I was at a rental house checking out $500k of video equipment (not for my own project — I wish) when Apple announced the iPhone 4 yesterday, so I forgot it was the day I was supposed to figure out whether my next editing machine was going to be a Mac or a Hac. When I got back home, however, I saw 30 billion posts on the internet about the iPhone — a platform for interacting and consuming — and nothing about the Mac — a platform for creating.

The current-generation Mac Pro has gone the longest it’s ever gone without an update (inclusive of its ancestor the Power Mac). I’ve already talked about filmmakers switching to PCs this year because of Adobe CS5 — or at least switching from Apple to Adobe software — so I was pretty certain Apple would announce new products for those of us that make a living using Mac hardware. You know, tools for making stuff, instead of tools for buying music and taking photos of babies (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Gizmodo pegged the likelihood of a new Mac Pro at 80%, but instead WWDC focused entirely on the iPhone.

When it comes to the new iteration of the Jesus Phone, other than the usual upgrades (thinner, faster, higher-res), there were a few notable general features — resolution independence, pseudo-multitasking, three-axis accelerometer — as well as a few notable video features. Specifically:

• HD video camera
• Video editing with iMovie
• Netflix

And then of course there’s FaceTime, which I think of as being less relevant for filmmakers and more relevant for meeting people. In fact, in my opinion the killer app for front-facing cameras is mobile dating. Specifically the Chat Roulette kind — where you simply click one button to see the next person — except with geolocation. Instead of clicking “next” and getting someone thousands of miles away, you’ll get someone in a 20-mile radius. If you don’t “next” them, you can chat for a while and say, “wanna meet?” No filling out profiles and answering lots of questions. Just see if you get along with someone by talking face to face and then go from there (sounds old-fashioned, doesn’t it?).

Anyway, perhaps due to my disappointment with no new Mac hardware,¹ I viewed the Apple hype machine with more skepticism than I normally do. If you’re not already sick of hearing about it, here’s Apple’s extended iPhone ad:

Apple’s getting a bit hyperbolic, even by its own standards. When they announced the iPad they called it “magical and revolutionary.” It’s a big iPhone, guys — one term will do. The iPhone 4 video above ends with the following statement: “The Retina display. 5-megapixel camera. High-def video recording. A4 chip. Bigger battery. All in a thinner product? This is going to change everything. All over again.” Wait, how does that change everything? Universal health care would change a lot of things. Getting clean drinking water to the one billion people in this world that don’t have it would change a lot of things. On the tech side, teleportation or time travel would change everything. But a thinner phone with an extra camera “changes everything?” Give me a break, Steve. Or at least a new Mac.

1. Or because of my growing fondness for Google’s open devices…

Will somebody please remind me again why ProRes footage can’t play nice with RGB, or why exporting to H.264 still results in a gamma shift?  There’s nothing that I’ve seen in Snow Leopard, with it’s new system-wide gamma switch to 2.2, that seems to have done anything to remedy these issues.  I suppose I’m grateful that Macs and PCs finally share the same default gamma levels, but trying to navigate through the myriad of remaining unresolved color issues can be maddening.

Jerome goes on to show that the exact same clips look different whether they’re being viewed in Quicktime 7, Quicktime X (now know simply as Quicktime Player), Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and more. This makes it impossible to determine the correct “master,” which makes color correction on a Mac, as they say in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, a “clustercuss.” Jerome goes on to conclude:

My advice, for whatever it’s worth, is not to color correct until the client has approved the final cut. Then, once the picture is locked, get out of YUV. Export your ProRes timeline to an RGB codec such as Sheer’s 8-bit RGB, or, if you’re more courageous, use Media Manager to export the actual edited clips, and then batch convert those from within MPEG Streamclip to Sheer.

This is a terrible solution! Not through any fault of Jerome’s, but simply because this is a totally unreasonable workflow for hardware and software components that share “Pro” monikers (MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Quicktime Pro (aka 7)). Check out the full version of his post if you’re interested in the ins and outs, and please share here if you’ve come up with a reliable color correction workflow!

Link: Which Version Do I Color Correct?

[via FreshDV]

Some unexpected Adobe-related news came from Apple, just days prior to Adobe’s CS5 launch. I’ve written multiple times about Adobe Flash’s ability to export one application to several platforms, and how it could potentially allow indie productions to be able to produce cross-platform apps on the cheap. But then Apple gave Adobe the finger, inserting new language into its latest iPhone SDK potentially banning non-native applications from the iEcosystem; Adobe fired back by demonizing Apple, going so far as to say, “Go screw yourself Apple.” Short of both sides sending their programmers into an all-out, Braveheart-style battle to the death, no one knows how this is going to shake out — but the corporate battle does have potential consequences for independent creatives.

