The lid angle sensor is also serialized to the motherboard: you cannot replace it, or the motherboard, without performing calibration, which can be performed by an apple authorized service provider, or alternatively, in Europe (and elsewhere where Apple offers parts for self-service repair), you can purchase the sensor from Apple, connect the machine to the internet after replacing it, to then perform the calibration, only if the sensor was purchased from Apple.
So the hardware is capable of performing the calibration, Apple just does not graciously grant you the right to install a recycled or third party sensor in your machine.
They call it "calibration" when it's presumably nothing more than writing a serial number to an EEPROM somewhere. See also the related story of sabotaging iPad screens to work but subtly degrade when the serials don't match, and cameras that only semi-work when swapped (with genuine original Apple parts). This type of pathological lying that Apple loves to do is why I'll never buy or recommend to others any of their products.
Interesting but that proves the point even more --- it's hardly "calibration" when it effectively does nothing more than write constants to the EEPROM. They certainly have enough processing power in the machine to do that automatically too without needing anything more, but instead they make everyone go through a whole song-and-dance to do this trivial process; which doesn't even require Apple's involvement.
"Set the angle to 0 (closed) and press Enter. Open 10 degrees and press Enter. Repeat for every 10 degrees from 0 to 170" would be an example of actual calibration.
Exactly my thought, but this might not be precise enough in low light conditions? So maybe best used as a fail safe (if camera is lit don't calibrate even if the user pressed confirmed)
It does actually perform a security function. The lid angle sensor is used to know when the device is open or closed, and when closed, it physically disconnects the microphone. If you were to be able to recalibrate it at any time, you would leave your device vulnerable to having the microphone enabled when the lid is closed. You can argue whether that justifies the practice, but it's not as simple as just burning the EEPROM serial number in that tells it to turn the display on or off. It defends the user against an attack vector.
From that perspective making it one-time programmable is not unreasonable.
Though it could be simpler if it was something like a magnet on the lid that activates a magnetic switch on the bottom part (and it would be harder to have a false negative result). But Apple is going to Apple
Yes, it could be done with a Hall effect sensor or something like they used to. The cool thing about this approach is they actually use a different angle to turn the screen off as you close the lid than they do for turning it on when you open the lid, to create a better experience. Since it is a security feature, then the "open" vs "closed" state should use the same source of truth. So it's a trade-off of complexity and experience.
Apple even makes a suitable one themselves... but the point is that a calibration procedure involves adjustment and measurement, and not merely reading some data from the sensor and writing it back. If Apple weren't deliberately trying to be hostile and sneaky, they would not have bothered with this roundabout, obfuscated process which no doubt increases their production cost too.
Okay so here's the argument I've heard: if arbitrary replacements of the lid sensor were possible, it would be feasible to create a tampered sensor that failed to detect the MacBook closing, thus preventing it from entering sleep mode.
This could then be combined with some software on the machine to turn a MacBook into a difficult to detect recording device, bypassing protections such as the microphone and camera privacy alerts, since the MacBook would be closed but not sleeping.
Additionally, since the auto-locking is also tied to triggering sleep mode, it would be possible to gain access to a powered off device, switch the sensors, wait for the user to attempt to sleep mode the device, and then steal it back, completely unlocked with full access to the drive.
Are these absolutely ridiculous, James Bond-tier threat assessments? Yes, absolutely. But they're both totally feasible (and not too far off from exploits I've heard about in real life), and both are completely negated by simply serializing the lid sensor.
Should Apple include an option, buried in recoveryOS behind authentication and disk unlock steps like the option to allow downgrades and allow kernel extensions, that enables arbitrary and "unauthorized" hardware replacements like this? Yes, they really should. If implemented correctly, it would not harm the security profile of the system while still preventing the aforementioned exploits.
There are good security reasons for a lot of what Apple does. They just tend to push a little too far beyond mitigating those security issues into doing things which start to qualify as vendor lock-in.
I really wish people would start to recognize where the line should be drawn, rather than organizing into "security of the walled garden" versus "freedom of choice" groups whenever these things get brought up. You can have both! The dichotomy itself is a fiction perpetuated to defend the status quo.
The line should be drawn by the owner of the device.
As the user and owner of the product, I should be the sole decider about my own security posture, not some company who doesn’t know my use case or needs.
It’s crazy how we’ve managed to normalize the manufacturer making these kinds of blanket decisions on our behalf.
Yes it’s wild. Imagine if we decided that people can’t be relied on to install good locks for their doors, so we gave the government responsibility for locking and unlocking your door every time you wanted to leave your house.
A lid sensor is just so peripheral. Where do the vendor lock-ins end?
I dislike Apple's lock-in tactics, but I dislike gross fear-mongering exaggerations even more.
How'd we get to tyrannical government oversight from shitty corporate control? Sorry, I think I slipped on that slippery slope.
The better analogy would be "door lock vendor requires you to buy their door frame to make their door lock work with the security guarantees you chose to buy into."
Government should stay out of our private lives, but this kind of jumpy fear-mongering is what makes people lose focus, and when people are run by fear that's when the real psychopaths start taking advantage. Your fear mongering is creating the very government tyranny you're mongering about.
> As the user and owner of the product, I should be the sole decider about my own security posture, not some company who doesn’t know my use case or needs.
It's not so cut and dry though. The "user" and the "owner" of a product are not always the same person, but hardware security impacts the "user" more than the "owner".
How does Apple know the owner of the product has authorized the HW change?
There’s a secondary argument you could make here whereby because the replacements must be valid Apple parts that have uniform behavior and tolerances, the strength of the secondary market is stronger and Apple products have a stronger resale value as a result, because you’re not going to encounter a MacBook with an arbitrary part replaced that you as the second-hand buyer know nothing about (this is why the secondary market for cars doesn’t work without the ability to lookup the car history by VIN).
What happens when you indirectly cause the machine to fail by installing some shout 3rd party part? Are you still going to claim warranty? Walk into an Apple Store to ask for help?
That car comparison doesn't work here. You can't be sure about the true history of a car, only what was reported.
When I replace a wheel bearing assembly in my driveway, you still can't see that by looking up my VIN. Nobody knows except myself and the person I bought the parts from.
Was it a dealer part? An OEM part? A poor quality replacement? Can't tell without looking.
This might actually support Apple's side of the argument, although I do not. I don't think we need some Carfax equivalent for MacBooks.
This might actually support Apple's side of the argument, although I do not. I don't think we need some Carfax equivalent for MacBooks.
In some ways, Apple's scheme is better than Carfax. In other ways, it's worse.
It's worse because you can't get access to the repair history of a device.
It's better because you can actually have a reasonable degree of confidence that no "driveway repairs" have taken place since Apple's scheme is not known to be broken.
This is my biggest complaint with the strict "my device, my rules" people.
I want Apple to lock down my device to customization, repairs, etc..
I know I am never going to install an app through means other than the app store, even if I could. I know I'm never going to repair my device through anyone other than Apple, even if I could. I want to know that my device will be a $1,000 paperweight to anyone who steals it.
I want to pay Apple to ensure there are no "driveway repairs".
A number of years ago I accidentally ended up with a second hand iPhone with a shitty "fake" screen repair. I had no way of knowing it wasn't an Apple screen. But it fucked me over as soon as it started failing a couple months after I bought it.
I get tired of the people demanding that a company, with willing, paying customers, isn't allowed to protect their customers because they want something the company doesn't offer. Fuck right off with that shit and buy from a company that does offer that.
I had a similar experience myself paying for screen repair in SF and getting back a phone with a butchered display. Why wouldn’t you get mad for spending money and not having your expectations met?
If you need consumer protection laws then clearly reputation isn’t worth much. The issue with reputation is that society has grown so large and impersonal that we’re constantly facing interactions with unknown people.
I'm sorry for my candor, but your argument is so silly, it rubs me the wrong way.
Laws are how society operates.
If you need traffic rules (those are defined by laws fyi) then clearly individual's ability to drive isn't worth much. Let's abolish car ownership, make Apple operate all ground transportation and prohibit anyone else from deciding where Apple-operated cars go, what are operational hours and where the stops are.
> Let's abolish car ownership, make [car manufacturers] operate all ground transportation and prohibit anyone else from deciding where [manufacturer]-operated cars go, what are operational hours and where the stops are.
Shhhhhh! Don’t give them any more bad ideas or they might actually do it.
She is however the target of pretty much every financial scam on the planet, many of which rely on convincing folks to hand over the keys to their (digital) castle...
I'm not aware of any that this particular sensor would mitigate. I think the idea that security is only for people targeted by nation-states is not a realistic view of the modern world (and, moreover, if we decide that normal people don't need enhanced security measures, it becomes trivial to identify dissidents by the fact that they implement security measures).
My dude, an Indian is going to call your Apple-using grandmother and tell her that he works for "the Microsoft" and he needs her to give him all her banking details, or go to a bitcoin ATM, or buy a stack of $500 gift cards, and she's going to do it.
The sensor in her macbook lid does not matter! Get real.
Another answer, mine, is that one grandmother flew bombers, jets, spitfires, etc. in WWII and ran a post war international logistics company after that. The other did "stuff" with math.
ie. Both capable of understanding a security posture.
How about your grannies?
You might want to ask well formed questions in future, on a site such as HN the set of all grandmothers is hardly homogeneous.
It's not that crazy when people seem to cheer for a nanny state at every turn. Specially if said nanny state bombards them with propaganda about all the dangers they'll face if they just don't "comply".
1984 references may have seen farfetched but after the suppression of rights using covid as an excuse people have little to no recourse to claim control back. Apple was always famous for their walled garden and tight control, but we have Google becoming like apple (can't install things in your device unless you go to them with your private details), ID to track your movements because "protect the children" (effectively blocking news even), chat control (very similar to installing a camera in your home and recording all your conversations).
Corps and governments are relying on each other to strengthen their control and it's not a surprise.
A properly gated, user-authorized override in recoveryOS or similar would give advanced users and third-party repair shops a legitimate path without blowing up the security model
Keeping a victim device unlocked when the lock state is responsible for encryption key state is a totally legitimate risk.
With that being said, I don’t think Apple see this specific part as a security critical component, because the calibration is not cryptographic and just sets some end point data. Apple are usually pretty good about using cryptography where they see real security boundaries.
It doesn't need to be encrypted if it's one-time programmable. The calibration data is likely written into efuses which are physically burned and cannot be reset.
For the mic cut-off? My understanding is that it outputs an electrical signal that's routed to the audio codec that literally prevents the audio from getting to system memory in the same way a physical switch would. It autonomously, at an electrical level, disconnects the mic without OS or software intervention. As it cannot be programmed again, you would have to crack open the laptop and modify the PCB to override it.
Don't invent reasons for Apple to continue to have a stranglehold over their monopoly of critical computing infrastructure.
Companies as big as Apple and Google that provide such immensely important platforms and devices should have their hands tied by every major government's regulatory bodies to keep the hardware open for innovation without taxation and control.
We've gone from open computing to serfdom in the last 20 years, and it's only getting worse as these companies pile on trillions after trillions of nation state equivalent market cap.
The government regulators also have an interest in knowing the laptops they buy for eg the NSA have authenticated parts to avoid supply chain attacks.
If you're selling cell phones you already spend plenty of time satisfying regulators and vendors from all over the world. The cell phone companies aren't the ones with power here. (In general tech people have no political power because none of them have any social skills.)
Supply chain attacks don't generally target the second hand market. Much more effective to upstream your attack to the vendor Apple buys parts from in China, and compromise every MacBook in one fell swoop
That's too discoverable to work. Supply chain attacks are by state actors who can interrupt specifically your order on its way to you and silently replace parts in it.
If repair shops can buy the $130 calibration machine, presumably the super spy in this story (who for some reason couldn't steal the data while they were replacing the lid sensor, nor can they steal the data when the laptop's in use, but somehow can steal the data when it's idle with the lid down) can also get a calibration machine, and then deliberately set the zero point incorrectly.
If you have access to my laptop long and deep enough to replace the hinge sensor with a fake one that prevents the lid from closing as a way to turn it into a recording device -- which of course would also require installing software on it -- instead of just putting a tiny microphone into it (or my bag), you are simultaneously a genius and dumb. And if you really are going to that level of effort, hoping that I don't notice my laptop failing to go to sleep when I close it so you might be able to steal it is crazy when you can 100% just modify the hardware in the keyboard to log my password.
Hell: what you really should do is swap my entire laptop with a fake one that merely shows me my login screen (which you can trivially clone off of mine as it happily shows it to you when you open it ;P) and asks for my password, at which point you use a cellular modem to ship it back to you. That would be infinitely easier to pull off and is effectively game over for me because, when the laptop unlocks and I don't have any of my data (bonus points if I am left staring at a gif of Nedry laughing, though if you showed an Apple logo of death you'd buy yourself multiple days of me assuming it simply broke), it will be too late: you'll have my password and can unlock my laptop legitimately.
> There are good security reasons for a lot of what Apple does.
So, no: these are clearly just excuses, sometimes used to ply users externally (such as yourself) and sometimes used to ply their own engineers internally (such as wherever you heard this), but these mitigations are simply so ridiculously besides the point of what they are supposedly actually securing that you simply can't take them seriously if you put more than a few minutes of thought into how they work... either the people peddling them are incompetent or malicious, and, even if you choose to believe the former over the latter, it doesn't make the shitty end result for the owner feel any better.
I can imagine a different attack vector: A malicious actor doing laptop repairs can absolutely replace the hinge sensor and install software on it. They could draw in people by offering cheaper prices, then steal their info or use it to setup more complex scams.
The counterpoint to this is that car body shops can also plant recording devices in your car. This is true, but the signal-to-noise ratio in terms of stealing valuable data is much lower. I don't have data to back this up, but I assume way more people use their laptops for online purchases and accessing their bank account than doing the same with phone calls in the car.
A repair worker can install software on it without replacing the sensor. Also add a tiny mic without installing the software. Or both.
I mean.. someone could replace your cars breakpads with pieces of wood or plastic, which would seemingly brake on the repair shop parking lot but fail horribly (burn and worse) when you needed them after. Somehow we still let people replace brake pads without having to program in the serial numbers.. for now.
“Sure, you can borrow my laptop. It’s fine. Take it home. I promise not to spy on you while the lid is closed. I promise not to record aaaaaany audio or anything! And I definitely won’t hear any conversation that contains information that I’ll use to stalk you later!”
There are a million ways that some nefarious person could spy on another, but at least this isn’t one of them.
And I am a very suspicious person, thanks to some eye opening experiences that I’ve had. When someone says that they want to do something that not a lot of people want to do, I immediately wonder how they will use that against myself or someone else. Because that has happened multiple times to me.
I also hate that I am suspicious of people who want to at least have the opportunity to fully own their devices; something that is perfectly reasonable to want, but I am. What would that additional ability do for them? What will they be capable of doing that they can’t do now? How and when will they use it to get what they want out of someone? Or out of me?
If you don’t think like this, I really envy you. For the longest time, every teacher, every supervisor, every commander, every non-familial authority figure I had until I was probably 35, used and manipulated me for the purpose of advancing themselves. Every single one. The ones in the military didn’t even attempt to hide it.
I’m so scarred because of people convincing me to help them screw me over that I no longer trust anyone who is concerned about things like laptop lid angle sensors. Because who are you trying to screw over and why does that angle sensor stand in your way?
> When someone says that they want to do something that not a lot of people want to do, I immediately wonder how they will use that against myself or someone else. Because that has happened multiple times to me.
I’m intrigued. Would you be comfortable sharing some of these real experiences here (with sensitive details fudged/removed)?
As far as I know the mic is still shut off when the machine is set to clamshell mode. That's the point. You cannot use the mic when the lid is closed. It's a hardware cut-off, you cannot configure it in software. Hence my comment about the bug bounty.
DESCRIPTION
caffeinate creates assertions to alter system sleep behavior. If no
assertion flags are specified, caffeinate creates an assertion to prevent
idle sleep. If a utility is specified, caffeinate creates the assertions
on the utility's behalf, and those assertions will persist for the
duration of the utility's execution. Otherwise, caffeinate creates the
assertions directly, and those assertions will persist until caffeinate
exits.
