It's from eBay. Does it Even Work?
4 minute readI've generally had decent experiences buying from eBay. But before I start chopping bits off my purchase I should probably make sure it works.
Being an eBay purchase (albeit from a seller with good feedback) the first thing I needed to do was make sure that this thing was actually functional.
The screen was damaged (as per the listing) and displayed basically nothing, or to be specific a few single-pixel lines of colour which hinted at whether the machine was on or off, on a black smashed background.
Nothing so garish as ‘an LED to tell you when its powered on’ would be allowed on a modern Mac. These thin, single-pixel lines of colour would be my power indicator.
Monitors and cables
This is where I encountered my first difficulties. I have a very small, very cheap USB-C monitor. This is the only actual monitor I have. I usually run stuff headless over VNC, NoMachine etc, using tablets like my Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra as remote OLED displays. I just don’t have much need for monitors. I have a Boox Max Lumi E-ink tablet with a micro HDMI input, so that can act as a monitor but… maybe later.
So I plugged the little monitor in to one of the two available ports on the characterless bravely minimal chassis (the other port would do for power). The monitor didn’t light up.
A vast landscape of confusing possible states opened up before me. Was I in the wrong port? A USB-C port is not a USB-C port etc, especially where displays and power are concerned. Maybe only one specific port would power the Mac, or only one of them would output a display signal.
What about the cable, both cables? Were they even providing power/pixels or did they have the wrong strands in them?
Did the Macbook put out enough power over USB-C for the monitor? Did I need to plug an additional cable for power, or charge the battery some more, or plug extra power into the monitor itself?
Was my monitor just not compatible? It’s a simple AliExpress generic thing, and Apple is not exactly known for its broad compatibility with 3rd-party products. Was it just not-yet-enabled in the OS?
Was I even ‘in the OS’ at this point, or was the Macbook still booting… or stuck in some horrific ‘recovery zone’ where blindly pressing the wrong button might result in destroying the OS, the only solutions to be “plug it into one of the other Apple computers that you don’t have” or “take it to an Apple Store where (if somebody dressed like you is allowed inside) a Genius will go asthmatic at the concept of a headless Macbook and make you buy a new one for a thousand of the pounds that you don’t have”?
After an embarrassing amount of cable-swapping (80% of my USB-C cables either couldn’t deliver enough power, or couldn’t deliver the pixels, and I’ve been through this stuff so many times I should know by now to never assume that my cables are good) I eventually made progress.
The monitor lit up.
Then it went black again. Not dead-black, but that rubbish glowingly-grey attempt at black that TFT panels manage, which told me that the monitor was powered up and trying to display something, but had nothing to display.
Power button
The Macbook does grant me a power button at least, in the form of a special key on the keyboard, up in the corner.
It’s a strange item, sitting slightly lower than the other keys on the keyboard, with a slightly different tactile response compared to the other keys. Maybe this is to mark it out as being ‘other’ for usability reasons (which I like), or maybe it’s a side-effect of the button housing a fingerprint sensor.
With my lack of Apple experience and the lack of working screen, I actually found this button a little confusing. I was never sure if I’d pressed it ‘properly’, ie did it require a tap, or a little hold, or did perhaps a long hold perform a different function?
I tried searching for info about the button but there are so many different models of Macbook, many users with varying ways of communicating their ideas, no official detailed documentation for these things, and of course the reasonable assumption that Macbooks have screens. Yes, I was confused by a power button.
After several presses of the power button, and waits to see if a reboot was happening, more progress. Trees! The MacOS login screen appeared, only… not quite. There were no buttons, dialogues, or any user interface elements.
A bit of searching taught me that the missing login UI was indicative of a second screen being attached to a Macbook. The login screen was being shown (invisibly to me) on the broken internal display, and my little monitor was just acting as an extension. Fair enough.
More ‘internet research’ revealed that CMD + F1 would swap output to the external monitor. This worked. Great. I now had a dinky 11" MacOS login screen.
It Just (about) Works.