Blocking applications originating in languages other than objective-c is a dickish move on Apple’s part, since they already have an approval process within their app store. Their reasoning — that non-native applications don’t live up to native programming, from a quality standpoint — is a blanket statement that should really be applied on a case-by-base basis. Realistically I don’t expect Adobe’s cross-platform Flash exporter to work like magic, but I do think casual games and other relatively simple apps could perform perfectly fine. As an independent filmmaker/designer/writer who is planning on releasing application components as part of my next film project, I had high hopes for developing the app once and releasing on many different platforms at no additional cost.

Apple’s not only getting prickly with Adobe; while they played nice with Google for a while, now they’re killing the Google search button on the new iPhone, complaining about being violated by the big G (not a pleasant experience, I imagine), and warning of porn on Android (although that may be more of an endorsement to some). All of this makes sense — it used to be that Google was “just” a search company and Apple “just” a hardware/software company — but now Apple’s MobileMe intrudes on Google’s cloud services (albeit relatively poorly), and Google’s Android phone, forthcoming tablet, and set-top box intrude on Apple’s iPhone, iPad and AppleTV territories. By excluding and badmouthing competitors, to a certain extent Apple is just behaving as any corporation would (and as a certain rival company has so famously). But blocking Flash and inserting new language into a SDK specifically to block Adobe’s cross-platform strategy is not only competitive, it’s also creatively stifling to developers, designers, filmmakers, and anyone planning on releasing an app for iPhones or iPads.

Personally, I’m committed to the Apple platform for creative work; I have too many Mac-specific applications that I use on a day-to-day basis, and the OS is rock-solid and efficient, so I have no desire to switch back to a PC. But I also enjoy having a much more open Android phone, and despite my use of iTunes to listen to music, I have never purchased a DRM’d file from the iTunes store. There are two sides to Apple: their solid technological foundation, and the “our way or the high way” consumer-facing ecosystem. I’m reliant on the former, and have a strong distaste for the latter.

This duality is one of the reasons I wrote earlier this year that I might switch to a PC. After thinking about it some more, I realized that it’s probably not going to happen (if anything, to save money I’d build a hackintosh). But the catalyst for my thinking about switching was Adobe CS5’s Mercury playback engine, demoed here at NAB:

Why is this important? Because increasing our efficiency and that of our team is going to be the only way many of us will be able to achieve our creative goals in the coming year. Like a lot of people, I don’t have a bunch of employees carrying out my will, and so I need to find ways to be more productive myself. With only so many hours in the day, something like the Mercury playback engine could easily convince me to switch from the Mac-only Final Cut Studio (of which I presently only use Final Cut and Compressor) to an all-Adobe workflow. I’m not the only one considering this, because, by extension, switching to exclusively Adobe programs opens the door to no longer being reliant on Mac OS.

From a strategic standpoint, Apple’s been focused on the iPad and other mobile devices lately, even going so far as to lay off 40 Final Cut team members. They’ve seen their most profitable quarters in history by switching their focus from pro hardware and applications to these lower-cost devices. Whither the future of the Mac as a superior creative/development platform? Apple should get something similar to Mercury out the door using their own OpenCL technology soon, or I won’t be the only one dropping Final Cut in favor of Adobe CS5.

Here are some interesting (p)reviews of the new versions of Adobe’s flagship video-centric products: After Effects CS5 and Premiere Pro CS5. At this point I plan on building a hackintosh as a sort of “best of both worlds” approach, to run a Mercury-optimized Adobe suite. When and if this happens, I’ll post a how-to — complete with filmmaking-centric components and benchmarks — here at NoFilmSchool.

(And yes, the Apple logo up top is supposed to be stretched; it’s a visual entendre…)

Link: Paparazzi

Enjoy this extra white space due to the long image. Think deep thoughts.

MacHeist is a website that sells a lot of Mac applications in a bundle for less than the normal price of one of the individual apps. In the case of the currently running “nanoBundle2″ promotion, it’s seven applications that would retail for $266, on sale together for a total of $19.95. These aren’t trial versions or crippled licenses; they are the full monty.