Installing software generally requires user permission. Replacing Hw can be done surreptitiously. At least that’s the strongman variant of the security argument.
If we're talking Bond-tier assessments then Apple already sell a covert microphone: AirTags. They “have no microphone” according to product specs, but they do have a huge speaker, and a speaker and microphone are the same thing like a generator and motor are the same thing: https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/Pages/news/eaves_dropping.aspx
Just because a speaker can technically operate as a microphone doesn’t mean that AirTags would be capable of this. The speaker driver definitely doesn’t have any recording capability. The only reason the 3.5mm jack mentioned in your article is capable of this is because the jack has functionality to allow analog recording for mic/line in cases. No dedicated speaker driver would have this because it would be worthless and costly.
Mostly this is a consequence of laziness rather than a proper attempt at serialisation. The “calibration data” for most small sensors in Apple devices is stored in a centrally in a crypto blob to provide guarantees around component combinations, with sensor serial numbers used as lookup keys. It not usual for the sensor calibration data to computed on a component-by-component basis with calibration blob being computed _before_ the machine is assembled, based on the serial numbers the machine should contain.
So adding a new sensor means new serial number, which means the data lookup now fails. Resulting in the new sensor not working at all.
The pre-computed calibration blobs are neat little manufacturing trick to provide an end-of-line QA check, proving that a specific machine only contains the specific components it’s supposed to have. But it means the setup has no proper fallback mechanism for generating new blobs outside of the manufacturing process.
I personally think it’s a travesty that Apple hasn’t properly addressed this issue and enabled proper 3rd party repairs. But I think it worth recognising that the serialisation mechanism doesn’t exist primarily to prevent repairs, it exists to provide a form of cryptographic integrity check of the manufacturing process. Preventing repairs is just a “happy accident”.
> But I think it worth recognising that the serialisation mechanism doesn’t exist primarily to prevent repairs, it exists to provide a form of cryptographic integrity check of the manufacturing process.
What, you mean in case the parts of two machines accidentally fall out and fall back in to the other machine on the production line or during shipping?
Of course it's to prevent unauthorised repairs. There's no feasible way for the parts to be physically swapped other than someone intentionally doing a repair.
It doesn't even seem like a very good form of QA, since someone without repair experience can always try to take something apart and put it back together. Whether the serials match has little to do with whether the machine is currently assembled correctly.
Positive take: discourage theft; not only is the device locked down / encrypted and you can't just wipe / reinstall it, you can't even break it down for parts.
When the iphones etc first came out, they were a very attractive target for theft. Come to think of it, that's one reason why I was hesitant to get an iphone back then.
I used to have an extremely negative view on all this serial number pairing that Apple does, then I found out why.
Within mainland China, Apple was facing fraud of having their devices purchased, stripped for genuine parts, and then rebuilt with knockoffs and sold as new to unsuspecting victims within China or returned. This whole thing that we hate in the west was in response to that fraud.
I don't like it at all, but it's not all Apple being assholes.
Then what stops this "counter-measure" from "working?" Could they not just "flash with a different ROM or something" to allow the part to work normally?
I genuinely doubt that the level of theft ever rose to a large enough margin, if it did, Apple would have pulled out of China.
For reference, Apple employs ex-NSA, CIA, TLA professionals to solve this exact problem with a near endless budget and 0 oversight and accountability.
> I genuinely doubt that the level of theft ever rose to a large enough margin, if it did, Apple would have pulled out of China.
There was a point where the black market in China was making more on Apple products than Apple itself. They initially tried to have stricter warranty conditions in China as a fix, but state media decided this was an affront to the country: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2271627/apple-clarifies-wa...
Hence, the technical fix.
Why pull out when you can apply a technical fix and retain both access to the biggest consumer electronics market in the world and maintain the good graces of the country that manufactures almost all your products?
The situation has changed recently for iphones. Parts are icloud locked now. While the part serial is registered to an icloud locked iphone. Any phone with those parts will refuse to work entirely until the part is either removed or the part is unlinked from the owners account.
This would be the way to go if on the flip side any part that was not iCloud locked could be paired without hassles. Phone stolen/lost/etc? Parts unusable. Phone iCloud unlocked? Parts free for use. Of course this depends on mitigating various ways thieves can iCloud unlock stolen phones..I think the current method is snatching the phone while it's in use and iCloud unlocking it? However that doesn't make much sense since I assume you need some sort of password to do so even if the phone is physically unlocked?
The reason for that scam is that Apple doesn't make it easy to get genuine parts, so they have to be harvested from existing devices.
I am sure that if the parts were available to anyone from Apple at a reasonable price (like Fairphone or Framework), these scammers would be out of business soon enough. Who would insist on genuine parts and yet choose a shady supplier if it was easy to buy from the manufacturer directly?
A lot of "new" products in the "bargain" category can have remanufactured parts, even without telling the end users.
For example, in this DankPods video he pulls apart two cube speakers, and while they look mostly the same on the outside, one has a Nokia-sized lithium battery that is directly soldered to, and the other has a swollen pouch pack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfnabYBtJ2I&t=325s
Unfortunately end users can't tell whether they got a "race to the bottom" item, so as much as I'd like cheap repairs, it seems like those also come with a huge amount of buyer beware that they may not know about.
You don't get to be an extremely profitable company by doing things that cynical people online assume are the most profitable thing to do, since they always pick the most evil option assuming it's most profitable.
That is certainly the argument that is made. I don't believe it, however. I don't for one second think that Apple did that for the benefit of users and not as a way to turn an extra buck.
Does it though? Are there statistics that clearly show devices aren't being stolen anymore because they cannot monetize them anymore?
The way I see it the only thing this does is make you feel better the thief cannot monetize it, or use it, but it does nothing to prevent the theft which is really a moot point in the grand scheme of things. We end up paying in this way, of not having the freedom to easily and cheaply replace parts, while being comforted that even though they still are getting stolen from us, whoever steals them cannot use/monetize them. Which is quite primitive in a sense, and I do not think it's worth it. But that's just me.
According to the GSMA last year phone theft (which arguably has much more part serialization and anti-theft measures implemented) has been a steady 1% of smart phone users worldwide. It does not seem these attempts to lock down systems are successful in reducing theft. https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/industry-services/...
However I wonder if they have had an impact on data and financial theft. Which things like part serialization wouldn't affect but system security measures would.
In the early days, iPhones being both extremely popular and expensive made them pretty big theft targets and Apple was getting pressure from the various state governments to "do something" about the increases in phone theft. At least according to NY and CA, the activation lock alone in iOS7 caused double digit drops in the iPhone theft rates: https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/20/police-say-ios-7-...
Yeah, imagine a world where people who are forced to steal are competent enough not only to know which phones they can sell, but to be able to guess the make and model in the middle of a mugging
They actually do though. First thing to learn when swiping is what's worth swiping, and if no one will buy an iphone paper weight then it's not worth the risk.
That might account for a small set of scenarios, most times they just go for whatever sticks to their hand, in pockets/purses, without knowing what they'll get. As long as there's devices that can be monetized they will attempt to steal them if they cannot make sure it's not worth it.
And this would account for pros, let alone newbs in stealing, or just irrational behavior, or people who just enjoy creating harm with no gain.
I think this is a case where the justification is weak and in reality it's more about greed and control on Apple's side rather than some potential benefit that is actually seriously diluted by a lot of other not mentioned factors.
I agree that all the random factors you mentioned exist, and the proportion to random vs targeted theft would be an interesting debate, but there's solid evidence for significant targeted theft. The fencers tell the thieves what to look for.
Yeah it's like saying "home invaders don't know if there is anything good inside they just choose houses at random." The point of the theft is to get something out of it.
I've thankfully never had my house robbed, or a cell phone or laptop stolen. I have had my car broken into. The thieves chucked a paving stone through the window, grabbed a backpack sitting on the passenger's seat, and ran off with it. Left the paving stone in the driver's seat. The backpack had my gym clothes in it. A T-shirt I was rather fond of, a pair of shorts, a few extra pairs of socks, and a shitty pair of sneakers, all were well worn.
Replacing the backpack and gym clothes was probably $100, market value was maybe $10, and it was $507 to fix the window. (my deductible was $500.)
I thought you were going to say "but they ignored the $100 textbook on the dashboard" or something. The anecdote doesn't demonstrate anything. How much of an inconvenience the theft was for you is not a factor for the thief. They got $10 by chucking a rock through a window, and they only lost the opportunity cost of choosing a different victim.
They had to take the cumulative risk of getting caught though - one well-targeted burglary to take a designer handbag or diamond necklace would earn that thief as much as the indiscriminate 'stealing nwallin's gym clothes' thief would make in a year, as long as they had the network to sell the contraband on without incriminating themselves.
That risk is there regardless of what they steal. The kind of thieves who break into cars are low-effort-random-reward. They have neither the patience nor the skill nor the resources for the kind of planning you're referring to. Yes, the bag didn't contain much valuable. A different bag might have. Had the thief known that for a fact beforehand they probably wouldn't have bothered.
imagine a world where people who are forced to steal are competent enough not only to know which phones they can sell, but to be able to guess the make and model in the middle of a mugging
No need to imagine. This actually happens with watches.
In Hong Kong (and likely other cities), you can pick a watch from a "catalog" that is a binder of photos of watches on people's wrists in public, and the middleman will have the watch custom-stolen for you.
Apple could easily have a dialogue that pops up saying:
"The XYZ sensor in this device is still registered to a device attached to robert8 @icloud.com. Please log into that account now to authorize the component swap".
Whilst the swap isn't authorised, firmware would power the system off after 10 mins, making any stolen laptop parts useless.
Thieves once broke into my car. They stole everything, but then have thrown away things they don't need: which was everything except iPad Pro M1. They have even thrown away an e-ink device which was as expensive.
Many signs suggest that the thieves were in an organized group regularly operating in the area, and I'm certain they knew what they were doing.
My iPad has never appeared online after the theft according to my iCloud.
This was in 2024.
I'm confident this iPad didn't just become a paperweight for the organized group of thieves.
But it would become a paperweight for me if, say, the infrared camera went off due to a water damage and I wasn't willing to pay Apple a hefty price for the motherboard replacement.
I read somewhere the angle sensor also has a privacy feature of cutting off microphone at hardware level. This is probably the main reason for parts pairing.
... and this can't done with the myriad of other ways a lid can know it's closed.. why?
Presumably MacBooks still have a big un-shuttered camera on the screen? Presumably there is still a light sensor?
I get the idea of parts pairing as a theft/parts-out deterrent -- I don't get it as a method of cutting features on existing machines. "We need the lid angle sensor to be valuable, so let's cut out our eyes and seal our ears."
<shrug> I don't work for Apple and design these things, but for some privacy things they do go to the extreme. I can imagine the scenario where a TLA tries to replace the angle sensor so they can keep the mic open for surveillence reasons, hence why they do parts pairing.
> More recently London has become known as the “phone-snatching capital of Europe”. If the victims manage to track their devices, the goods are most likely to turn up in China.
> Globalisation created the supply chain that allows each iPhone—assembled from nearly 3,000 components—to reach the hands of a consumer. The same forces inverted see that phone yanked out of it, re-exported and broken apart again.
I wouldn't personally trust the Economist with this kind of thing, at least not compared to publications by technically-minded experts that have been shared elsewhere on this thread, such as the Register. The phone-snatching is real, but the effectiveness of this theft in creating usable spare parts, or of the efficacy Apple's software in reducing said theft, is much harder to determine.
If we want to split hairs, technically it’s robbery, which is more serious than theft. In the UK for example, the maximum sentence for robbery is life imprisonment.
To those wondering why the MacBook would have a sensor for this, it’s likely there to support Desk View[0]. It shows the items on your desk in a geometrically correct, top-down view. Knowing the angle of the display is very helpful when applying keystone correction.
Simpler than that I think - when do you turn off the screen or sleep? Because it isn't fully closed, but you want to be able to 'privacy-duck' the screen a bit before that, and having a sensor rather than just a fixed angle switch makes it software defined and something they can update.
If you approach something metalic to the top of the base in the left side of most macbooks you can feel where the magnet is. They either have both systems or maybe they switched this recently.
More likely a hall effect sensor, which is solid state and a lot smaller. And yes, older MacBooks had something like that, as evidenced by the fact you could put them to sleep by holding a magnet in the right place (just to the left of the trackpad IIRC in the models I'm familiar with)
Nice one ! Curious since I know almost nothing about HW - do magnets screw with computer HW otherwise ? I would guess no since we don't use HDD anymore but not sure.
As far as I know, even HDDs were pretty resilient to magnets when in their enclosures. I once took a large magnet meant for holding together concrete forms, one strong enough that it stuck to a ferrous surface it could probably support my weight, and stuck it to a hard drive for a full year to see if it'd break. The drive, as well as all of the data on it, were fine.
When I ran a MacBook Pro in closed clamshell mode and put another laptop on top of it, it went to sleep. Must be a weight sensor in there as well. (/s)
It's one sensor in both cases, and in the latter case you can do so much more: change the thresholds in an update, detect when the lid is in the process of closing, apply hysteresis (on a simple switch, there's an angle where vibration could cause it to bounce between reading open and closed, but with an angle sensor you can use different thresholds for detecting and open and closing state change).
But most of all...you don't have to commit to a behavior early in the design process by molding the switch in exactly the right spot. If the threshold you initially pick isn't perfect, it's much easier to change a line of code than the tooling at the manufacturing plant.
Why use two sensors when one will do? If you already have an angle sensor, it makes sense to get rid of the reed switch and reduce your production costs.
Apple has a history of adding sensors, security chips, etc. a few revisions before the feature they support launches. It’s a really good idea because it helps them sort out the supply chain, reliability, drivers, etc. without any customer impact. It decouples the risks of the hardware project from the risks of the software project.
If things go particularly well you get to launch the feature on multiple hardware revisions at once because the first deployment of the component worked great, which is a neat trick.
Yeah, my iPhone 11 Pro came with the ultra-wideband chip in late 2019, and before the AirTags were released in early 2021, I believe the only thing it was used was for ordering AirDrop targets by proximity. It was clearly intended for the AirTags from the beginning, but it took about 1.5 years before it actually mattered.
At Apple Stores, laptops screens have to be opened exactly at 76 degrees. I wonder if they use this sensor and specific software for adjustment (I'm not implying this is the only reason it's there)
It seems like it would be much quicker and easier to just have a piece of plastic or something cut at a 76 degree angle that they can place on the laptop and fold the screen up to.
Could be that the demo OS reports some metric on how often the laptops are set to 76deg and how often customers move it. Probably a whole ton of usages of the sensor and if it's price comparable to the old close sensor they used to use it would be easy to justify.
I've heard employees use the measurements app in their iPhones sometimes to adjust in the mornings, but having a sensor in the laptop lid seems like a much easier way to do it and you don't need to carry anything with you.
It would not, since you don't want to carry a piece of plastic all day long to set the angle correctly. Most people just use their phones to check the angle though.
I'm assuming so. Apparently it's an angle that "invites" people to use the computers, but I don't think there's anything specific about 76 degrees that makes it better than, say, 73 or 82. As long as you can see the content from an average height, it should work. Most likely they just settle on that angle because it looked good to the store team that was staging the first store, measured it, turned out to be 76 and kept it the same across stores since then for consistency.
I believe the rumor is that 76 degrees is slightly uncomfortable enough to look at that it makes you want to adjust the screen, which in turn makes you more likely to try the device.
Yep this seems like it makes a lot of sense— and adding on, picking a measurement means that all of them can be the same (consistency, as you said)- having variation in the same row would look bad from a distance
Shows you how good they are at planning and decomposing features into well scoped hardware and software features which can ship earlier, provide some value, while enabling richer future features. You have to respect them for this because this is how they have always operated.
This is trivially broken by people who affix some type of cover over the camera. I do this on the off chance some errant application thinks it deserves to take pictures of my environment.
