Sunday, February 22, 2009

How my Macbook Pro dims the screen

I love my Macbook Pro. Speed, backlit keyboard, glorious screen, four gigs of ram, etc. It's just a fantastic machine. The screen dims and brightens depending on lighting conditions and I've often wondered how it did this, i.e. where was the ligth sensor? On my wife's pervious generation MBP the location of her light sensor remains unknown but on mine the built-in camera is the light sensor.

I figured this out while cleaning the screen with the microfiber cleaner that was packaged with the laptop. While the camera was covered the screen dimmed. Ta-da.

Sorry, that was kind a wordy post for such a minor revelation and needn't have been.

3 comments:

Tanner Lovelace said...

Ok, I think that scares me a bit. This means the camera is always on, even if you don't want it to be.

Parlez à la Main said...

Yeah, I'm with you Tanner. I'm not sure if I like this after thinking about it last night. Hum...

Any idea how to access the camera directly via the command line?

Tanner Lovelace said...

No, but Google is Your Friend. :-)