How can MacHeist do this? Well, the involved app developers get a lot less money for their app, but they’re getting less money from a lot more people. Plus they gain a larger userbase and get broad exposure from the promotion. The current bundle contains a number of handy-looking creative applications and is live until March 9th, so I thought I’d review the software contained therein from the perspective of a writer/designer/filmmaker/blogger. To get your money’s worth you’ve really only gotta find one of the seven applications useful; is the nanoBundle2 worth a Jackson?

Impressions upon visiting the MacHeist website:

1. Man, this is some nerdy shit.
2. Wait, why wouldn’t I buy this? The entire bundle costs less than the even the cheapest application. As a multi-hyphenate who uses an embarrassing number of Mac apps over the course of an average day, surely I’ll find one of these useful.
3. They’re raising a lot of money for charity; 25% of all purchases go to a worthy cause. At the time I’m posting this, the ticker’s up to $131,000 raised from nanoBundle2 and over $2 million in the site’s history. Cheap apps and you’re helping save the world (you can choose which charity your 25% goes to, or distribute it evenly among the 11 options)!

I pull the trigger.

The seven bundled applications are MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout, Flow, Tales of Monkey Island, and RapidWeaver. The final two apps require a certain number of purchases to be unlocked, so you’re incentivized to tell friends to buy the bundle. I didn’t realize RapidWeaver was included in this “maybe” category — they have a threshold of 50,000 sales to unlock Monkey Island, but don’t explicitly list the number for RapidWeaver, which is either unintentionally bad design or intentional deception. See the image at right — on first glance, is it clear that Flow is included but Rapidweaver isn’t? If you’re going to put a “will be unlocked” dialogue under Monkey Island (which I couldn’t care less about), you should do the same for RapidWeaver. Sorry, but this is Design 101. Anyway, RapidWeaver was the main reasons I was interested (it’s also the most expensive app at $79), but let’s see if any of the first five are useful.

The apps

Clips

This looked pretty handy. I’ve been using Jumpcut as a clipboard manager, which allows you to keep track of dozens of bits of cut/copied text, instead of the default system clipboard, which only allows you to paste the most recently copied item. I was hoping Clips would be a more advanced version of Jumpcut, as right now I only use Jumpcut for temporary copying and pasting; for frequently-used snippets of text like URLs, html code, and canned email responses I use Apple’s built-in Stickies. Clips seemed to offer a unifying solution, but I’m sorry to say: upon initial use, it just didn’t work. It would only remember the most recent thing I copied, which defeats the entire purpose of using it; perhaps I’ll figure Clips out in the future, since I officially own the software now, but first impressions are not good. Plus, Clips tries to do too much — there are three different ways of displaying your clips, two different hotkey options, and two different display options (dock or menu bar) — honestly, guys, the hallmark of Mac is simplicity. I want you to figure out what works best for 90% of your users, and present that to us as the default functionality; don’t make me choose from eight options the first time I start it up. It should “just work,” and it didn’t for me. On its own, Clips retails for $27.

MacJournal

For the past four years I’ve been using Mori to keep track of ideas, organize initial outlines, brainstorm, and keep a journal. It’s not a great program, but its simplicity is its virtue, and I’m used to it. However, Mori hasn’t been updated in ages and it seems development is at a dead-end. Thus my interest in MacJournal; it’s a similar program, but more fully-featured, and has a long history of development and support. First impressions of MacJournal are very good; it has a great full-screen writing mode (up until now I’ve been using an old freeware version of Writeroom for this functionality), it plugs into a number of blog services for posting to the web, and for keeping a journal it really seems like the app to beat on the Mac. If you’re looking for a journaling program — meaning, jotting down your thoughts, making them searchable, and keeping track of when you wrote what — MacJournal makes the nanoBundle worth it alone. However, I’m looking for more of a brainstorming/outlining program, so my search for a Mori replacement continues — more on this another time. Normally $40.

RipIt

RipIt bills itself as “effortless DVD importing.” It does what it says — you pop in a DVD, hit “Rip,” and it takes care of the job for you, automatically ripping the main feature and excising the menus and extras. For a lot of people, this fits the bill and will be a valuable cog in the MacHeist machine. However, by default RipIt generates .dvdmedia files, which play fine in Apple’s built-in DVD Player software but don’t afford you the greatest flexibility (in preferences, you can switch it to generate VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders). I prefer the free and open-source Handbrake, which allows you to customize file format, compression, and subtitling options; I pretty much knew going in that I wasn’t going to use RipIt because of the Handbrake elephant in the room. For grandma, however, RipIt might find a home. Normally $20, although it looks like the free version lets your rip 58 DVDs before you’d have to register.