The Mac camera light is wired inline. If the camera is on, so is the light. Since we're not seeing the camera light flashing on periodically, this isn't how it's being done.
The Macbook tally light isn‘t necessarily wired to the camera. It very well could be independently software controlled. At least it was not too long ago. IIRC there was an article about this, posted here on HN.
Macs used to have (still have?) a feature where you could declare it as lost/stolen and remotely take a photo with the camera. I believe the light didn‘t glow for that.
But is there actually an API for that? Last I checked the big providers Video Intelligence APIs even distinguishing cats and dogs was still unreliable.
Unless I am missing something massive, BirdNET[0] is for identifying birds by sound, not by images.
Merlin[1] (also from Cornell Lab of Ornithology), on the other hand, has both image and sound ID. I haven't used either, so I cannot compare the quality of results from Merlin vs. BirdNET for sound ID, but afaik only Merlin has image ID.
The Mac camera light is wired inline so as to make this impossible. The only way for the camera to be on and the light not is if the light itself is broken.
The sensor angle would be in a file like `/sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device*/in_angl0_raw` (device number can vary). At least I have this in a config file and remember it working (maybe on a different computer?). I cannot get it to work anymore on my laptop.
> Motion is tracked using the laptop camera via optical flow and mapped to continuous control over dynamics, while the sound is generated in real-time.
Author here. We checked for APIs like this at the time, but since approximately every laptop has a webcam, the cv approach is much more accessible. It would be a fun rewrite though; I’m sure polling this would be a few orders of magnitude more efficient. There was definitely lag if you ran the app on a very underpowered machine which did impact the “playability” of the velocity parameter.
I worked at an Apple retail store during college. We were taught to put the screens at a certain angle but it was a gut feeling angle learned through practice, and not measured. More senior people would correct you if you were off.
They did mandate putting the bezel, mouse, keyboard, etc. at specific grains in the wood that were consistent across the desks though to ensure they were lined up without having to bust out a level-like device.
Overall everything was made so that retail employees would continuously clean up the displays as they walked around the store (even while helping customers without them realizing it) so that the store always felt perfect. They had a phrase for it but I forgot now, it's been almost 15 years now...
> In Apple Stores all screens are tilted at exactly 76° degrees, this is so you move the screen with your hand…interacting with the product more and making you feel more attached to it.
From the description, I would've thought it meant 76 degrees from the user's PoV, i.e. slightly closed so the user would feel compelled to open it more / tilt it into their view (with their hand). The pictures show ~70 degrees from the back of the devices though, so IDK what they mean about the hand moving the screen. There's no need for interacting then, since the display can be seen from afar.
My first job was at a video rental store. My boss was very strict about the videos being spaced evenly and all at the same angle. Every hour one of us had to walk the entire store straightening everything out. It did look very nice in there.
You could use that to display some kind of billboard affect, so that an image is always in a correct aspect ration to the observer in front :D Please could someone with a macbook do this and post a video here? :D
Apple is going to see an increase in MacBook Pro hinges breaking from people trying to play the Star Trek theme in theremin mode or other songs with other instrument sounds.
Apple: How did the hinge break?
Customer: I don’t know, I just opened it one day and it came off.
Great idea! Thinkpads (used to?) have an Active Protection System that used a Free Fall Sensor IMU to park the HDD read/write head in the event of a fall. Don't know if there's an API, though.
I wonder why? Presumably this information doesn't come for free, and Apple spends money to put this sensor in.
Is it a backup if the magnet for closed lid detection fails? Is it some kind of input for the brightness sensor or True Tone? Is it for warranty investigation, that if the hinge breaks they can figure out if it was physically pushed too far, or was repeatedly slammed open and shut like a toy?
The info probably does come for free. The laptops don’t use the magnets along the top edge of the screen for detecting if the screen is closed, those magnets are just there to provide the latching effect when the screen is closed, so it doesn’t open accidentally.
The sensor used for detecting if the lid is closed is an “angle” sensor, although really it’s an Hall effect sensor and a magnet in the hinge. If you have a Hall effect sensor, getting angle data from it is pretty much free, because the Hall effect produces a continuously varying signal, you need thresholding logic to turn it into a binary output.
Given Hall effect ICs are so cheap and plentiful there no reason to use anything else. Also given they mass-produced ICs it’s probably cheaper to buy a fully featured Hall Effect IC, because the manufacturing cost between a basic IC and an advanced IC is almost certainly zero these days.
In short, modern IC manufacturing has just made magnetic angle sensors as cheap, if not cheaper, than dump non-angle sensing Hall sensors. After all you can always use an angle sensing Hall sensor as binary switch if you want, but the reverse isn’t true, so if the ICs basically cost the same, you can expect the less capable ICs to be completely outcompeted by the more capable ICs.
They only need to be co-linear to the shaft if you care about accurate measurements, such as in a motor controller. I doubt the error introduced by being off-axis would make much difference in this application.
There are also packaging considerations when putting a hall sensor elsewhere. Packaging it in the hinge has the advantage you can use the same hinge and sensor setup in all laptop models. Packaging the sensor elsewhere means custom packaging setups for each laptop to work around all the other components in the body of the machine. Doing the extra work for packaging in the hinge once is probably quite a bit cheaper than having to constantly redo the packaging work in every new model.
Once upon a time Mac laptops used reed switches to detect closed lids, and they were a common point of failure, presumably since they contained moving parts.
They can be erroneously triggered or prevented from working as expected by nearby magnetic objects too, which can be annoying. No such issue with a hinge angle sensor.
The cost of the software is higher for an angle sensor than a binary switch, but perhaps they consider it NRE (which is actually not true if you consider "maintenance" work.)
We've been using Hall effect sensors for lid close detection for a long, long time. My thinkpad from 2013 has it halfway down one edge.
If you simply move the sensor (that is already a requirement) closer to the hinge, you can infer angle based on the Hall sensor for free. You can even get special sensors that specifically measure the magnetic field orientation for the same price as the simple type.
Yes, it's completely free with just a very minimal amount of thought put into the design.
It’s likely there to support Desk View[0]. Desk View presents the items on your desk in a geometrically correct, top-down view. Knowing the angle of the display is very helpful when applying keystone correction.
Wild idea: if the goal is to wake from sleep as quickly as possible when opening the lid, could receiving a signal as soon as the user starts lifting the screen save a few hundred milliseconds? I might be way off though.
My best guess is it's related to thermal control. The vents on macbooks are right under the hinge, and the vents are blocked and opened to different degrees based on the angle of the lid.
There is no official statement about this issue but you can search for user reports like "M2 MacBook Air black screen" or something similar. It is not uncommon.
In older versions of macOS you can simply try two things:
* Press Esc in locking screen, or
* Press "Sleep" from the menu bar icon and then press Esc immediately
If the machine crashes/reboots, the sensor is bad and it needs to be replaced. Apple Store replaces the whole display assembly.
I was wondering this myself. I've had three mac air/books that simply failed to turn the display on. I've heard (from a third party repairer) that it is not uncommon.
Great! so they already know that I've been squinting at a 42deg gap trying to use my old MBP. The year with the faulty designed screen connector which was only covered for replacement on certain models, not mine. I wonder if that is why they added this, to check for 'holding the lid wrong'. If I open it any further I need a reboot to get the display back, oh and that angle decreases over time.
I wouldnt mind but I was 95% of the time clamshell, and still the keyboard made from butterflies wings lasted next to no time, and the battery put on too much weight after only 30 something cycles. After all these years I never understand how they produce such lemon models some years, just trying to save a few cents here and there. The one before was thermal paste nvidia meltdown.
I think clamshell mode was a killer of those models especially. I never ran mine closed and still use them for gaming to this day (since they still run Wintel). Not even a single key failed yet
There was a sensor where it would detect when you slapped the side of the screen, and a guy wired it up so when you did that it shifted to the next space (virtual desktop).
If I remember correctly, it was originally meant to detect if the laptop was falling, so that it could turn off HDDs to mitigate damage. Hitting the side of the screen could also trigger that sensor.
A lot of foldables have a hinge angle sensor - it's actually a public API in Android, and robust enough that we use it to detect whether a device is a foldable:
The first thing that comes to mind is simplifying the identification of a device type, without the necessity of looking up a device list name or updating the list with each new device that gets released.
Foldables have a different UI which often requires different requests to the backend. They need to support both narrow-screen and large-screen formats for content, and you usually want to avoid having critical UI elements fall on the hinge for fairly obvious usability reasons.
That should all be abstracted out to the operating system, not dependent on checking for specific devices. Any app should be able to accommodate different screen/window sizes and safe areas.
The Android OS does provide screen width/height information and safe areas. We use them when appropriate, which is fairly often, but not universally. Safe area support for foldables is pretty weak, though, because it's a relatively new device category that imposes fairly different constraints on devices.
The bigger issue is that there's always a long-tail of product considerations that need to be different on foldables and aren't covered by just feature-detecting the available screen resolution. Logging is one: PMs are very interested in how the category as a whole is performing, if only to direct future hardware plans, and that requires that it actually be categorized as a separate category. Backend requests are another: you can (and should) optimize your bandwidth usage on phones by not shipping to the client information that is only going to be displayed on large screens, and you can (and should) optimize your screen usage on large screens by displaying more information that is not available on phones, but foldables represent the union of the two, and you usually don't want the latency of additional backend requests when the user fold/unfolds the device.
(The irony is that the app in question is Google Play, and I personally know most of the PMs and several of the engineers on Android SysUI.)
Reminds me of a "stable window" app gadget from mid-2000's that used the built-in accelerometer to make a window stable irrespectively of laptop's tilt.
It would be cool if the Macbook can figure out the relative position of a newly connected external monitor. It would help in setting up the monitor with little manual adjustments.
Since covid, we no longer have assigned desks at work --- it's first come, first served. And while most are respectful of the desks we have "chosen" for ourselves, every once in a while, I'll have to sit at some other, often new desk. And that means my laptop will not recognize the monitor and that I'll have to configure it (scaling, relative position, etc).
And Windows being the mediocre OS that it is, will always select to duplicate the screens even though the logical choice is to extend. My laptop screen and the external monitor aren't even the same aspect ratio. SMH.
At least Macs have the sense to extend screens by default. Though, if I could place a Macbook on the desk, plug in the external monitor, tilt the screen back until the camera can see the monitor, the hinge sensor and cameras can work together to figure out where the monitor is relative to the laptop, and automatically determine the right settings for the monitor instead of requiring my intervention.
As someone who recently wrecked their MacBook's screen by leaving something hard and pointy in between keyboard and screen when closing the lid, I wonder if one can turn on the webcam briefly before the lid closes and sound an alarm if it detects anything in the way.
Does anyone know if this is used by any program to check if you are actually looking at the screen? I could imagine it being used for some blackmirror type stuff
> Confused why it says that 'this API is not exposed'
What it says is (emphasis mine) “it’s not exposed as a public API”. In other words, Apple doesn’t provide official documentation and hooks for you to interact with the feature, like they do e.g. with Bluetooth. Even then, while they provide public APIs to interact with paired devices, interacting with the Bluetooth controller itself (e.g. turning it completely off or on) requires private APIs.
my guess: probably there to support the camera system and depth camera.
although unless there's some sort of angle measurement with respect to the ground in the base, i'm not sure what it would be useful for. maybe to provide continuity for the depth camera when the lid angle is changing (without heavy duty estimation calculations).
At first I wondered why you'd assume the latter – certainly something like a tiny rotary encoder is a simpler lower-tech solution than a MEMS inclinometer. But these days I'm not actually so sure.
Microsoft has had this in their Surface Book. It has a screen that could detach and be used as a table, which had an accelerometer in it that could measure the angle.
This post was also made (by the same person, it seems) on Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/115159295473019599 — which has the added benefit of not being X, not requiring cookies, and has more information than the tweet, including a follow-up "theremin" hinge.
Fediverse will never be useful because balkanization isn't a desirable feature. The question of "which server should I sign up for" is an irredeemable anchor around anyone's neck before they can even start using it. I'm all for decentralized social media but the whole federated model is so bad.
Have you actually tried using it? I love mastodon now! You can just follow people as normal, a number of pretty interesting folks hang out on there (Brian Krebs etc).
No ads, a timeline which isn't endless and you can actually just read. It's actually really nice! I also think the decentralized non proprietary model brings us closer to something which is becoming ever more important in this world we find ourselves in.
Using it isn't the problem, joining it is. Finding a server that has the right combination of
- isn't The Big One (defeats the point)
- has a nice domain (that's your name forever)
- is stable (major downtime or data loss is unacceptable these days)
- is guaranteed to stick around forever (no, migration isn't solved and it will never not suck)
- has rules you agree with and can guarantee you'll follow
- is running the right software (no, "fedi" isn't compatible, you either run Mastodon or things will always be ever so slightly broken)
Some of the points you make are still true, but I think you're a little out of date.
Migration is not solved, but it also doesn't suck - unless you're doing it every week nothing will break, and several people I follow have already done it and it's been just fine.
Stability is also fine - if your server is down for a couple of hours, your timeline will catch up when it comes back online, and likewise your sent posts will stay in a local outbox until they can be sent. That's absolutely no different from email or Jabber or anything else.
"Fedi" is compatible enough that I run my own GoToSocial server, which is technically still beta software, and I haven't experienced any issues following and interacting with anyone on Mastodon, Pixelfed, Pleroma and quite a few other platforms.
Would I recommend it to a non-technical user, someone who wasn't really interested in 'servers' and 'clients' and 'protocols'? Yes, although I'd suggest they just go for The Big One, as you put it. What I would say though is that this is no longer just a technology for Web nerds any longer; it's a very viable alternative to centralized platforms.
I made a serious effort to look into it, but without already knowing where I want to be it was impossible to decide which server to sign onto and it's an expensive choice to make upfront since they don't all federate with each other and even the ones that do federate are not guaranteed to not start beef with each other. That's before even getting to the fact that I can name at least 4 different protocols off the top of my head (Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey) at various levels of not-entirely-incompatible with each other. I remember there being work on between-server account moving mechanisms in some state of almost-partially-working, too. Maybe things have changed now but I doubt it, everything I saw in the ecosystem just seemed to promote balkanization as a feature.
I'd love a truly decentralized model for this but fediverse isn't it, fediverse is a Hellenic League of city states where your ability to interact outside your bubble is beholden to your and their local leadership and shifting realities of protocol war jank.
If you do think my opinion is uninformed or mistaken at least know that I know many times more people who bounced off the idea for these reasons than people who actually managed to make heads or tails of this. Fwiw I don't use xitter/bsky either.
I'm only going to to be alive for a million more hours, and the BDFL in charge of this Xitter is doing a way better job of things. Year of Linux desktop when?
Why click on a link that works versus one that doesn't? Is that the question? It's a weird form of evangelism to say that one shouldn't use the working link because it may not work in the future. That's the nature of web, most links decay.
This is exactly why I avoid things like Mastodon as well, because the problem isn't who controls the format, it's the format itself. Who controls the format sure doesn't help, but if you imagine Mastodon becoming as universally adopted as Twitter and seriously don't think it would be a massive mess, then I envy your optimism.
Fedi is different because it isn't proprietary or centralized. A new proprietary and/or centralized alternative is never the answer. That's just buying time.
Personally I am not a fan of the Mastodon software or side of fedi, but I have had good times on the Pleroma/Akkoma side, and it all works together.
It will never be 'it', because I - despite being technically capable of running server on bare metal or something - have no idea what you're talking about. Fedi, Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, there's too much to know or read about before you can just use it. People go to Facebook, to twitter.com, and just sign up and use it and know what it is.
I don’t think that matters that much; it’s still just a popularity contest, and if something manages to break through that threshold, it’ll be trivial enough to make the default.
No one knew Reddit boards and 4chan boards either; you just knew to go to /b/ or /r/funny. The other boards, the other fediverse servers, are just details that enable other subcommunities to survive. The major community will just route to a single server, and most will probably never use a second
Not who you were speaking to, but you just tried to trivialise the power of friction in a signup process, which goes _strongly_ against all known research on the topic.
