and this is very uncomfortable to have to go closer to keyboard just because you can not close app using mouse. Thanks God I have 5-button mouse 🙂 Never use additional mouse in Windows - no need, but since I started to USE MAC OS, all buttons are occupied 🙂 lol ...

P.S: I hated Windows until I tried MAC OS 🙂 LOL

P.P.S: i noticed you have skype. my skypename is vip_league 😉

Hello,

I received my new MacBook Pro 13, and I see that the screen is yellow compared to my 2008 version.

I understand that I need an LG- Philips 9CCE, but my question is:

=> where can I find that LCD spec? cause it was not available into the system informations.

Thank you

Hello,

type this in your terminal:

ioreg -lw0 | grep IODisplayEDID | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6

I also got the yellowish samsung screen, also had a "dead" pixel. (Macbook Pro 13" 2011, i5)

I send it in to a premium apple service store in Sweden. I said it was yellow and a dead pixel.

They replaced the display with a:

AU OPTRONICS B133EW07 V2 13.3"

Wich is, unfortunately, also yellow, and much darker.... compared to my friend's 2010 years model, which is a LG-screen. (I have both of them next to each other)

I'm so dissapointed on Apple, can't even understand how they can allow to have different displays that looks different.

I also said that some of my keys "falls away" while i just types on the keyboard. They said that apple would never replace that. Because it is a "damage of using it", the macbook is 2 month old. Come on apple.

Display model number: 9CCB

I really hope that Apple will fix this problem, because it's unacceptable.

/ Filip

And guys by the way, who still wants to buy this piece of... faulty hardware... I ran some tests on Apple SSD Drive (Toshiba actually) and Mercury Extreme Pro, which I just bought for my Dell XPS Desktop. The screenshot is below:

So, whoever thinking of having MBP with SSD, do not buy SSD from Apple. I made that mistake 😉