Coverscout

Coverscout is an application that, uh, scouts covers. Covers for your albums, that is — its goal is to get rid of as many of those blank placeholder images you see when that “totally legitimate album you paid money for” shows up in iTunes without any pretty artwork. The registration is kind of a pain — you have to create a login and jump through some other hoops, which wasn’t the case with any of the other apps. While the program works — it correctly pulls your library from iTunes, logs into various online databases to find missing album art and assigns them automatically — as you’d expect with multiple sources, album art sizes tend to vary and the accuracy isn’t anywhere near 100%. This can make for comical discrepancies between genre of music and the resulting album cover (“Ain’t no Half Steppin” by Big Daddy Kane pulled a cover for “Christ is Come” by a Christian band named Big Daddy Weave). If you want to go through your albums one by one — my library yielded over 1,000 coverless albums — you have a chance at ending up with accurate covers… but do you really care enough to do that? Either way, don’t expect to “select all” and hit the “magic” button (you’ll probably break your internet connection if you do, as Coverscout doesn’t seem to have a queuing system, instead hitting the servers for all of your selected albums all at once). I got tired of waiting and quit the program, resigned to my placeholder-filled music library. Coverscout is normally $40, which seems overpriced given iTunes is free and includes basic “Get Album Artwork” functionality. SongGenie, a different program from the same company that fills in missing metadata like album title, year, and track number — which would probably ensure more accurate covers — is another $30. Seriously guys, you want someone to spend $70 on software that does nothing more than dress up already-existing music files? Bundle the two together for $30 and then we can talk.

Flow

Flow is a file-transfer program which works with FTP/SFTP as well as other protocols like Amazon S3 and MobileMe. This had appeal to me, as I’ve used the free FTP program Cyberduck for years — encountering a host of bugs along the way — and eventually paid $30 for Transmit when Cyberduck became unreliable. Flow intergrates with the Mac OS much more nicely than either of the aforementioned apps and promises URL copying (meaning, you can upload a file to an FTP server and automatically copy the file’s URL for sharing). This is handy for sending clients links to files — but as soon as I got Flow’s URL copying working, I realized Transmit offers the same feature. I will say this — Flow has a chance at becoming my default FTP program, and I would use it over Cyberduck if I hadn’t already bought Transmit.

As for the “unlockable” apps — Tales of Monkey Island and RapidWeaver — the former is an adventure game and the latter is a template-based website construction tool. I don’t have much to say about the former as I’m not much of a gamer, and I was a Senior Designer at MTV for three years so you wouldn’t think RapidWeaver would be of any interest to me, but it’s the “rapid” part of the latter that is appealing — I have some upcoming transmedia projects for which I’ll need to launch a lot of sites very quickly, and in the quantity-over-quality department I’m interested in comparing one-off RapidWeaver sites to those based on Wordpress themes. If MacHeist makes their goal — whatever it is — and RapidWeaver is unlocked, I’ll put it to use and add a review later.

Conclusion

Overall, I had no problems getting the apps installed or registering them; they are indeed what they promise, 100% full and legal applications for a fraction of the price. MacHeist is on their A-game with this stuff; they’ve done a great job offering appealing applications at a very enticing price, and the concept of “unlocking” apps at a certain number of sales is brilliant marketing — free Tweets all around! Not to mention, in a world of so much pirated software, it’s nice to support smaller application developer. Additionally, MacHeist raises a lot of money for charity with each promotion, which is the icing on the cake.

Normally I consider $30 to be the reasonable price point for a single desktop Mac application — I’ve paid $30 for several useful apps in the past couple of years — so $20 for seven apps is a no-brainer. For my own needs, however, I’m not sure that I’ll regularly use any of the first five (I do hope to find RapidWeaver useful, though). Clips is a nice idea, but it’s not there yet. RipIt would make a nice gift for the computer illiterate in your family, but if you’re reading this you’ll probably be happier with Handbrake. Coverscout is only handy if you’re a constant iTunes gardener. However, I do feel MacJournal and Flow are solid apps worth the price of admission on their own if you’re looking for a journal or FTP program. After all, you’ve only got to use one app to make the bundle worth your while; I hope this review was helpful in determining whether you’ll find use for one — or more — of the nanBundle2 apps.

The deal is live until March 9 at MacHeist, and now features three more throw-in apps if you tweet.

Know of an alternative that’s better than Onyx? Let me know!