A social network does not have to be universally adopted to be interesting because the vast majority of the folks do not do or think anything interesting.
A social network with just the top 1% of the geeks would be absolutely amazing.
They called it a “Trojan horse” they shouldn’t be distracted from. They were stating that it was more likely to fail, which isn’t true. You can challenge that without challenging the idea that mastodon can still be a cool place, no one said they couldn’t.
I can't see it, and if I click on @samhenrigold's profile I get a random selection of things from this July and last October instead of recent posts .
It's really not a useful platform for publicly sharing information anymore. Drives me nuts that government agencies use it for announcements like "Here's an amber alert with a twitter link, but you can't have any of the followup information because that's only for people who are logged in."
But you can only see replies to tweets if you're logged in; so thank you for providing that link, but currently, that's the only way that those of us who aren't logged into Twitter can find it.
I am thinking about getting a completely different apple id when I get my next iPhone. I don't have a paid developer account. Or do they actively prohibit multiple accounts? I've never tried on Apple before but I have multiple goog.e accounts and it seems fine to have different accounts on different Android devices?
Moreover on Android you still can have 10 different Google accounts on one phone all from different countries for downloading region-locked apps on Google Play. Though recently Google started to break it by changing account region countries nilly-willy. Yet you can still register as many accounts via Chrome as you wish really without extra gmail accounts just by using own domain redirect via cloudflare or something.
On iOS installed apps are locked into specific Apple ID they been downloaded with, so you might have issues with e.g WhatsApp. Still possible to download region-locked apps with non-primary AppleID, but it will sometimes ask to re-authenticate with said AppleID to keep it updated so it's cant be just throwaway.
Classic Apple overengineering. Every other laptop I know of just uses a single lid switch. It reminds me of their mouse that has capacitive buttons and a speaker to produce clicking sounds.
And also it has a magnet to detect the lid being closed. People think this is over engineered, but I've yet to see another brand that has a working closed lid detection
With both Windows and Linux, it's always a luck-of-the-draw thing. Sometimes closing the lid works perfectly, sometimes you get a doofus manufacturer with lousy drivers, so 1 in 20 times you pull your laptop out of your bag and it's red hot with a drained battery.
It's maddening that only Apple gets this right 100% of the time, and it's among the things keeping me on Apple's platform for the moment. I can't fathom why this isn't a bigger priority for everyone else: much like "trackpads that don't suck", it's a huge quality-of-life thing which keeps tons of people on Macs because they want it to Just Work without ever thinking about it.
>sometimes you get a doofus manufacturer with lousy drivers, so 1 in 20 times you pull your laptop out of your bag and it's red hot with a drained battery.
That's due to "connected standby"[1], which is to have laptops behave more like a phone when in sleep. This is in contrast to S3 sleep, which basically halts all activity. Sounds all good in theory, but as soon as you allow code to be run while in sleep, it's easy for some runaway app (OS or third party) to eat through your battery even while your laptop is "sleeping". Worse is that there's no way to force sleep, so your only choice is hibernate, which is even worse than S3 sleep before.
“Modern standby” is indeed the culprit in many cases, maybe even the primary one these days, but to my understanding it can still be a crapshoot on laptops that support S3 sleep since it’s up to the OS to detect that the lid has been closed and put the machine to sleep. This has been a problem for a very long time, since well before it became cool to pretend to be a smartphone and not actually sleep the machine.
There’s also wake on LAN which if enabled can rouse the machine from sleep after it’s successfully entered a sleep state.
Source: My macbook has drained its battery flat while closed in my bag dozens of times. Then it just stopped doing that on an OS update. I still have no idea why.
For a long time (years) there was a bug in Firefox that'd prevent a Windows machine from going to sleep if webgl content was loaded in any FF tab.
So anyway that killed one of my laptop's batteries. So much for supporting Internet freedoms...
Windows comes with a utility that'll tell you what process denied a sleep request, super useful.
I've actually ran into MacBooks not sleeping a few times, but it is much rarer.
It is unfortunate because back on the mid 2000s windows had the best functioning sleep code, but then they tried to catch up with iPad's # instant on and chasing perfection led to the current mess.
The old Intel models were hit or miss, but with the M-series models I’ve never had problems with MacBooks not going to sleep when the lid is shut and staying that way so long as wake on LAN is disabled (or disabled on battery). That setting does need to be off though, with it on I did observe occasional misbehavior.
What makes you think that these issues you describe (which I've experienced too, FWIW) are problems related to the sensor rather than the OS or drivers?
I don't think this is about the hardware driver detection of the lid closing. Lid events are a first-class thing in ACPI and I've never seen a laptop that didn't have one, or any real evidence that one didn't do the thing.
Much more likely is that the OS was prevented from going to sleep by some badly behaved process, or got woken up by another thing like allowing USB to wake it from sleep, where even touching the mouse can wake it - with some laptop equivalent like a ghost touchpad touch or whatever.
The magnets work too well. Having one Thinkpad Yoga sat on top of another closed Yoga tricks the sensor into thinking it's in tablet mode and it disables the keyboard. I only lost 30min or so trying to work out what was happening...
There's decent reasons to over-engineer some of these sensors so they can't be unduly tricked by external influences.
If you're talking about laptops waking up inside backpacks- that's due to the terrible implementation of "Windows Modern Standby" that has ruined every laptop except Macbooks and Framework. (Framework still implements legacy S3 standby to improve compatibility with Linux.)
This has been an issue for so long - who is at fault? Is it hardware vendors or software? The spec itself is so bad that all implementations will disagree?
Halting power until an external physical event seems like a simple enough idea. I have never wanted to close my laptop and let it keep number crunching.
I've also found my work MacBook Pro heating up my backpack sleeve a number of times because it didn't properly go to sleep. Likely culprit is some "security" spyware the company installs.
Yea this is how the new Apple silicon devices will start if they are off. The fingerprint sensor is just used to manually do it or override the current state / put it into recovery mode.
The lid angle sensor is also serialized to the motherboard: you cannot replace it, or the motherboard, without performing calibration, which can be performed by an apple authorized service provider, or alternatively, in Europe (and elsewhere where Apple offers parts for self-service repair), you can purchase the sensor from Apple, connect the machine to the internet after replacing it, to then perform the calibration, only if the sensor was purchased from Apple.
So the hardware is capable of performing the calibration, Apple just does not graciously grant you the right to install a recycled or third party sensor in your machine.
https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/759262/Torn+Lid+angle+se...
They call it "calibration" when it's presumably nothing more than writing a serial number to an EEPROM somewhere. See also the related story of sabotaging iPad screens to work but subtly degrade when the serials don't match, and cameras that only semi-work when swapped (with genuine original Apple parts). This type of pathological lying that Apple loves to do is why I'll never buy or recommend to others any of their products.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955071
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36926276
https://github.com/Vladislav98759/Macbook-Lid-Angle-Sensor-C...
No, it actually does set the zero point.
Interesting but that proves the point even more --- it's hardly "calibration" when it effectively does nothing more than write constants to the EEPROM. They certainly have enough processing power in the machine to do that automatically too without needing anything more, but instead they make everyone go through a whole song-and-dance to do this trivial process; which doesn't even require Apple's involvement.
"Set the angle to 0 (closed) and press Enter. Open 10 degrees and press Enter. Repeat for every 10 degrees from 0 to 170" would be an example of actual calibration.
Pressing enter while closed might be a little difficult.
Trivial with a delay, press enter and close, after 5 seconds it calibrates
You don't even need that, just ask the user to close the lid and see what the sensor settles on.
How would you know the user is ready to perform the command?
You could use the camera to estimate if the laptop is closed.
Exactly my thought, but this might not be precise enough in low light conditions? So maybe best used as a fail safe (if camera is lit don't calibrate even if the user pressed confirmed)
Minimum angle seen during a full motion would be perfectly reasonable.
The calibration measures only when the screen is open and closed. There is a grace period of a few seconds to allow you to close the screen.
But yes, if you don’t do it correctly, you will burn the service part and have to replace it again.
That seems an extreme measure to ensure the security/integrity of a screen hinge sensor input ( or protect this tiny revenue stream )
It does actually perform a security function. The lid angle sensor is used to know when the device is open or closed, and when closed, it physically disconnects the microphone. If you were to be able to recalibrate it at any time, you would leave your device vulnerable to having the microphone enabled when the lid is closed. You can argue whether that justifies the practice, but it's not as simple as just burning the EEPROM serial number in that tells it to turn the display on or off. It defends the user against an attack vector.
From that perspective making it one-time programmable is not unreasonable.
It feels like Apple's implementation leans more toward vendor lock-in than purely user protection
I agree with you
Though it could be simpler if it was something like a magnet on the lid that activates a magnetic switch on the bottom part (and it would be harder to have a false negative result). But Apple is going to Apple
Yes, it could be done with a Hall effect sensor or something like they used to. The cool thing about this approach is they actually use a different angle to turn the screen off as you close the lid than they do for turning it on when you open the lid, to create a better experience. Since it is a security feature, then the "open" vs "closed" state should use the same source of truth. So it's a trade-off of complexity and experience.
USB keyboard?
3rd party keyboard :)
Apple even makes a suitable one themselves... but the point is that a calibration procedure involves adjustment and measurement, and not merely reading some data from the sensor and writing it back. If Apple weren't deliberately trying to be hostile and sneaky, they would not have bothered with this roundabout, obfuscated process which no doubt increases their production cost too.
Do Macs not support USB-keyboards?
> it's hardly "calibration" when it effectively does nothing more than write constants to the EEPROM
What do you think calibration of digital devices entails?
It does involve exactly that. Whereas in an analog device you would be adjusting a potentiometer or something similar
You're forgetting (or purposely omitting) the measurement aspect.
The measurement aspect is obvious to anyone who thinks two seconds about the point I'm making
The measurement happening on the lid is the "lid closed" point
Okay so here's the argument I've heard: if arbitrary replacements of the lid sensor were possible, it would be feasible to create a tampered sensor that failed to detect the MacBook closing, thus preventing it from entering sleep mode.
This could then be combined with some software on the machine to turn a MacBook into a difficult to detect recording device, bypassing protections such as the microphone and camera privacy alerts, since the MacBook would be closed but not sleeping.
Additionally, since the auto-locking is also tied to triggering sleep mode, it would be possible to gain access to a powered off device, switch the sensors, wait for the user to attempt to sleep mode the device, and then steal it back, completely unlocked with full access to the drive.
Are these absolutely ridiculous, James Bond-tier threat assessments? Yes, absolutely. But they're both totally feasible (and not too far off from exploits I've heard about in real life), and both are completely negated by simply serializing the lid sensor.
Should Apple include an option, buried in recoveryOS behind authentication and disk unlock steps like the option to allow downgrades and allow kernel extensions, that enables arbitrary and "unauthorized" hardware replacements like this? Yes, they really should. If implemented correctly, it would not harm the security profile of the system while still preventing the aforementioned exploits.
There are good security reasons for a lot of what Apple does. They just tend to push a little too far beyond mitigating those security issues into doing things which start to qualify as vendor lock-in.
I really wish people would start to recognize where the line should be drawn, rather than organizing into "security of the walled garden" versus "freedom of choice" groups whenever these things get brought up. You can have both! The dichotomy itself is a fiction perpetuated to defend the status quo.
The line should be drawn by the owner of the device.
As the user and owner of the product, I should be the sole decider about my own security posture, not some company who doesn’t know my use case or needs.
It’s crazy how we’ve managed to normalize the manufacturer making these kinds of blanket decisions on our behalf.
Yes it’s wild. Imagine if we decided that people can’t be relied on to install good locks for their doors, so we gave the government responsibility for locking and unlocking your door every time you wanted to leave your house.
A lid sensor is just so peripheral. Where do the vendor lock-ins end?
I quite like this analogy, I hope I can remember it for the appropriate moment.
I dislike Apple's lock-in tactics, but I dislike gross fear-mongering exaggerations even more.
How'd we get to tyrannical government oversight from shitty corporate control? Sorry, I think I slipped on that slippery slope.
The better analogy would be "door lock vendor requires you to buy their door frame to make their door lock work with the security guarantees you chose to buy into."
Government should stay out of our private lives, but this kind of jumpy fear-mongering is what makes people lose focus, and when people are run by fear that's when the real psychopaths start taking advantage. Your fear mongering is creating the very government tyranny you're mongering about.
You mean like a prison?
> As the user and owner of the product, I should be the sole decider about my own security posture, not some company who doesn’t know my use case or needs.
It's not so cut and dry though. The "user" and the "owner" of a product are not always the same person, but hardware security impacts the "user" more than the "owner".
How does Apple know the owner of the product has authorized the HW change?
There’s a secondary argument you could make here whereby because the replacements must be valid Apple parts that have uniform behavior and tolerances, the strength of the secondary market is stronger and Apple products have a stronger resale value as a result, because you’re not going to encounter a MacBook with an arbitrary part replaced that you as the second-hand buyer know nothing about (this is why the secondary market for cars doesn’t work without the ability to lookup the car history by VIN).
Apple doesn't need to know. Once it's sold Apple is no longer the owner.
What about a work computer? You're not the owner, but presumably you appreciate when can feel that your work computer is still secure.
What happens when you indirectly cause the machine to fail by installing some shout 3rd party part? Are you still going to claim warranty? Walk into an Apple Store to ask for help?
We have the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty... to rely on.
Huh? Explain more.
Generally speaking companies are not liable for failures due to the customer's own modifications to the product.
That car comparison doesn't work here. You can't be sure about the true history of a car, only what was reported.
When I replace a wheel bearing assembly in my driveway, you still can't see that by looking up my VIN. Nobody knows except myself and the person I bought the parts from.
Was it a dealer part? An OEM part? A poor quality replacement? Can't tell without looking.
This might actually support Apple's side of the argument, although I do not. I don't think we need some Carfax equivalent for MacBooks.
This might actually support Apple's side of the argument, although I do not. I don't think we need some Carfax equivalent for MacBooks.
In some ways, Apple's scheme is better than Carfax. In other ways, it's worse.
It's worse because you can't get access to the repair history of a device.
It's better because you can actually have a reasonable degree of confidence that no "driveway repairs" have taken place since Apple's scheme is not known to be broken.
This is my biggest complaint with the strict "my device, my rules" people.
I want Apple to lock down my device to customization, repairs, etc..
I know I am never going to install an app through means other than the app store, even if I could. I know I'm never going to repair my device through anyone other than Apple, even if I could. I want to know that my device will be a $1,000 paperweight to anyone who steals it.
I want to pay Apple to ensure there are no "driveway repairs".
A number of years ago I accidentally ended up with a second hand iPhone with a shitty "fake" screen repair. I had no way of knowing it wasn't an Apple screen. But it fucked me over as soon as it started failing a couple months after I bought it.
I get tired of the people demanding that a company, with willing, paying customers, isn't allowed to protect their customers because they want something the company doesn't offer. Fuck right off with that shit and buy from a company that does offer that.
Apple aren’t aiming to protect buyers of pre-owned devices.
If they could get away with it, they’d likely prevent resale entirely.
Why would they? Lots of people sell their old phone to pay for the latest model. Killing the resale value will decrease new sales.
Resale through Apple only -
Apple already will give you discounts if you upgrade some things.
So the resale value will continue albeit at a fixed price
I feel your'e just mad because your expectations of buying a second hand phone were not met.
I had a similar experience myself paying for screen repair in SF and getting back a phone with a butchered display. Why wouldn’t you get mad for spending money and not having your expectations met?
This is solved by repair shop warranty and reputation.
They butchered your repair, you demand a fix or a compensation for a new phone. That's what customer protection laws are for.
If you need consumer protection laws then clearly reputation isn’t worth much. The issue with reputation is that society has grown so large and impersonal that we’re constantly facing interactions with unknown people.
I'm sorry for my candor, but your argument is so silly, it rubs me the wrong way.
Laws are how society operates.
If you need traffic rules (those are defined by laws fyi) then clearly individual's ability to drive isn't worth much. Let's abolish car ownership, make Apple operate all ground transportation and prohibit anyone else from deciding where Apple-operated cars go, what are operational hours and where the stops are.
