Apple Says Goodbye to the Startup Chime with the New MacBook Pro | Hacker News Reader

Apple Says Goodbye to the Startup Chime with the New MacBook Pro

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39 pointsevacchi53 comments

I guess future viewers of Wall-E won't get the joke now. (for those who didn't see the film, the robot main character made the Mac startup chime when he finished charging)

Good.

Article doesn't seem to load for me but it served nearly no purpose but a nostalgic one. Maybe someone somewhere debugged a hardware problem with it? Have no idea. Given that the touch bar has it's own hardware and software, it can serve as a better hardware debugging tool anyway.

Agreed. I wish it also didn't have the "MacBook Pro" text on the bezel of the screen.

It serves no useful purpose of making the laptop better, but it can be slightly distracting from the work you're doing on screen, just because it's always in your field of view.

There's already an Apple logo on the back of the screen, which is perfect. Why the need to bring back this text? iMac doesn't say iMac on the bezel...

https://regmedia.co.uk/2010/11/24/imac_three_quarter_large.j...

It used to :)

> There's already an Apple logo on the back of the screen, which is perfect.

Except for those of us giving presentations to a roomful of glowing Apples wherein it becomes intensely annoying. To the extent that it's difficult not to direct my attention to the Mr Joe Boring with the Anonymous Black Laptop. He's the only one thinking differently...

I'm not sure why people voluntarily advertise for the World's most valuable company without any form of compensation and futhermore feel proud to do so.

The logo on the new macbook doesn't glow.

One more way in which the previous MBP was superior. No "MacBook Pro" on the bezel.

The chime was useful to know when the computer had finished its test and was about to boot, or rather, to count boot cycles.

'Zapping the PRAM', or, on modern systems, NVRAM, is a useful diagnostic trick and has fixed a lot of problems on a lot of the machines I manage, and for a lot of people I don't. The standard instructions I gave were very easy to follow:

1. Hold down Command-Option-P-R 2. Keep them held down until you hear the chime twice 3. Release as soon as you hear the second chime

Done! Simple instructions anyone can follow; grandparents, children, lawyers, whoever. Now that the chime is gone, those instructions are useless, and I'm not sure what instructions I'll be giving people to help them through the process. "Hold it down for thirty seconds" maybe?

"Lug it down to the Genius Bar"

It's useful to me, to let me know if it's a cold boot or resuming from hibernation. Kinda mentally prepares me so I'm ready to launch some terminals and tmux sessions, connect to VPN, etc.

I'll definitely miss it.

If your Mac won't start, or you have a desktop and the monitor's acting up, it's convenient to have some indication of what's going on. Not that zapping the PRAM often solved anything, but it'll be more difficult now that there's no indication how many times the machine has restarted.

But the nostalgia (I'd call it the Pavlov response) is the biggest part. Hearing the chime as I sit down to get some work done is a cozy way to get into the swing.

Is nostalgia bad?

The startup chime doesn't bother me (and I rarely reboot my MacBook Pro, usually only after required security updates). The Finder logo, on the other hand, looks like something one would find in a student union at a small midwestern college that hasn't been updated since 1986, and it is always there, creepily staring me down day after day...

> The Finder logo, on the other hand, looks like something one would find in a student union at a small midwestern college that hasn't been updated since 1986

I've always loved the Finder logo, each to their own. It was possibly inspired by a slightly better artist than what you suggest :)

http://www.cultofmac.com/75608/did-picasso-influence-the-mac...

The Finder logo was updated in Yosemite, IIRC

Good. A loud sound that I can't predict or control is pretty bad. I've tried every command line trick I can find to disable this rudeness. It always randomly re-enables at some point.

I've tried too. The only thing that works is to turn off sound before shutting down your MacBook.

I find it odd that people actually shut down their Apple laptops. Apple's sleep/wake (on real Apple hardware) has never let me down. When I'm done with the laptop, I just close the lid. Of course, I require a password on wake.

I'm curious if I'm in the minority on this?

I've rebooted my MacBook maybe 5 times outside of system updates since I got it in 2013. One of those things that "just works".

I need to reboot between OS X for programming and windows for CAD modeling fairly frequently. It can be really annoying if I forget to mute the sound before rebooting in a meeting.

I'm in the same boat. You do have to reboot to install system updates though. I've developed a habit of always setting system volume at the minimum (non-zero) possible when plugging in headphones, so that if I need to restart the computer it will make close to no sound at all.

I travel to and from my office on public transit each day, and I am in the habit of shutting down my laptop before putting it in my bag.

With full disk encryption and a strong password, it means one less thing to worry about in the unlikely event somebody steals my bag while I'm out and about. (I'd still invalidate credentials and rotate passwords, but it would be with less urgency).

Plus, it's not like it takes a huge amount of time in the morning to boot up - usually about the same amount of time as it takes me to get it plugged in and squared away on my desk anyways.

