The new PowerBook’s sense the ambient light to turn on and off the backlit keyboard when it decides that’s a good idea. That’s all fine and good, but a lesser talked about feature is the display’s “Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes” option.

The goal is to dim the display as the surroundings get darker. This is an admirable goal. The display doesn’t need to be nearly as bright as the space your in gets darker. Unfortunately, the implementation is somewhat annoying. The problem is that when my ambient light is just beginning to get low, the display’s brightness seems to slosh slightly between a little darker and a little brighter. This drives me nuts. The solution should have been to turn off “Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes” and I’ll manage the brightness myself. All is well, right? Nope. I’ve turned this feature off at least four times in the past couple months. More annoying than the sloshy brightness is the fact that the setting is being reset somehow. Now that I’m convinced it’s turning itself back on, I’ll keep an eye on it and look for a pattern.

I decided to do three minutes of “research” on this issue. Turns out I’m not alone: macosxhints – Work around an ambient light adjustment bug in 10.3.8
In that article someone states:

I tried too turn off “Automatic Adjustment … ” in Display Preferences but the checkbox allways[sic] turned on again when reentering the preferences (???)”

This comment was from Feb. 28 ’05. I guess I shouldn’t hold my breath for a fix. Oh well, all things considered, it’s a minor issue.

In a less negative tone, look at this slider bar pulsate at you when you have “Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes” turned on: System Preferences Movie

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 at 4:59 am and is filed under Apple, Complaints, Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.