> Let's abolish car ownership, make [car manufacturers] operate all ground transportation and prohibit anyone else from deciding where [manufacturer]-operated cars go, what are operational hours and where the stops are.
Shhhhhh! Don’t give them any more bad ideas or they might actually do it.
It wouldn't be difficult for Apple to add a page in the device settings that shows whether the device contains any non-genuine components.
You do get to decide (buy another product with a different value proposition).
Does your grandma decide her own “security posture”? Does she even know what that means?
Your grandma is not the target of state level spy rings...
The noise made about security is absolutely ridiculous.
She is however the target of pretty much every financial scam on the planet, many of which rely on convincing folks to hand over the keys to their (digital) castle...
Which financial scams involve such attacks, so is there a single scam that this measure would prevent?
I'm not aware of any that this particular sensor would mitigate. I think the idea that security is only for people targeted by nation-states is not a realistic view of the modern world (and, moreover, if we decide that normal people don't need enhanced security measures, it becomes trivial to identify dissidents by the fact that they implement security measures).
State hacking tech leaks to average hackers and scammers over time. Scammers today are using nation state tech from a decade ago.
My dude, an Indian is going to call your Apple-using grandmother and tell her that he works for "the Microsoft" and he needs her to give him all her banking details, or go to a bitcoin ATM, or buy a stack of $500 gift cards, and she's going to do it.
The sensor in her macbook lid does not matter! Get real.
Who are you to decide what matters and what doesn’t?
If you were a journalist reporting on russia or the UAE it would certainly matter.
Not to mention that it’s not that hard to imagine an AI tool being paired with 24/7 surveillance that reports back private information it hears.
It’s also not hard to imagine your average hackers getting their hands on a tool like that after a couple years of governments deploying it.
both my grandmothers are dead
What’s the point of this comment?
It answers the question you asked.
Another answer, mine, is that one grandmother flew bombers, jets, spitfires, etc. in WWII and ran a post war international logistics company after that. The other did "stuff" with math.
ie. Both capable of understanding a security posture.
How about your grannies?
You might want to ask well formed questions in future, on a site such as HN the set of all grandmothers is hardly homogeneous.
Don’t be obtuse. Nobody likes a smartass.
It's not that crazy when people seem to cheer for a nanny state at every turn. Specially if said nanny state bombards them with propaganda about all the dangers they'll face if they just don't "comply".
1984 references may have seen farfetched but after the suppression of rights using covid as an excuse people have little to no recourse to claim control back. Apple was always famous for their walled garden and tight control, but we have Google becoming like apple (can't install things in your device unless you go to them with your private details), ID to track your movements because "protect the children" (effectively blocking news even), chat control (very similar to installing a camera in your home and recording all your conversations).
Corps and governments are relying on each other to strengthen their control and it's not a surprise.
A properly gated, user-authorized override in recoveryOS or similar would give advanced users and third-party repair shops a legitimate path without blowing up the security model
Then Apply tying the angle sensor to microphone status is a security issue. I would read that as a cheap excuse to be honest.
Keeping a victim device unlocked when the lock state is responsible for encryption key state is a totally legitimate risk.
With that being said, I don’t think Apple see this specific part as a security critical component, because the calibration is not cryptographic and just sets some end point data. Apple are usually pretty good about using cryptography where they see real security boundaries.
It doesn't need to be encrypted if it's one-time programmable. The calibration data is likely written into efuses which are physically burned and cannot be reset.
The sensor and its data stream would need to be authenticated, though.
For the mic cut-off? My understanding is that it outputs an electrical signal that's routed to the audio codec that literally prevents the audio from getting to system memory in the same way a physical switch would. It autonomously, at an electrical level, disconnects the mic without OS or software intervention. As it cannot be programmed again, you would have to crack open the laptop and modify the PCB to override it.
Don't invent reasons for Apple to continue to have a stranglehold over their monopoly of critical computing infrastructure.
Companies as big as Apple and Google that provide such immensely important platforms and devices should have their hands tied by every major government's regulatory bodies to keep the hardware open for innovation without taxation and control.
We've gone from open computing to serfdom in the last 20 years, and it's only getting worse as these companies pile on trillions after trillions of nation state equivalent market cap.
The government regulators also have an interest in knowing the laptops they buy for eg the NSA have authenticated parts to avoid supply chain attacks.
If you're selling cell phones you already spend plenty of time satisfying regulators and vendors from all over the world. The cell phone companies aren't the ones with power here. (In general tech people have no political power because none of them have any social skills.)
Because the NSA is buying used laptops?
Supply chain attacks don't generally target the second hand market. Much more effective to upstream your attack to the vendor Apple buys parts from in China, and compromise every MacBook in one fell swoop
That's too discoverable to work. Supply chain attacks are by state actors who can interrupt specifically your order on its way to you and silently replace parts in it.
If repair shops can buy the $130 calibration machine, presumably the super spy in this story (who for some reason couldn't steal the data while they were replacing the lid sensor, nor can they steal the data when the laptop's in use, but somehow can steal the data when it's idle with the lid down) can also get a calibration machine, and then deliberately set the zero point incorrectly.
If you have access to my laptop long and deep enough to replace the hinge sensor with a fake one that prevents the lid from closing as a way to turn it into a recording device -- which of course would also require installing software on it -- instead of just putting a tiny microphone into it (or my bag), you are simultaneously a genius and dumb. And if you really are going to that level of effort, hoping that I don't notice my laptop failing to go to sleep when I close it so you might be able to steal it is crazy when you can 100% just modify the hardware in the keyboard to log my password.
Hell: what you really should do is swap my entire laptop with a fake one that merely shows me my login screen (which you can trivially clone off of mine as it happily shows it to you when you open it ;P) and asks for my password, at which point you use a cellular modem to ship it back to you. That would be infinitely easier to pull off and is effectively game over for me because, when the laptop unlocks and I don't have any of my data (bonus points if I am left staring at a gif of Nedry laughing, though if you showed an Apple logo of death you'd buy yourself multiple days of me assuming it simply broke), it will be too late: you'll have my password and can unlock my laptop legitimately.
> There are good security reasons for a lot of what Apple does.
So, no: these are clearly just excuses, sometimes used to ply users externally (such as yourself) and sometimes used to ply their own engineers internally (such as wherever you heard this), but these mitigations are simply so ridiculously besides the point of what they are supposedly actually securing that you simply can't take them seriously if you put more than a few minutes of thought into how they work... either the people peddling them are incompetent or malicious, and, even if you choose to believe the former over the latter, it doesn't make the shitty end result for the owner feel any better.
I can imagine a different attack vector: A malicious actor doing laptop repairs can absolutely replace the hinge sensor and install software on it. They could draw in people by offering cheaper prices, then steal their info or use it to setup more complex scams.
The counterpoint to this is that car body shops can also plant recording devices in your car. This is true, but the signal-to-noise ratio in terms of stealing valuable data is much lower. I don't have data to back this up, but I assume way more people use their laptops for online purchases and accessing their bank account than doing the same with phone calls in the car.
A repair worker can install software on it without replacing the sensor. Also add a tiny mic without installing the software. Or both.
I mean.. someone could replace your cars breakpads with pieces of wood or plastic, which would seemingly brake on the repair shop parking lot but fail horribly (burn and worse) when you needed them after. Somehow we still let people replace brake pads without having to program in the serial numbers.. for now.
Your laptop can be compromised during a trip to a foreign state, by state actors.
Travelling back you would notice a microphone, and would notice nothing on the laptop.
Yes.
“Sure, you can borrow my laptop. It’s fine. Take it home. I promise not to spy on you while the lid is closed. I promise not to record aaaaaany audio or anything! And I definitely won’t hear any conversation that contains information that I’ll use to stalk you later!”
There are a million ways that some nefarious person could spy on another, but at least this isn’t one of them.
And I am a very suspicious person, thanks to some eye opening experiences that I’ve had. When someone says that they want to do something that not a lot of people want to do, I immediately wonder how they will use that against myself or someone else. Because that has happened multiple times to me.
I also hate that I am suspicious of people who want to at least have the opportunity to fully own their devices; something that is perfectly reasonable to want, but I am. What would that additional ability do for them? What will they be capable of doing that they can’t do now? How and when will they use it to get what they want out of someone? Or out of me?
If you don’t think like this, I really envy you. For the longest time, every teacher, every supervisor, every commander, every non-familial authority figure I had until I was probably 35, used and manipulated me for the purpose of advancing themselves. Every single one. The ones in the military didn’t even attempt to hide it.
I’m so scarred because of people convincing me to help them screw me over that I no longer trust anyone who is concerned about things like laptop lid angle sensors. Because who are you trying to screw over and why does that angle sensor stand in your way?
> When someone says that they want to do something that not a lot of people want to do, I immediately wonder how they will use that against myself or someone else. Because that has happened multiple times to me.
I’m intrigued. Would you be comfortable sharing some of these real experiences here (with sensitive details fudged/removed)?
I think it's possible to advocate for device ownership and repair rights without having malicious intent
I mean nobody expected pager bombs, but here we are.
those are over-complicated bollocks. there are easier and less detectable software only ways to do all that.
If you were to come up with one, I suspect you'd have a solid bug bounty waiting for you.
you just set the pc to not sleep on screen down? it is literally a feature
As far as I know the mic is still shut off when the machine is set to clamshell mode. That's the point. You cannot use the mic when the lid is closed. It's a hardware cut-off, you cannot configure it in software. Hence my comment about the bug bounty.
$5 USB mic?
If the point is to hide the recording that's not a great way. Especially when many corporate IT solutions monitor USB device connections.
Isn't there software that does exactly this? Called caffeine, I believe?
ITYM "caffeinate"
Installing software generally requires user permission. Replacing Hw can be done surreptitiously. At least that’s the strongman variant of the security argument.
`caffeinate` is installed by default on macOS.
If we're talking Bond-tier assessments then Apple already sell a covert microphone: AirTags. They “have no microphone” according to product specs, but they do have a huge speaker, and a speaker and microphone are the same thing like a generator and motor are the same thing: https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/Pages/news/eaves_dropping.aspx
Just because a speaker can technically operate as a microphone doesn’t mean that AirTags would be capable of this. The speaker driver definitely doesn’t have any recording capability. The only reason the 3.5mm jack mentioned in your article is capable of this is because the jack has functionality to allow analog recording for mic/line in cases. No dedicated speaker driver would have this because it would be worthless and costly.
There’s a fairly large jump between having a microphone and being able to be used as a surveillance device.
Mostly this is a consequence of laziness rather than a proper attempt at serialisation. The “calibration data” for most small sensors in Apple devices is stored in a centrally in a crypto blob to provide guarantees around component combinations, with sensor serial numbers used as lookup keys. It not usual for the sensor calibration data to computed on a component-by-component basis with calibration blob being computed _before_ the machine is assembled, based on the serial numbers the machine should contain.
So adding a new sensor means new serial number, which means the data lookup now fails. Resulting in the new sensor not working at all.
The pre-computed calibration blobs are neat little manufacturing trick to provide an end-of-line QA check, proving that a specific machine only contains the specific components it’s supposed to have. But it means the setup has no proper fallback mechanism for generating new blobs outside of the manufacturing process.
I personally think it’s a travesty that Apple hasn’t properly addressed this issue and enabled proper 3rd party repairs. But I think it worth recognising that the serialisation mechanism doesn’t exist primarily to prevent repairs, it exists to provide a form of cryptographic integrity check of the manufacturing process. Preventing repairs is just a “happy accident”.
> But I think it worth recognising that the serialisation mechanism doesn’t exist primarily to prevent repairs, it exists to provide a form of cryptographic integrity check of the manufacturing process.
What, you mean in case the parts of two machines accidentally fall out and fall back in to the other machine on the production line or during shipping?
Of course it's to prevent unauthorised repairs. There's no feasible way for the parts to be physically swapped other than someone intentionally doing a repair.
It doesn't even seem like a very good form of QA, since someone without repair experience can always try to take something apart and put it back together. Whether the serials match has little to do with whether the machine is currently assembled correctly.
Negative take: Vendor lock-in
Positive take: discourage theft; not only is the device locked down / encrypted and you can't just wipe / reinstall it, you can't even break it down for parts.
When the iphones etc first came out, they were a very attractive target for theft. Come to think of it, that's one reason why I was hesitant to get an iphone back then.
I used to have an extremely negative view on all this serial number pairing that Apple does, then I found out why.
Within mainland China, Apple was facing fraud of having their devices purchased, stripped for genuine parts, and then rebuilt with knockoffs and sold as new to unsuspecting victims within China or returned. This whole thing that we hate in the west was in response to that fraud.
I don't like it at all, but it's not all Apple being assholes.
That would be a good argument for Apple showing a warning every time it's powered on or something, but not for it refusing to work altogether.
Yeah, but then you could just flash with a different ROM or something and prevent that warning from being displayed?
Then what stops this "counter-measure" from "working?" Could they not just "flash with a different ROM or something" to allow the part to work normally?
I genuinely doubt that the level of theft ever rose to a large enough margin, if it did, Apple would have pulled out of China.
For reference, Apple employs ex-NSA, CIA, TLA professionals to solve this exact problem with a near endless budget and 0 oversight and accountability.
Most notably, one of the organisational leaders was caught bribing the sheriff's office for concealed carry permits, https://www.ft.com/content/e73676d7-c6bc-4b07-b9bf-9bd702f1f... / https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/29/apples_chief_security...
> I genuinely doubt that the level of theft ever rose to a large enough margin, if it did, Apple would have pulled out of China.
There was a point where the black market in China was making more on Apple products than Apple itself. They initially tried to have stricter warranty conditions in China as a fix, but state media decided this was an affront to the country: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2271627/apple-clarifies-wa...
Hence, the technical fix.
Why pull out when you can apply a technical fix and retain both access to the biggest consumer electronics market in the world and maintain the good graces of the country that manufactures almost all your products?
If you could do that, you could just flash a new ROM to ignore serial errors, too.
The checks are not entirely in software, and would not be in showing the error, either.
The situation has changed recently for iphones. Parts are icloud locked now. While the part serial is registered to an icloud locked iphone. Any phone with those parts will refuse to work entirely until the part is either removed or the part is unlinked from the owners account.
This would be the way to go if on the flip side any part that was not iCloud locked could be paired without hassles. Phone stolen/lost/etc? Parts unusable. Phone iCloud unlocked? Parts free for use. Of course this depends on mitigating various ways thieves can iCloud unlock stolen phones..I think the current method is snatching the phone while it's in use and iCloud unlocking it? However that doesn't make much sense since I assume you need some sort of password to do so even if the phone is physically unlocked?
Source? What message does iOS show?
The reason for that scam is that Apple doesn't make it easy to get genuine parts, so they have to be harvested from existing devices.
I am sure that if the parts were available to anyone from Apple at a reasonable price (like Fairphone or Framework), these scammers would be out of business soon enough. Who would insist on genuine parts and yet choose a shady supplier if it was easy to buy from the manufacturer directly?
A lot of "new" products in the "bargain" category can have remanufactured parts, even without telling the end users.
For example, in this DankPods video he pulls apart two cube speakers, and while they look mostly the same on the outside, one has a Nokia-sized lithium battery that is directly soldered to, and the other has a swollen pouch pack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfnabYBtJ2I&t=325s
Unfortunately end users can't tell whether they got a "race to the bottom" item, so as much as I'd like cheap repairs, it seems like those also come with a huge amount of buyer beware that they may not know about.
Sounds like more of an excuse than a reason.
More like plausible deniability.
Yes and: Requiring genuine parts reduces risk of silent hardware pwnage. Which is a no-negotiable requirement these days.
That said...
I demand that Apple makes genuine parts available to end users and 3rd repair shops.
And being 100% pro Right to Repair, I support repairs with non-genuine parts.
For peace of mind, have your gear repaired by Apple. For the cost sensitive and tinkerers, you have options.
