Entanglement (Or Do Standards Matter?)

This case is a year old. But worth mentioning. I had a MacMini computer running Windows 7 via Bootcamp.  Pretty standard setup. Every Mac comes with MacOS preloaded and has a component called Bootcamp, which allows to install Windows as a second operating system. Bootcamp consists of a boot manager (lets you select whether you boot in MacOS or in Windows) and a set of drivers that allow Windows to work with the Mac hardware. All the drivers are signed and work really well. I have not had any issues with them. After several months I replaced my old PC keyboard with the small Mac Bluetooth keyboard and later upgraded the setup with the 27" Mac Cinema display. The nice thing of having both the Mac keyboard and the Mac Cinema Display is you can control the brightness of the display directly from the keyboard. I like this function and use it very often.

The brightness control on the keyboard is so convenient I really forgot there was no brightness control on the display itself at all. Things were obvious. Obvious until I replaced the Mini with the Lenovo X220 laptop. I was selecting the laptop very carefully to make sure it would work with the Apple display. The key was the DisplayPort interface. The Lenovo has one of the regular size and Mac Cinema Display has the Mini DisplayPort, but at Amazon you can buy a simple DisplayPort - to - MiniDisplayPort adapter that works very well.

I plugged the Cinema Display to the Lenovo and it worked immediately. Then paired the Mac keyboard with the laptop and quickly realized the brightness keys did not work at all. Obviously there was no driver on the Lenovo system to intercept the brightness keys and send proper commands to the display. The problem seemed fairly straightforward to solve: google the thing and install a driver.

Not so fast.

After spending several minutes with Google Search, I realized the problem is more serious. Many people were looking for a solution and not many were getting good answers. Some tried to extract the drivers from the Mac Bootcamp CD, some tried to control the display using variety of home brew applications. None worked for me. Eventually I came into conclusion I have to install the full Mac Bootcamp package on the Lenovo system. But surprise, surprise, the Bootcamp was not available as a download from Apple. You have to use the CD that comes with the original Mac OS. Yes that is right. To control the brightness of the Mac Cinema Display in Windows, you need a MacOS license. Fortunately I have one, because I own a Mac. I am not sure this license allows for using Bootcamp on a different machine. Eventually Apple may sue me and I will go broke. But for the time being I was interested whether the solution would work at all.

It did not.

To make the long story short, after days of digging I found the answer. I renamed my Windows C drive to BOOTCAMP and the brightness controls started working. This is no joke. On Windows, to control the brightness of the Apple Cinema Display connected to the DisplayPort, you need a Mac keyboard, a MacOS license and your C drive has to be labelled BOOTCAMP.

So much for the standards. USB, DisplayPort, Bluetooth. The devil is (as always) in the details.