Couldn’t you just hibernate (ie, save the RAM contents to a file on disk, power off, then write the data back on next boot)? I don’t remember exactly how it’s done on macOS but it’s possible. You can also set it to hibernate after sleeping for a while which is what I use. https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/127650

No, I always just close the lid. But there are a bunch of reasons why you have to reboot, like software updates and bootcamp.

FileVault can only truly protect your data when the Mac is off. Like jffry, I shutdown for my commute (a short one on public transit). Boot time and time to restore all my application windows is fast enough for me to not mind. Plus the fact that in general I use a work account at work and a personal account at home so I'd be logging in/out when arriving at each anyway.

In my experience, it obeys system volume. If I had the system muted before I shut down, it comes up silently. I keep my work laptop muted most times. On the weekend, I might actually need the sound for Skype. Monday morning is a rude start if I forget to mute the sound the last time I used it.

> In my experience, it obeys system volume

...if you're using OSX.

One of them must have worked for me because I haven't heard it in years. So long ago I can't remember what I did!

A bit off topic, but 99 percent invisible did an interesting episode on sound with a bit about the creation of the apple start-up chime. The relevant part starts at 04:30.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-sizzle/

This seems to be what I've been using to disable it most recently:

    sudo nvram SystemAudioVolume=%80

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3208783?start=120&tstar...

Hasn't worked since Yosemite.

Good riddance, along with the even tackier glowing logo.

Blind folks are going to be very annoyed about this.

Yeah it would be nice to make this configurable for that reason. But they have this problem with many devices, they get no indication on the iPhone, right?

The iPhone buzzes when it turns on.

Is there a technical reason for this? e.g. maybe they were having issues with audio in the EFI and decided to not bother?

Along with the glowing logo.

i never really enjoyed that noise personally... i could see the nostalgia element, but it always seemed out of place coming out of a modern, slick looking piece of hardware. :)

Well, this is sacrilege, added to the 'ESC' key blasphemy. MBPs could be banned in Ireland, they consider blasphemy the first class crime.

With macOS Sierra you can natively remap Esc to Caps Lock (or CMD, Alt, Ctrl). I think a lot of people already did this before. I just tried it out yesterday with Vim, and I find it way more convenient than Esc.

Couldn't you already do this? I've been off OSX for 5 or 6 years now, but I remember having no issues remapping the Caps Lock key as CTRL/CMD/ALT, and would have sworn ESC was an option.

Escape isn't an option. Or at least it wasn't before... There's a third party tool called Karabiner which enables this.

I can confirm it's a native option in Sierra. I have not installed Karabiner. Actually, from their website: "Karabiner does not work on macOS Sierra at the moment."

Sure enough, this is new with Sierra. El Capitan doesn't support it. Finally! I was tired of Seil/Karabiner/whatever else constantly updating itself and changing its name, just so I could remap caps lock to escape.

It wasn't a native option before. You had to use a third party program (not 100% sure since I never tried before). Now it's built in to the keyboard settings for macOS.

I use a ThinkPad but I was curious about this solution that people were discussing yesterday: do they also have something mapped as Compose? On my machine I have Caps Lock mapped as Compose so that I can type foreign characters quickly, especially when writing Portuguese.

If my Esc key disappeared, I'd still want a Compose key; is there a convenient option for that on the new MBP keyboard? Is there something other than Compose that macOS users like for non-ASCII text entry?

Edit: for example, I just saw the Icelandic Pirate Party's banner "A rettri leið" in a New York Times video about their electoral success, and I wanted to use Google Translate to find out what it meant. Of course, it wasn't copyable text, so I just typed "a rettri lei[Compose]dh" and I had my translation in moments. :-)

Mac has the Option key for that. It lies between Control and Command.

That does seem to be the closest equivalent, and I guess people who like Compose could usefully map it there!

Not sure what you mean, I don't think a "Compose" key is a concept in macOS.

I guess I was implicitly thinking about people running Linux on MacBook Pro hardware and/or wondering how people would enter a range of non-ASCII characters in macOS, which I should have made more explicit.

Thanks for your answers.

I never heard of a Compose key before. "Because Microsoft Windows and OS X do not support a compose key by default, the key does not exist on most keyboards designed for modern PC hardware." [0]

How did you know to type [Compose]dh to get the desired character?

Guess what? Google Translate gives the same translation for "A rettri leid" even though 'ð' is apparently not a 'd' with a diacritic but its own letter, "eth." [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth

> How did you know to type [Compose]dh to get the desired character?

I went to Iceland a few years ago and looked into how to type ð and þ in order to be able to send e-mail about people, signs, and place names, even though I didn't learn the language. It's also useful for linguistics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative

I will not pay a dime for a computer with no ESC key. Because it is scary to use a computer you cannot escape from.

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