Problem with doing repairs by apple is that they always go with "let's replace the motherboard"
Because the time spent on diagnosing the specific problem and replacing just the faulty component would cost more.
that's charitable.
I would presume that the world's third largest company by market cap would be attracted to that option because it's the most profitable thing to do.
Yes -- there is a nuance between 'most profitable' and 'most thrifty'.
You don't get to be an extremely profitable company by doing things that cynical people online assume are the most profitable thing to do, since they always pick the most evil option assuming it's most profitable.
How does AppleCare factor into your presumption?
It makes people buy apple?
That is certainly the argument that is made. I don't believe it, however. I don't for one second think that Apple did that for the benefit of users and not as a way to turn an extra buck.
>discourage theft
Does it though? Are there statistics that clearly show devices aren't being stolen anymore because they cannot monetize them anymore?
The way I see it the only thing this does is make you feel better the thief cannot monetize it, or use it, but it does nothing to prevent the theft which is really a moot point in the grand scheme of things. We end up paying in this way, of not having the freedom to easily and cheaply replace parts, while being comforted that even though they still are getting stolen from us, whoever steals them cannot use/monetize them. Which is quite primitive in a sense, and I do not think it's worth it. But that's just me.
According to the GSMA last year phone theft (which arguably has much more part serialization and anti-theft measures implemented) has been a steady 1% of smart phone users worldwide. It does not seem these attempts to lock down systems are successful in reducing theft. https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/industry-services/...
However I wonder if they have had an impact on data and financial theft. Which things like part serialization wouldn't affect but system security measures would.
In the early days, iPhones being both extremely popular and expensive made them pretty big theft targets and Apple was getting pressure from the various state governments to "do something" about the increases in phone theft. At least according to NY and CA, the activation lock alone in iOS7 caused double digit drops in the iPhone theft rates: https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/20/police-say-ios-7-...
Alternatively, without these measures phone theft might be a lot more than 1% of users. People get killed for less than a smartphone costs.
It’s a dynamic system. The number staying the same doesn’t tell you anything about causality or the counterfactual.
I suspect the majority of phone thieves don't care about the previous owner's data, they just want it wiped so it can be sold to someone else.
Yeah, imagine a world where people who are forced to steal are competent enough not only to know which phones they can sell, but to be able to guess the make and model in the middle of a mugging
They actually do though. First thing to learn when swiping is what's worth swiping, and if no one will buy an iphone paper weight then it's not worth the risk.
That might account for a small set of scenarios, most times they just go for whatever sticks to their hand, in pockets/purses, without knowing what they'll get. As long as there's devices that can be monetized they will attempt to steal them if they cannot make sure it's not worth it.
And this would account for pros, let alone newbs in stealing, or just irrational behavior, or people who just enjoy creating harm with no gain. I think this is a case where the justification is weak and in reality it's more about greed and control on Apple's side rather than some potential benefit that is actually seriously diluted by a lot of other not mentioned factors.
For example in the UK the police did a sting simply by wearing expensive watches, and caught 31 robbers in a 12 month period.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-68003783
I agree that all the random factors you mentioned exist, and the proportion to random vs targeted theft would be an interesting debate, but there's solid evidence for significant targeted theft. The fencers tell the thieves what to look for.
Yeah it's like saying "home invaders don't know if there is anything good inside they just choose houses at random." The point of the theft is to get something out of it.
I've thankfully never had my house robbed, or a cell phone or laptop stolen. I have had my car broken into. The thieves chucked a paving stone through the window, grabbed a backpack sitting on the passenger's seat, and ran off with it. Left the paving stone in the driver's seat. The backpack had my gym clothes in it. A T-shirt I was rather fond of, a pair of shorts, a few extra pairs of socks, and a shitty pair of sneakers, all were well worn.
Replacing the backpack and gym clothes was probably $100, market value was maybe $10, and it was $507 to fix the window. (my deductible was $500.)
I thought you were going to say "but they ignored the $100 textbook on the dashboard" or something. The anecdote doesn't demonstrate anything. How much of an inconvenience the theft was for you is not a factor for the thief. They got $10 by chucking a rock through a window, and they only lost the opportunity cost of choosing a different victim.
They had to take the cumulative risk of getting caught though - one well-targeted burglary to take a designer handbag or diamond necklace would earn that thief as much as the indiscriminate 'stealing nwallin's gym clothes' thief would make in a year, as long as they had the network to sell the contraband on without incriminating themselves.
That risk is there regardless of what they steal. The kind of thieves who break into cars are low-effort-random-reward. They have neither the patience nor the skill nor the resources for the kind of planning you're referring to. Yes, the bag didn't contain much valuable. A different bag might have. Had the thief known that for a fact beforehand they probably wouldn't have bothered.
Outside nwallin's car: no valuables
Inside nwallin's car: maybe valuables?
There is no risk in may states like California:
imagine a world where people who are forced to steal are competent enough not only to know which phones they can sell, but to be able to guess the make and model in the middle of a mugging
No need to imagine. This actually happens with watches.
In Hong Kong (and likely other cities), you can pick a watch from a "catalog" that is a binder of photos of watches on people's wrists in public, and the middleman will have the watch custom-stolen for you.
Part of me believes this is true. The other part suspects this is a fancy way to sell custom fakes with no refunds.
The majority of phones in the US are iPhones, especially in big cities where phone theft is most common.
Anti-theft isn't the reason.
Apple could easily have a dialogue that pops up saying:
"The XYZ sensor in this device is still registered to a device attached to robert8 @icloud.com. Please log into that account now to authorize the component swap".
Whilst the swap isn't authorised, firmware would power the system off after 10 mins, making any stolen laptop parts useless.
That is how it works as of recently https://support.apple.com/en-au/120610
> discourage theft
Thieves once broke into my car. They stole everything, but then have thrown away things they don't need: which was everything except iPad Pro M1. They have even thrown away an e-ink device which was as expensive.
Many signs suggest that the thieves were in an organized group regularly operating in the area, and I'm certain they knew what they were doing.
My iPad has never appeared online after the theft according to my iCloud.
This was in 2024.
I'm confident this iPad didn't just become a paperweight for the organized group of thieves. But it would become a paperweight for me if, say, the infrared camera went off due to a water damage and I wasn't willing to pay Apple a hefty price for the motherboard replacement.
Theft of what, sorry not clear. Thieves keep stealing macbooks no prob.
I read somewhere the angle sensor also has a privacy feature of cutting off microphone at hardware level. This is probably the main reason for parts pairing.
... and this can't done with the myriad of other ways a lid can know it's closed.. why?
Presumably MacBooks still have a big un-shuttered camera on the screen? Presumably there is still a light sensor?
I get the idea of parts pairing as a theft/parts-out deterrent -- I don't get it as a method of cutting features on existing machines. "We need the lid angle sensor to be valuable, so let's cut out our eyes and seal our ears."
<shrug> I don't work for Apple and design these things, but for some privacy things they do go to the extreme. I can imagine the scenario where a TLA tries to replace the angle sensor so they can keep the mic open for surveillence reasons, hence why they do parts pairing.
https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/security/secbbd20b00b/...
iPhones were like gold on the black market
They are still a target for theft
https://www.economist.com/interactive/britain/2025/08/17/the...
> More recently London has become known as the “phone-snatching capital of Europe”. If the victims manage to track their devices, the goods are most likely to turn up in China.
> Globalisation created the supply chain that allows each iPhone—assembled from nearly 3,000 components—to reach the hands of a consumer. The same forces inverted see that phone yanked out of it, re-exported and broken apart again.
I wouldn't personally trust the Economist with this kind of thing, at least not compared to publications by technically-minded experts that have been shared elsewhere on this thread, such as the Register. The phone-snatching is real, but the effectiveness of this theft in creating usable spare parts, or of the efficacy Apple's software in reducing said theft, is much harder to determine.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255110862?sortBy=rank
> Stolen iPhone is in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China; what can I do?
As the saying goes, is it even theft if you don't own the device? (If you can't do whatever you wish.)
If we want to split hairs, technically it’s robbery, which is more serious than theft. In the UK for example, the maximum sentence for robbery is life imprisonment.
Yes, Apple rents me some very powerful hardware that allows me to make a living.
Someone depriving me of it is theft.
That is a particularly idiotic saying.
Stuff like this makes Right to Repair not just a consumer issue
Is there anything that can be replaced on a MacBook?
Not really. You used to be able to replace the SSD (albeit with another proprietary module), but even that is soldered down as of a few years back
Louis Rossman has talked about this extensively and I believe come up with a solution.
The only true solution is to vote with your wallet.
Weird to be mad at this when you didn't know it was a thing 10 minutes ago ...
You can dislike something in general and simply point out when a scenario matches what you dislike, as is happening here.
You can't repair what doesn't exist, though.
Completely unrelated to the point I’m explaining
If I told you some John Smith had brutally killed a cat I bet you'd be a bit mad, even thought you'd never heard of him before.
To those wondering why the MacBook would have a sensor for this, it’s likely there to support Desk View[0]. It shows the items on your desk in a geometrically correct, top-down view. Knowing the angle of the display is very helpful when applying keystone correction.
0: https://support.apple.com/en-us/121541
Simpler than that I think - when do you turn off the screen or sleep? Because it isn't fully closed, but you want to be able to 'privacy-duck' the screen a bit before that, and having a sensor rather than just a fixed angle switch makes it software defined and something they can update.
I'm pretty sure the sensor for that is a simple reed switch.
A reed switch (plus magnet and choice of location) would be an implementation of a 'fixed angle switch' per my comment above.
If you approach something metalic to the top of the base in the left side of most macbooks you can feel where the magnet is. They either have both systems or maybe they switched this recently.
More likely a hall effect sensor, which is solid state and a lot smaller. And yes, older MacBooks had something like that, as evidenced by the fact you could put them to sleep by holding a magnet in the right place (just to the left of the trackpad IIRC in the models I'm familiar with)
I pranked a coworker once by sticking a magnet to his desk somehow to get his macbook to sleep when his computer was in a certain spot.
Nice one ! Curious since I know almost nothing about HW - do magnets screw with computer HW otherwise ? I would guess no since we don't use HDD anymore but not sure.
As far as I know, even HDDs were pretty resilient to magnets when in their enclosures. I once took a large magnet meant for holding together concrete forms, one strong enough that it stuck to a ferrous surface it could probably support my weight, and stuck it to a hard drive for a full year to see if it'd break. The drive, as well as all of the data on it, were fine.
When I ran a MacBook Pro in closed clamshell mode and put another laptop on top of it, it went to sleep. Must be a weight sensor in there as well. (/s)
They weren't sleeping. That's how Mac Minis are made.
Why though? That seems unnecessarily complex? It seems fine to me to just use a reed switch and sleep when it's closed or very close to closed.
It's one sensor in both cases, and in the latter case you can do so much more: change the thresholds in an update, detect when the lid is in the process of closing, apply hysteresis (on a simple switch, there's an angle where vibration could cause it to bounce between reading open and closed, but with an angle sensor you can use different thresholds for detecting and open and closing state change).
But most of all...you don't have to commit to a behavior early in the design process by molding the switch in exactly the right spot. If the threshold you initially pick isn't perfect, it's much easier to change a line of code than the tooling at the manufacturing plant.
Why use two sensors when one will do? If you already have an angle sensor, it makes sense to get rid of the reed switch and reduce your production costs.
It can’t be exclusively for Desk View. Desk View only works on Macs with wide-angle cameras, which were introduced in 2024 and 2025 models.
But this sensor has been in MacBooks since the 2019 models.
Apple has a history of adding sensors, security chips, etc. a few revisions before the feature they support launches. It’s a really good idea because it helps them sort out the supply chain, reliability, drivers, etc. without any customer impact. It decouples the risks of the hardware project from the risks of the software project.
If things go particularly well you get to launch the feature on multiple hardware revisions at once because the first deployment of the component worked great, which is a neat trick.
Yeah, my iPhone 11 Pro came with the ultra-wideband chip in late 2019, and before the AirTags were released in early 2021, I believe the only thing it was used was for ordering AirDrop targets by proximity. It was clearly intended for the AirTags from the beginning, but it took about 1.5 years before it actually mattered.
At Apple Stores, laptops screens have to be opened exactly at 76 degrees. I wonder if they use this sensor and specific software for adjustment (I'm not implying this is the only reason it's there)
It seems like it would be much quicker and easier to just have a piece of plastic or something cut at a 76 degree angle that they can place on the laptop and fold the screen up to.
Could be that the demo OS reports some metric on how often the laptops are set to 76deg and how often customers move it. Probably a whole ton of usages of the sensor and if it's price comparable to the old close sensor they used to use it would be easy to justify.
I've heard employees use the measurements app in their iPhones sometimes to adjust in the mornings, but having a sensor in the laptop lid seems like a much easier way to do it and you don't need to carry anything with you.
It would not, since you don't want to carry a piece of plastic all day long to set the angle correctly. Most people just use their phones to check the angle though.
76 degrees is just an aesthetic choice?
I'm assuming so. Apparently it's an angle that "invites" people to use the computers, but I don't think there's anything specific about 76 degrees that makes it better than, say, 73 or 82. As long as you can see the content from an average height, it should work. Most likely they just settle on that angle because it looked good to the store team that was staging the first store, measured it, turned out to be 76 and kept it the same across stores since then for consistency.
I believe the rumor is that 76 degrees is slightly uncomfortable enough to look at that it makes you want to adjust the screen, which in turn makes you more likely to try the device.
Yep this seems like it makes a lot of sense— and adding on, picking a measurement means that all of them can be the same (consistency, as you said)- having variation in the same row would look bad from a distance
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2012/06/14/why-the...
Shows you how good they are at planning and decomposing features into well scoped hardware and software features which can ship earlier, provide some value, while enabling richer future features. You have to respect them for this because this is how they have always operated.
How does this work? Does it have two cameras?
Fascinating feature! Is it known how they do it?
Is it just an image transformation or a full blown AI model using Gaussian Splats or something along those lines?
You could calculate the angle from the camera view as long as at least some piece of the MacBook is in view.
You could, for orders of magnitude more compute than reading a magnetic encoder (my assumption at how they estimate it)
Sure, but not more than what you're already spending on transforming the image. And it's not like these devices are exactly lacking in horsepower.
This is trivially broken by people who affix some type of cover over the camera. I do this on the off chance some errant application thinks it deserves to take pictures of my environment.
If someone covers the camera, the feature isn't relevant since it requires the camera to see your desk
Isn't the desktop view is produced from the iPhone camera capture, not from from the MacBook's camera?
If you have a new Macbook the built-in camera does it
But compute is cheaper for the manufacturer than adding a sensor (parts & labor, and it adds up over millions). Someone must've done the math.
The Mac camera light is wired inline. If the camera is on, so is the light. Since we're not seeing the camera light flashing on periodically, this isn't how it's being done.
The Macbook tally light isn‘t necessarily wired to the camera. It very well could be independently software controlled. At least it was not too long ago. IIRC there was an article about this, posted here on HN.
Macs used to have (still have?) a feature where you could declare it as lost/stolen and remotely take a photo with the camera. I believe the light didn‘t glow for that.
shameless plug: https://sannysanoff.github.io/whiteboard/
not only for mac users.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/
This was correct a number of years ago. Feels a little strange we can just do an API call for bird recognition now.
Flickr did it in 2014, same year as the comic. Unfortunately the service is down and they didn't include a screenshot of it working.
https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-o...
But is there actually an API for that? Last I checked the big providers Video Intelligence APIs even distinguishing cats and dogs was still unreliable.
Just to see if a bird is in the picture (like the comic states) using chatgpt et al can probably do a sufficient job.
Not condoning people make this app, just thinking about how fast things have moved in just a few short years.
BirdNET from the Cornell lab of ornithology provides that api.
Unless I am missing something massive, BirdNET[0] is for identifying birds by sound, not by images.
Merlin[1] (also from Cornell Lab of Ornithology), on the other hand, has both image and sound ID. I haven't used either, so I cannot compare the quality of results from Merlin vs. BirdNET for sound ID, but afaik only Merlin has image ID.