Link: Onyx

On a personal level, after pitching to studios dozens of times last year, I’ve realized that I don’t drop enthusiastic adjectives like Steve Jobs does, and that rather than saying “this is what it is,” I should be saying “this is what it is, and it’s awesome.” Thanks, Apple — lesson learned.

[via Mashable]

Audacity

GarageBand ships with every new Mac and is great for recording music. But if you’d like a simpler way to record audio for, say, a podcast, Audacity is a free (and lighter) alternative. It records live audio from any source (a microphone, a record player), imports and exports a variety of formats (including MP3, Ogg vorbis, WAV and AIFF), and allows you to apply a variety of filters and edit multitrack audio. Cross-platform software (also available for PC and Linux).

Celtx

If you’re a professional screenwriter you’re already using an industry standard like Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter, but if you’re more of the “aspiring” ilk it’s definitely worth checking out the free and open-source screenwriting program Celtx. Offering scheduling and budgeting in addition to scripting, Celtx has improved significantly since its earlier iterations (also worth keeping an eye on in this realm: Adobe Story).

Cyberduck

If you have your own website you’ll want to transfer files to and from the site using a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. Cyberduck isn’t the greatest FTP program in the world — some of its password handling tries too hard to ascribe to the Mac keychain, and I’ve gotten some errant (though harmless) overwriting prompts — but it is reliable, often-updated, and free.

Fluid

Google Chrome for the Mac is here, but it’s missing a few features from its PC brethren, including the ability to operate as a Site-Specific Browser (SSB). A SSB allows you to run an oft-visited web site (say, Gmail, Wordpress, Google Reader) as its own application, to separate it from the rest of your tab-heavy and crash-prone browsing. Treating a site as an app also allows you to further customize it (for example, by assigning it to a Space, or in the case of Google Reader, by using Helvetireader), and leave it running instead of always sitting through page loads. Fluid is a Mac-only application that allows you to implement SSBs for any web site of your choice and can be a productivity boon for web-based content creation (or consumption).

Freedom

I’ve written about this before, but the little-known freeware app Freedom does one very important thing: it shuts off your connection to the outside world, allowing you to focus on the task at hand (especially writing). Yes, you could accomplish this merely by turning off your Airport, but Freedom is better in two ways: one, you can set a time limit — forcing you to work, say, three hours straight — and two, you can’t reconnect unless you shut everything down and restart your computer, which is enough of a deterrent to keep you from that distracting “mini”-break on the World Wide Web.

Handbrake

If you’re ripping a DVD these days, odds are you’re not outputting to a blank DVD but rather to a file on your laptop, Apple TV, media server, or mobile device. With a wide selection of codecs, fine control over settings, subtitling options, and easy-to-use presets, Handbrake is your best bet for converting an old-fashioned disc into a high-quality (legal or illegal… ) copy.

Jumpcut

You cut a block of important text with the intention of pasting it elsewhere. But before you get a chance to paste it, you end up copying something insignificant (like a URL) and now the important stuff has vanished into the ether. Your computer’s clipboard is like Memento’s Sammy Jenkins — he can remember what happened five seconds ago, but not five minutes ago. Kind of. Anyway, Jumpcut is here to help — it logs all of your cut or copied entries and allows you to paste any of them on-demand via the menu bar. Very handy for anyone who handles text, and worth the price of this list alone (which is free, like all of the apps on this list).

MAMP

This one’s probably of limited interest to anyone other than web developers, but the first step to efficient web development is installing your own local server. MAMP virtualizes your own Apache and MySQL servers so you can develop and test at the speed of your own machine rather than waiting for every tweak to make it to your server in Ohio and back. There’s a Pro version enabling you to setup multiple local servers, but for a single site, MAMP’s free edition takes care of all the localization with ease and for free.

MPEG streamclip

Now that Quicktime Pro has gone the way of the dodo, Apple’s own native video application has gotten a bit over-simplified in its video-conversion abilities (Snow Leopard’s Quicktime X offers presets for iPhone, web, and Apple TV exporting — sans options for further tweaking). MPEG Streamclip steps in with all of the missing format conversion options (and then some), using Quicktime’s engine to convert from virtually anything to anything. It’s a great option for batch-conversion of files as well, which is necessary if you’re a DSLR filmmaker.

