Sometimes Applecare support line can really be manned by idiots. I got that today again.
I just got a UPS from a friend and was testing it out with my macbook pro. When attached, the UPS immediately adds its %full to the right of my battery %full in the menubar. When the UPS is unplugged, I get the popup warning that I'm on UPS power. I did NOT install powerchute, just running off the stock mac os x management of the UPS.
I went into System Prefs to adjust the settings. Select energysaver, settings for UPS. It shows my UPS currently has 38% charge.
PROBLEM: All three sliders that control when the computer will shut down (time on UPS, time remaining on UPS, percent charge remaining on ups) are greyed out, along with their check boxes.
I played with it a bit and didn't figure out what could possibly be wrong, and finally gave up and called applecare. 35 minutes, five holds, and one transfer later and I was no better off. The "product specialist" I talked with insisted that the problem was that my particular model of UPS did not support those three options. She kept coming back to saying that the UPS was somehow not allowing the computer to enable those options.
I tried to discuss this with her, that if the UPS was not relaying % charge to the computer, (and only saying that it was on battery with unknown time/charge remaining) that I would expect two of the three sliders to be unavailable. (but that "shut down after xxx minutes on UPS" should remain), and that if I was getting even a "percent charge left" indicator from the UPS (which I am) then all three sliders should be available since the computer itself has all the information it needs to perform these actions. (the UPS should have no say in the matter)
She was very insistent that everything was operating as expected for certain UPSs. I'm still very much in disagreement with her assessment of this situation. I ended the call with the compromise that mac os is operating as designed, although it may not be operating as expected or desired, and I took that to mean I was running into a known bug.
What is everyone else's experience? I am running server on this macbook (which by itself is not supported by apple) and this is a laptop, and I wonder if one or both of these facts is at the root of the problem? Considering it has a built-in battery, I could see where they may have disabled shutdown due to low UPS battery since you have shutdown due to low internal battery? But I'd expect them to have known this change in behavior when I talked with them... I could swear I've ran into this glitch before once or twice but I don't remember the circumstances.