0. https://birdnet.cornell.edu/
1. https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
These days you dont need an api, you can run the stack on tamagochi
https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
Ho boy, good luck convincing people it wasn't watching them wank!
That sounds like an excuse to enable turning on the camera without turning on the light for it just because no user-software is using it. No thanks.
Plenty of users put stickers on their cameras. One simple user trick would break your whole workflow.
The Mac camera light is wired inline so as to make this impossible. The only way for the camera to be on and the light not is if the light itself is broken.
This was used as part of a 2017 competition to make the worst volume controllers: https://x.com/0xDesigner/status/1642554834535477249
Other laptops have this too. Linux has a driver for it.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Hinge-Driver-Linux-5.12
The sensor angle would be in a file like `/sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device*/in_angl0_raw` (device number can vary). At least I have this in a config file and remember it working (maybe on a different computer?). I cannot get it to work anymore on my laptop.
Apple has crazy amount of underground PR.
A lot of the tech Apple uses is made by Samsung and others and you'd think everyone else works with sticks and stones.
A fun entry to the trend "stupid volume controller" a while back I guess would be to use this to control the volume, heh.
https://x.com/0xDesigner/status/1642554834535477249?t=SRX2aL...
If you have an external monitor and don't mind killing your hinge within an hour it's perfect for Trombone Champ
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1059990/Trombone_Champ/
Even better as a phone number input
Or as an accordion
Or some kind of... not-so-cheap theremin knockoff.
Is 802.11 signal strength consistent/detailed enough that it could be used as another kind of input, as someone cradles the laptop in different ways?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45160808
Made me chuckle
See "The Laptop Accordion" from 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMJAevVri5w
https://nime.org/proc/meacham2016/index.html
So doesn't seem specific to Apple hardware.
The only thing "Apple" here is that it's not exposed as a public API.
> Motion is tracked using the laptop camera via optical flow and mapped to continuous control over dynamics, while the sound is generated in real-time.
No, it's a different method.
Author here. We checked for APIs like this at the time, but since approximately every laptop has a webcam, the cv approach is much more accessible. It would be a fun rewrite though; I’m sure polling this would be a few orders of magnitude more efficient. There was definitely lag if you ran the app on a very underpowered machine which did impact the “playability” of the velocity parameter.
Apple goes much further than not offering an API: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/10/11/genius-n...
https://x.com/nevmed/status/1640004745250078723
I wonder if Apple uses this internally at Apple stores to set the screen angle at 76 degrees.
This must be new, if true.
I worked at an Apple retail store during college. We were taught to put the screens at a certain angle but it was a gut feeling angle learned through practice, and not measured. More senior people would correct you if you were off.
They did mandate putting the bezel, mouse, keyboard, etc. at specific grains in the wood that were consistent across the desks though to ensure they were lined up without having to bust out a level-like device.
Overall everything was made so that retail employees would continuously clean up the displays as they walked around the store (even while helping customers without them realizing it) so that the store always felt perfect. They had a phrase for it but I forgot now, it's been almost 15 years now...
I'm going to really enjoy going into apple stores and messing them up now.
Why would you enjoy making worker's lives just a little more difficult? :\
I like how the picture clearly shows that the screen angle is 70 degrees or rather 110 from the users point of view
> In Apple Stores all screens are tilted at exactly 76° degrees, this is so you move the screen with your hand…interacting with the product more and making you feel more attached to it.
From the description, I would've thought it meant 76 degrees from the user's PoV, i.e. slightly closed so the user would feel compelled to open it more / tilt it into their view (with their hand). The pictures show ~70 degrees from the back of the devices though, so IDK what they mean about the hand moving the screen. There's no need for interacting then, since the display can be seen from afar.
I believe the initial tweets/demos have some calculation errors which were later corrected.
Those calculation errors are called lies
The photo shows 70 degrees.
I wonder if the specific degree is important or rather it’s because screens tilted at different angles in a store looks ugly asf.
My first job was at a video rental store. My boss was very strict about the videos being spaced evenly and all at the same angle. Every hour one of us had to walk the entire store straightening everything out. It did look very nice in there.
I am just imagining the manager get an angry email from Tim Cook every time some MacBook in the store is not at 76 degrees.
Missed a huge opportunity to play the sound of a monstrous wooden door sound when the lid closes. Looking forward to the update!
Venjent has some amazing door-based tracks.
https://youtube.com/shorts/sgqTEjN5_vQ
https://youtu.be/Uivp-hvk-nk
Edit: not forgetting the classic Miles Davis door: https://youtu.be/wwOipTXvNNo
Venjet is new to me.
("It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.")
I seem to recall the BBC have released quite a few sound effects ... ahh yes:
https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/
There must be a door or two in there.
The audio stops abruptly when the lid clicks
You could use that to display some kind of billboard affect, so that an image is always in a correct aspect ration to the observer in front :D Please could someone with a macbook do this and post a video here? :D
Apple is going to see an increase in MacBook Pro hinges breaking from people trying to play the Star Trek theme in theremin mode or other songs with other instrument sounds.
Apple: How did the hinge break?
Customer: I don’t know, I just opened it one day and it came off.
Probably not as bad as the Smackbook, which used the HDD impact sensors to change apps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uvQTTPr9Rw
"I was just hitting the side of my laptop in order to go to Safari"
No longer supported because we don't use HDDs anymore.
I always wanted to rig up a laptop that has an IMU to detect when it was in free fall and play the Wilhelm scream.
Great idea! Thinkpads (used to?) have an Active Protection System that used a Free Fall Sensor IMU to park the HDD read/write head in the event of a fall. Don't know if there's an API, though.
Ha ha, too bad Apple is likely logging screen angle for just such a repair dispute.
I wonder why? Presumably this information doesn't come for free, and Apple spends money to put this sensor in.
Is it a backup if the magnet for closed lid detection fails? Is it some kind of input for the brightness sensor or True Tone? Is it for warranty investigation, that if the hinge breaks they can figure out if it was physically pushed too far, or was repeatedly slammed open and shut like a toy?
The info probably does come for free. The laptops don’t use the magnets along the top edge of the screen for detecting if the screen is closed, those magnets are just there to provide the latching effect when the screen is closed, so it doesn’t open accidentally.
The sensor used for detecting if the lid is closed is an “angle” sensor, although really it’s an Hall effect sensor and a magnet in the hinge. If you have a Hall effect sensor, getting angle data from it is pretty much free, because the Hall effect produces a continuously varying signal, you need thresholding logic to turn it into a binary output.
Given Hall effect ICs are so cheap and plentiful there no reason to use anything else. Also given they mass-produced ICs it’s probably cheaper to buy a fully featured Hall Effect IC, because the manufacturing cost between a basic IC and an advanced IC is almost certainly zero these days.
In short, modern IC manufacturing has just made magnetic angle sensors as cheap, if not cheaper, than dump non-angle sensing Hall sensors. After all you can always use an angle sensing Hall sensor as binary switch if you want, but the reverse isn’t true, so if the ICs basically cost the same, you can expect the less capable ICs to be completely outcompeted by the more capable ICs.
Angle sensing IC's tend to need to be on the end of the shaft they sense, which can make some packaging and assembly headaches.
I personally am surprised they don't put an accelerometer in both halves of the laptop and use math to calculate the angle based on gravity.
They only need to be co-linear to the shaft if you care about accurate measurements, such as in a motor controller. I doubt the error introduced by being off-axis would make much difference in this application.
There are also packaging considerations when putting a hall sensor elsewhere. Packaging it in the hinge has the advantage you can use the same hinge and sensor setup in all laptop models. Packaging the sensor elsewhere means custom packaging setups for each laptop to work around all the other components in the body of the machine. Doing the extra work for packaging in the hinge once is probably quite a bit cheaper than having to constantly redo the packaging work in every new model.
Once upon a time Mac laptops used reed switches to detect closed lids, and they were a common point of failure, presumably since they contained moving parts.
They can be erroneously triggered or prevented from working as expected by nearby magnetic objects too, which can be annoying. No such issue with a hinge angle sensor.
So basically as free as the glowing Apple logo that used to be on the back of Macbooks.
The cost of the software is higher for an angle sensor than a binary switch, but perhaps they consider it NRE (which is actually not true if you consider "maintenance" work.)
We've been using Hall effect sensors for lid close detection for a long, long time. My thinkpad from 2013 has it halfway down one edge.
If you simply move the sensor (that is already a requirement) closer to the hinge, you can infer angle based on the Hall sensor for free. You can even get special sensors that specifically measure the magnetic field orientation for the same price as the simple type.
Yes, it's completely free with just a very minimal amount of thought put into the design.
It’s likely there to support Desk View[0]. Desk View presents the items on your desk in a geometrically correct, top-down view. Knowing the angle of the display is very helpful when applying keystone correction.
0: https://support.apple.com/en-us/121541
Wild idea: if the goal is to wake from sleep as quickly as possible when opening the lid, could receiving a signal as soon as the user starts lifting the screen save a few hundred milliseconds? I might be way off though.
Pretty sure that exact feature was announced when the current generation of Macbooks were launched
My best guess is it's related to thermal control. The vents on macbooks are right under the hinge, and the vents are blocked and opened to different degrees based on the angle of the lid.
And this little thingy makes a lot of M2 MacBook Airs fail.
I'd like to hear more, do you have an article or something you could link?
There is no official statement about this issue but you can search for user reports like "M2 MacBook Air black screen" or something similar. It is not uncommon.
In older versions of macOS you can simply try two things:
* Press Esc in locking screen, or * Press "Sleep" from the menu bar icon and then press Esc immediately
If the machine crashes/reboots, the sensor is bad and it needs to be replaced. Apple Store replaces the whole display assembly.
15 inch and M3/M4 models are not affected, AFAIK.
I was wondering this myself. I've had three mac air/books that simply failed to turn the display on. I've heard (from a third party repairer) that it is not uncommon.
Great! so they already know that I've been squinting at a 42deg gap trying to use my old MBP. The year with the faulty designed screen connector which was only covered for replacement on certain models, not mine. I wonder if that is why they added this, to check for 'holding the lid wrong'. If I open it any further I need a reboot to get the display back, oh and that angle decreases over time.
I wouldnt mind but I was 95% of the time clamshell, and still the keyboard made from butterflies wings lasted next to no time, and the battery put on too much weight after only 30 something cycles. After all these years I never understand how they produce such lemon models some years, just trying to save a few cents here and there. The one before was thermal paste nvidia meltdown.
I think clamshell mode was a killer of those models especially. I never ran mine closed and still use them for gaming to this day (since they still run Wintel). Not even a single key failed yet
In case you do not have this sensor, you can use the ambient light sensor to achieve a similar effect: https://youtu.be/pzJwDs6KRXA?feature=shared
Does anyone remember the slapbooks?
There was a sensor where it would detect when you slapped the side of the screen, and a guy wired it up so when you did that it shifted to the next space (virtual desktop).
If I remember correctly, it was originally meant to detect if the laptop was falling, so that it could turn off HDDs to mitigate damage. Hitting the side of the screen could also trigger that sensor.
A lot of foldables have a hinge angle sensor - it's actually a public API in Android, and robust enough that we use it to detect whether a device is a foldable:
https://source.android.com/docs/core/interaction/sensors/sen...
> we use it to detect whether a device is a foldable
I’m curious what you do with this information. Can you share?
The first thing that comes to mind is simplifying the identification of a device type, without the necessity of looking up a device list name or updating the list with each new device that gets released.
Yeah but why do you need to know?
Foldables have a different UI which often requires different requests to the backend. They need to support both narrow-screen and large-screen formats for content, and you usually want to avoid having critical UI elements fall on the hinge for fairly obvious usability reasons.
That should all be abstracted out to the operating system, not dependent on checking for specific devices. Any app should be able to accommodate different screen/window sizes and safe areas.
...And does the Android OS provide this information?
'Cause if not, it makes perfect sense for nostrademons to be doing it themselves.
The Android OS does provide screen width/height information and safe areas. We use them when appropriate, which is fairly often, but not universally. Safe area support for foldables is pretty weak, though, because it's a relatively new device category that imposes fairly different constraints on devices.
The bigger issue is that there's always a long-tail of product considerations that need to be different on foldables and aren't covered by just feature-detecting the available screen resolution. Logging is one: PMs are very interested in how the category as a whole is performing, if only to direct future hardware plans, and that requires that it actually be categorized as a separate category. Backend requests are another: you can (and should) optimize your bandwidth usage on phones by not shipping to the client information that is only going to be displayed on large screens, and you can (and should) optimize your screen usage on large screens by displaying more information that is not available on phones, but foldables represent the union of the two, and you usually don't want the latency of additional backend requests when the user fold/unfolds the device.
(The irony is that the app in question is Google Play, and I personally know most of the PMs and several of the engineers on Android SysUI.)
I clicked around and the README links to this python lib: https://github.com/tcsenpai/pybooklid
Probably a nicer interface for anyone who wants to play with this :)
That’s a downstream project, the author’s original project is here [0], with much more information on the actual sensor.
0: https://github.com/samhenrigold/LidAngleSensor
Posts like this are the reason I keep visiting HN, THANK YOU!
I sure hope they don’t feed it to advertisers to fingerprint me!
Reminds me of a "stable window" app gadget from mid-2000's that used the built-in accelerometer to make a window stable irrespectively of laptop's tilt.
Looks like something is off with the value. That “exact angle” makes zero sense
Hey, developer of this experiment here. I screwed up the calculation on the demo video, but it’s patched in the latest version on the repo.
I thought it was centidegrees but it turns out the sensor was reporting the raw degrees.
Yes, the video shoes the screen moving about 120 degrees but the number goes from ~335 to 0 (~3x too much)
How is this useful? I don't get it? Is not a touchscreen, doesn't fold...
It would be cool if the Macbook can figure out the relative position of a newly connected external monitor. It would help in setting up the monitor with little manual adjustments.
Since covid, we no longer have assigned desks at work --- it's first come, first served. And while most are respectful of the desks we have "chosen" for ourselves, every once in a while, I'll have to sit at some other, often new desk. And that means my laptop will not recognize the monitor and that I'll have to configure it (scaling, relative position, etc).
And Windows being the mediocre OS that it is, will always select to duplicate the screens even though the logical choice is to extend. My laptop screen and the external monitor aren't even the same aspect ratio. SMH.
At least Macs have the sense to extend screens by default. Though, if I could place a Macbook on the desk, plug in the external monitor, tilt the screen back until the camera can see the monitor, the hinge sensor and cameras can work together to figure out where the monitor is relative to the laptop, and automatically determine the right settings for the monitor instead of requiring my intervention.
As someone who recently wrecked their MacBook's screen by leaving something hard and pointy in between keyboard and screen when closing the lid, I wonder if one can turn on the webcam briefly before the lid closes and sound an alarm if it detects anything in the way.
I love this edge case.
Does anyone know if this is used by any program to check if you are actually looking at the screen? I could imagine it being used for some blackmirror type stuff
Confused why it says that 'this API is not exposed' while it's a simple HID device.
Author can submit this to the AppStore.
> Confused why it says that 'this API is not exposed'
What it says is (emphasis mine) “it’s not exposed as a public API”. In other words, Apple doesn’t provide official documentation and hooks for you to interact with the feature, like they do e.g. with Bluetooth. Even then, while they provide public APIs to interact with paired devices, interacting with the Bluetooth controller itself (e.g. turning it completely off or on) requires private APIs.
If it’s a simple HID device, can we likewise have support for this on Linux?
my guess: probably there to support the camera system and depth camera.
although unless there's some sort of angle measurement with respect to the ground in the base, i'm not sure what it would be useful for. maybe to provide continuity for the depth camera when the lid angle is changing (without heavy duty estimation calculations).
Is there a downloadable source for this? I’d love to add it.
https://github.com/samhenrigold/LidAngleSensor
MacBook Protractor
Close/open sound font ideas
> Jacket zipper
> C Major scale
> Slide whistle
> Washboard
> Airlock
> Vinyl record scratch
> trombone/piano/violin glissando > falling and crash sound > ratcheting ring spanner > passing train/helicopter/car > heavy door (safe/cave) > theremin
Creaky dungeon door surely?