ReadRight

I read a fair number of scripts on my laptop, and other than the hotness of my laptop (as in temperature hotness, not as in “new hotness” — this thing’s four years old), I never had any complaints about the PDF reading experience. But then thanks to Filmmaker Magazine I discovered ReadRight, an application that displays PDFs sideways, which means you can use your MacBook like a book (hold it sideways and use the arrow keys or mouse button to navigate). ReadRight displays PDFs full-screen and auto-zooms the pages, meaning you don’t have to deal with scrolling past page breaks (it also saves your place when you quit). Until you get an iPad, ReadRight offers a nice alternative reading experience on the Mac.

Soundflower

Okay, so you’ve got Audacity and you used it to edit out the annoying skit out of your favorite mp3. But a lot of the stuff you might want to record and edit — internet radio, a live video stream, a skype conversation — you can’t record! While there are plenty of paid applications that will do this, the cheapest — although not the simplest — is Soundflower. It acts as a virtual output that you can route your Mac system sound to; once you’ve done this, you select Soundflower as your input in Audacity (or any audio recording program), and viola: record anything you can hear. Soundflower also wins the award for “worst icon,” but hey: it’s for audio, not visuals.

TextWrangler

There are a lot of alternatives to Mac’s default TextEdit, but TextWranger is among the best (free) options. TextWranger (along with its paid big brother, BBEdit) is chiefly designed for coding html, php, or css, but its document drawer is handy when working with multiple text files, and it’s also handy for light composition (e.g, emails) as it has more find/replace and spell-checking options than TextEdit; it is also useful for editing documents over FTP and SFTP.

Are you already using any of these programs, or do you know a better alternative to one (or more) of these apps? Let me know in the comments! Coming soon: a list of helpful paid apps (still cheap, but in many cases upgrades over the above).

“I’m not writing when I’m walking around. I can only really write when I’m alone in a place that’s mine, that I’m accustomed to, and there’s no interruption. I don’t have a phone. I don’t have anything that can distract me. And I spend the hours ruminating. If you spend six or seven hours ruminating on your invention, the next part of it will come to you.”

For younger creatives, I suspect the most common distraction is not the telephone but rather the internet; having the world’s information at your fingertips can be quite the omnipresent temptress. For anyone who writes (or otherwise works) on a Mac, I recently discovered an app (aptly) named Freedom; I can’t recommend it enough. It shuts off all network connectivity for a specified amount of time, and what seems like a simple hack (turning off wireless would have the same effect, really) turns out to be a godsend — because you specify the amount of time you want “Freedom,” the app allows you to keep track of how long you’ve been working, rather than just having some ephemeral sense at the end of the day of having tried to work a lot. And no, you can’t change your mind; if you want to get back on the ‘net before your time’s up, you have to restart your computer, which is just enough of a road block to prevent you from procrastinating.

You’ll need a couple of tools to perform this operation, but you would need these same tools to install a replacement fan as well, so you’re still saving fifty bucks (or more, if you were going to take it in to be repaired). They should total up to less than $15:

• T6 Torx screwdriver
• 00 Phillips screwdriver
• Graphite lubricant or WD-40

You also might want to get some compressed air to clean out the dusty innards of your machine (I added one to my order just to make it to the $25 free shipping mark at Amazon, and it ended up being quite handy).

As reported in the comments below, this repair works on both 15″ and 17″ versions, going back to 2006 and including the newer “unibody” models (unibody disassembly instructions are slightly different, but the repair requires the exact same set of tools). UPDATE: the new MacBook Pros introduced in April 2010 drop the Torx screws for Triwing screws; you’ll need a Triwing screwdriver to complete the repair.

The first step is to disassemble the laptop, for which you’ll need the aforementioned T6 Torx and Phillips screwdriver; it’s best to print and follow these instructions. This undertaking is categorized by iFixit as “difficult” — and while I would downgrade that rating to “easy if you’re coordinated,” you may want to go a different route if you’re not comfortable with the idea of your laptop looking like the one at left.

After you’ve extracted the fan from the Mac’s innards, the fan assembly comes apart quite easily (by undoing two Phillips screws), into three pieces. The inside of the fan assembly (illustrated in the brilliant photo below) is the noise culprit — it just needs to be cleaned and lubed.

Get rid of any debris using a lint-free cloth. Then, you could apply some graphite lubricant to the axle (illustrated by the subtle red arrow). But all I had handy was some WD-40, so I applied a bit to the axle, reassembled the fan, and everything went back together, quietly.

After reassembling the laptop (follow the directions in reverse), use the app smcFanControl to ramp up your fans to full speed for 30 seconds or so, and when you drop them back down to normal RPMs, the lubricant should have set. The Mac once again operates as it should, silently. Problem solved!