That's what the OP demonstrates....
Finally there is a sensor that can measure my tilt.
Someone should make a video game where you have to jerk the hinge back and forth for basic movement
Is it the angle of the hinge or the angle of the screen? I assume the latter... my laptop is rarely on a level surface.
At first I wondered why you'd assume the latter – certainly something like a tiny rotary encoder is a simpler lower-tech solution than a MEMS inclinometer. But these days I'm not actually so sure.
Without checking the catalog, I would assume that a MEMS inclinometer is much cheaper in 2025 than an absolute position encoder.
Edit: catalog confirms.
Chances are there's an accelerometer in the screen and one in the base.
Is this part of telemetry?
Looks like opportunity for gymnastics app!
This is the best thing ever
this just makes me miss the old Mac OS that let you add sound effects to anything.
IKR? The good old days...
Hahaha that’s awesome
Seems like they should expose it, perhaps done for security reasons. I can in-vision some interesting apps using the angle.
Microsoft has had this in their Surface Book. It has a screen that could detach and be used as a table, which had an accelerometer in it that could measure the angle.
My understanding is that this sensor is used to help adjust speaker behavior for better sound, but I can't find a link to support that.
The Nintendo Switch 2 according to Welcome Tour can also detect hinge angle. Unclear if this is a sensor or clever math though.
I bet it's just the built-in gyro.
This post was also made (by the same person, it seems) on Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/115159295473019599 — which has the added benefit of not being X, not requiring cookies, and has more information than the tweet, including a follow-up "theremin" hinge.
Here's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/samhenri.gold/post/3ly7252lx422d
Since people can't agree on which URL is better, I'll put these other links in the top text. Thanks to you both.
why avoid Xitter today for the Xitter of tomorrow? don't distract people from mastodon for this trojan horse.
Fediverse will never be useful because balkanization isn't a desirable feature. The question of "which server should I sign up for" is an irredeemable anchor around anyone's neck before they can even start using it. I'm all for decentralized social media but the whole federated model is so bad.
Have you actually tried using it? I love mastodon now! You can just follow people as normal, a number of pretty interesting folks hang out on there (Brian Krebs etc).
No ads, a timeline which isn't endless and you can actually just read. It's actually really nice! I also think the decentralized non proprietary model brings us closer to something which is becoming ever more important in this world we find ourselves in.
Using it isn't the problem, joining it is. Finding a server that has the right combination of
- isn't The Big One (defeats the point) - has a nice domain (that's your name forever) - is stable (major downtime or data loss is unacceptable these days) - is guaranteed to stick around forever (no, migration isn't solved and it will never not suck) - has rules you agree with and can guarantee you'll follow - is running the right software (no, "fedi" isn't compatible, you either run Mastodon or things will always be ever so slightly broken)
Some of the points you make are still true, but I think you're a little out of date.
Migration is not solved, but it also doesn't suck - unless you're doing it every week nothing will break, and several people I follow have already done it and it's been just fine.
Stability is also fine - if your server is down for a couple of hours, your timeline will catch up when it comes back online, and likewise your sent posts will stay in a local outbox until they can be sent. That's absolutely no different from email or Jabber or anything else.
"Fedi" is compatible enough that I run my own GoToSocial server, which is technically still beta software, and I haven't experienced any issues following and interacting with anyone on Mastodon, Pixelfed, Pleroma and quite a few other platforms.
Would I recommend it to a non-technical user, someone who wasn't really interested in 'servers' and 'clients' and 'protocols'? Yes, although I'd suggest they just go for The Big One, as you put it. What I would say though is that this is no longer just a technology for Web nerds any longer; it's a very viable alternative to centralized platforms.
I made a serious effort to look into it, but without already knowing where I want to be it was impossible to decide which server to sign onto and it's an expensive choice to make upfront since they don't all federate with each other and even the ones that do federate are not guaranteed to not start beef with each other. That's before even getting to the fact that I can name at least 4 different protocols off the top of my head (Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey) at various levels of not-entirely-incompatible with each other. I remember there being work on between-server account moving mechanisms in some state of almost-partially-working, too. Maybe things have changed now but I doubt it, everything I saw in the ecosystem just seemed to promote balkanization as a feature.
I'd love a truly decentralized model for this but fediverse isn't it, fediverse is a Hellenic League of city states where your ability to interact outside your bubble is beholden to your and their local leadership and shifting realities of protocol war jank.
If you do think my opinion is uninformed or mistaken at least know that I know many times more people who bounced off the idea for these reasons than people who actually managed to make heads or tails of this. Fwiw I don't use xitter/bsky either.
I'm only going to to be alive for a million more hours, and the BDFL in charge of this Xitter is doing a way better job of things. Year of Linux desktop when?
Why click on a link that works versus one that doesn't? Is that the question? It's a weird form of evangelism to say that one shouldn't use the working link because it may not work in the future. That's the nature of web, most links decay.
This is exactly why I avoid things like Mastodon as well, because the problem isn't who controls the format, it's the format itself. Who controls the format sure doesn't help, but if you imagine Mastodon becoming as universally adopted as Twitter and seriously don't think it would be a massive mess, then I envy your optimism.
Fedi is different because it isn't proprietary or centralized. A new proprietary and/or centralized alternative is never the answer. That's just buying time.
Personally I am not a fan of the Mastodon software or side of fedi, but I have had good times on the Pleroma/Akkoma side, and it all works together.
It will never be 'it', because I - despite being technically capable of running server on bare metal or something - have no idea what you're talking about. Fedi, Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, there's too much to know or read about before you can just use it. People go to Facebook, to twitter.com, and just sign up and use it and know what it is.
I don’t think that matters that much; it’s still just a popularity contest, and if something manages to break through that threshold, it’ll be trivial enough to make the default.
No one knew Reddit boards and 4chan boards either; you just knew to go to /b/ or /r/funny. The other boards, the other fediverse servers, are just details that enable other subcommunities to survive. The major community will just route to a single server, and most will probably never use a second
Not who you were speaking to, but you just tried to trivialise the power of friction in a signup process, which goes _strongly_ against all known research on the topic.
A social network does not have to be universally adopted to be interesting because the vast majority of the folks do not do or think anything interesting.
A social network with just the top 1% of the geeks would be absolutely amazing.
They called it a “Trojan horse” they shouldn’t be distracted from. They were stating that it was more likely to fail, which isn’t true. You can challenge that without challenging the idea that mastodon can still be a cool place, no one said they couldn’t.
Good catch! You can email the mods to ask the link be changed; use the footer contact link.
The follow-up theremin hinge is on X too.
I can't see it, and if I click on @samhenrigold's profile I get a random selection of things from this July and last October instead of recent posts .
It's really not a useful platform for publicly sharing information anymore. Drives me nuts that government agencies use it for announcements like "Here's an amber alert with a twitter link, but you can't have any of the followup information because that's only for people who are logged in."
Or... you could just log in?
Only if you're logged in.
doesn't look like it to me
https://x.com/samhenrigold/status/1964464940049453153
But you can only see replies to tweets if you're logged in; so thank you for providing that link, but currently, that's the only way that those of us who aren't logged into Twitter can find it.
If a mod sees this, can we please get TFA changed? Both sources are equally authoritative in this case so we may as well use the nicer one.
You can ensure a mod sees this by emailing them. :)
What does 'nicer' mean?
You can see the thread and its replies, there's no ads, trackers, popovers, spam bots, AI ads.
You simply see what the author posted and people's reactions.
It also doesn't load 400MB of JavaScript or whatever.
"nicer" is too subjective IMO. Both being equally authoritative is an argument to keep the one the original submitter used.
Mastodon is more accessible though. And I do not even use mastodon.
> Mastodon is more accessible
This is a semantic punt from nicer to accessible.
I would change it if I could.
> has the added benefit of not being X
Just call it Twitter.
lol apple
Why does it say it's by Lisa?
I signed up for my developer account when I was a kid, used my mom's name, and now it's stuck that way forever and I can't change it. That's life.
I am thinking about getting a completely different apple id when I get my next iPhone. I don't have a paid developer account. Or do they actively prohibit multiple accounts? I've never tried on Apple before but I have multiple goog.e accounts and it seems fine to have different accounts on different Android devices?
Moreover on Android you still can have 10 different Google accounts on one phone all from different countries for downloading region-locked apps on Google Play. Though recently Google started to break it by changing account region countries nilly-willy. Yet you can still register as many accounts via Chrome as you wish really without extra gmail accounts just by using own domain redirect via cloudflare or something.
On iOS installed apps are locked into specific Apple ID they been downloaded with, so you might have issues with e.g WhatsApp. Still possible to download region-locked apps with non-primary AppleID, but it will sometimes ask to re-authenticate with said AppleID to keep it updated so it's cant be just throwaway.
You can have up to three IDs per device.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/101661
"Can't change it" means "haven't tried to change it". People's legal names change, so you have to be able to update a record of your legal name.
That's consumer electronics. They're toys.
Classic Apple overengineering. Every other laptop I know of just uses a single lid switch. It reminds me of their mouse that has capacitive buttons and a speaker to produce clicking sounds.
I wish more laptop producers overengineered their products the way Apple does.
Expensive, complex, and difficult to repair?
Do not want.
Reliable (ie. can open after 2 weeks of sleep with full battery)
My framework 12 has a similar sensor. It tells to UI when to disable the keyboard and track pad because you've got it in tablet mode.
Are you talking about the MacBook trackpad, or something else?
This mouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Mighty_Mouse
[flagged]
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45159417 and marked it off topic.
Please don't fulminate or post flame bait on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Can someone please explain how presenting an evidence-based argument is "flamebait"?
[flagged]
Please don't comment like this on HN, not matter what you're replying to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ok but why?
For fun and whimsy in a world populated by too many exploitative apps. And because the author has a lot of free time (their words).
https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/115159306734992780
I mean why does the laptop need to have that sensor?
Meanwhile, Samsung makes luxury devices that have foldable screens ...
Apple has a _lot_ of catching up to do.
samsung literally develops cutting edge display tech in-house. It would be sad if they were not the best in that “class”, no?
Yes, but what is your point? I'm just saying that this praised feature of a screen hinge sensor is nothing compared to what the competition offers.
And also it has a magnet to detect the lid being closed. People think this is over engineered, but I've yet to see another brand that has a working closed lid detection
>but I've yet to see another brand that has a working closed lid detection
???
I don't think I've seen a laptop that doesn't have closed lid detection. At the very least it's common enough that windows has a setting specifically for it: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/69762-how-change-default...
With both Windows and Linux, it's always a luck-of-the-draw thing. Sometimes closing the lid works perfectly, sometimes you get a doofus manufacturer with lousy drivers, so 1 in 20 times you pull your laptop out of your bag and it's red hot with a drained battery.
It's maddening that only Apple gets this right 100% of the time, and it's among the things keeping me on Apple's platform for the moment. I can't fathom why this isn't a bigger priority for everyone else: much like "trackpads that don't suck", it's a huge quality-of-life thing which keeps tons of people on Macs because they want it to Just Work without ever thinking about it.
>sometimes you get a doofus manufacturer with lousy drivers, so 1 in 20 times you pull your laptop out of your bag and it's red hot with a drained battery.
That's due to "connected standby"[1], which is to have laptops behave more like a phone when in sleep. This is in contrast to S3 sleep, which basically halts all activity. Sounds all good in theory, but as soon as you allow code to be run while in sleep, it's easy for some runaway app (OS or third party) to eat through your battery even while your laptop is "sleeping". Worse is that there's no way to force sleep, so your only choice is hibernate, which is even worse than S3 sleep before.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
“Modern standby” is indeed the culprit in many cases, maybe even the primary one these days, but to my understanding it can still be a crapshoot on laptops that support S3 sleep since it’s up to the OS to detect that the lid has been closed and put the machine to sleep. This has been a problem for a very long time, since well before it became cool to pretend to be a smartphone and not actually sleep the machine.
There’s also wake on LAN which if enabled can rouse the machine from sleep after it’s successfully entered a sleep state.
That feature also works just fine on macs, though.
Macs have a completely different operating system managing what happens when the laptop is doing its standby stuff, though.
It works fine, except for when it doesn't.
Source: My macbook has drained its battery flat while closed in my bag dozens of times. Then it just stopped doing that on an OS update. I still have no idea why.
On mac it works slightly more reliably than windows. I've had both devices drain in standby.
For a long time (years) there was a bug in Firefox that'd prevent a Windows machine from going to sleep if webgl content was loaded in any FF tab.
So anyway that killed one of my laptop's batteries. So much for supporting Internet freedoms...
Windows comes with a utility that'll tell you what process denied a sleep request, super useful.
I've actually ran into MacBooks not sleeping a few times, but it is much rarer.
It is unfortunate because back on the mid 2000s windows had the best functioning sleep code, but then they tried to catch up with iPad's # instant on and chasing perfection led to the current mess.
Macs these days wake up regularly as I understand it. My MacBook's battery discharges decently fast even when the lid is shut
Ah, I wish. You're just lucky if you never had a MacBook burning your hand when pulling it out of a backpack.
The old Intel models were hit or miss, but with the M-series models I’ve never had problems with MacBooks not going to sleep when the lid is shut and staying that way so long as wake on LAN is disabled (or disabled on battery). That setting does need to be off though, with it on I did observe occasional misbehavior.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44745897
This is not a sensor problem, it's a Windows problem.
To be fair, I’ve had this issue with MacBooks as well in the past, although not yet with my M3 pro
What makes you think that these issues you describe (which I've experienced too, FWIW) are problems related to the sensor rather than the OS or drivers?
Ironically, I had this issue with my Macbook more than my Windows and Linux machines combined.
I don't think this is about the hardware driver detection of the lid closing. Lid events are a first-class thing in ACPI and I've never seen a laptop that didn't have one, or any real evidence that one didn't do the thing.
Much more likely is that the OS was prevented from going to sleep by some badly behaved process, or got woken up by another thing like allowing USB to wake it from sleep, where even touching the mouse can wake it - with some laptop equivalent like a ghost touchpad touch or whatever.
The magnets also work great as a way to attach a sunshade.
The magnets work too well. Having one Thinkpad Yoga sat on top of another closed Yoga tricks the sensor into thinking it's in tablet mode and it disables the keyboard. I only lost 30min or so trying to work out what was happening...
There's decent reasons to over-engineer some of these sensors so they can't be unduly tricked by external influences.
The reality distortion field is immortal.
Only ever had a Thinkpad lid close sensor fail once. Found my T60 heating up my backpack. Other than that, never been a problem.
I've never once had a Dell/HP/Acer/Asus with a reliable lid close sensor. You can't trust those things.
If you're talking about laptops waking up inside backpacks- that's due to the terrible implementation of "Windows Modern Standby" that has ruined every laptop except Macbooks and Framework. (Framework still implements legacy S3 standby to improve compatibility with Linux.)
> Framework still implements legacy S3 standby to improve compatibility with Linux.
Just want to warn other readers: Not all framework models have S3 sleep. I've got the 7040 AMD framework laptop and it only does s2idle.
This has been an issue for so long - who is at fault? Is it hardware vendors or software? The spec itself is so bad that all implementations will disagree?
Halting power until an external physical event seems like a simple enough idea. I have never wanted to close my laptop and let it keep number crunching.
Microsoft. There's ~nothing to be gained by checking in with the Internet while laptop is closed, they implemented it anyway.
> If you're talking about laptops waking up inside backups
Presumably he meant the laptop didn't go into standby when closed or woke up from standby while still closed.
That’s what Modern Standby does.
I've also found my work MacBook Pro heating up my backpack sleeve a number of times because it didn't properly go to sleep. Likely culprit is some "security" spyware the company installs.
It's not generally the lid sensor that causes a Windows laptop to fail to go to sleep, is it?
Yea this is how the new Apple silicon devices will start if they are off. The fingerprint sensor is just used to manually do it or override the current state / put it into recovery mode.