8 ms·

Apple Releases MacOS 10.12.4 with Night Shift

66 points by totorokun 10y ago

shurcooL 10y ago
System requirements for Night Shift: Night Shift requires macOS Sierra 10.12.4 and one of these Mac computers, using the built-in display or the displays listed: • MacBook (Early 2015 or newer) • Apple LED Cinema Display • MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or newer) • Apple Thunderbolt Display • MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer) • LG UltraFine 5K Display • Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer) • LG UltraFine 4K Display • iMac (Late 2012 or newer) • Mac Pro (Late 2013 or newer) So this doesn't work on arbitrary 3rd party displays, only Apple ones. That's a pretty big constraint. Edit: Some people are saying it works on their 3rd party monitors anyway. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT207513 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT207513
- vmasto 10y ago
  That's very weird, does anyone have any insight about this decision on a technical level?
  - shurcooL 10y ago
    My guess is that the Night Shift feature depends significantly on the color profile, various options (color temperature, gamma, contrast, sRGB setting, etc.) and calibration of the display. With their own displays, they have full control over that in software, and can produce expected results. It'd be much harder to have predictable results with 3rd party monitors that users configure themselves, so Apple probably opted to outright not support those monitors. It's also a lot easier to test the feature on a limited combination of hardware.
    - lloeki 10y ago
      Was about to say basically the same thing, since f.lux works by dynamically altering the colour profile (which results in interesting bugs and glitches here and there). They've been going out of their way to make things work across the board.
      - mikeash 10y ago
        I had to stop using f.lux on my Mac Pro because of this. Every five minutes my screens would blink as it adjusted the color profile. Not quite worth it! If for some reason Night Shift were to cause a similar problem, Apple wouldn't want to put effort into fixing it if it happened with third-party displays. By having an official list, they're free to tell people having problems with other hardware "tough luck, sucks to be you."
  - copperx 10y ago
    I don't think there's one at the moment, but if I were Apple's CEO, I would make all Apple devices have two types of backlights: regular LED backlighting, and LED backlighting with no blue components. A hardware solution would be more costly, but it would be the "Apple" way. Be aware that even if you use Flux or Night Shift your display still emits significant blue light. It could be marketed as a big feature on an Apple keynote, given how much we use devices at night.
    - ianai 10y ago
      I think changing to OLED screens is the next logical step toward that? Personally I wish there were display options sans backlight.
      - antfarm 10y ago
        On my white iBook, it was possible to see what's on the screen, even when backlight was turned off, through the translucent apple logo, if the display was lit from the back, by the sun or a lamp. I always wished there was a display that could be lit by an external lightsource, e.g. a library lamp.
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      I would love to see a display with, say, 8 primaries instead of 3. With a careful choice of pixel pattern, it should be possible to get much wider color gamut (especially among intense light reds and blue-green colors which are very poorly supported by “RGB” displays), without causing the metamerism problems that very colorful 3-primary displays have. Unfortunately there’s a big chicken–egg problem since images and other content are all created with the expectation of current display technology. They definitely don’t want to completely drop the short-wavelength primary for many purposes, but it would be nice to have a “late night writing mode” where that is possible.
      - illicium 10y ago
        There is no chicken-and-egg problem because the OS already does color management to map your source color space (sRGB, mostly) to your target monitor's color space. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to view sRGB content correctly on wide-gamut monitors, for example. The real challenge is in developing display backlight and phosphor technology to reproduce colors outside of the standard gamuts.
  - smoser 10y ago
    If it works like iOS it changes the tint based on the contents of the screen so it could require some extra processing power to dynamically change the tint level.
  - kristofferR 10y ago
    It's because they have a whitelist of allowed version numbers: https://pikeralpha.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/4398/ https://pikeralpha.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/4398/
  - apostacy 10y ago
    I would strongly suspect that there is absolutely no technical justification for this decision at all. This was a political and marketing decision, to punish customers who use third party devices. This falls neatly into line with Apple's agenda. Apple refused to support TRIM on SSDs, unless you make on small patch to their kext. I would imagine that there is something similar for this feature.
- bostand 10y ago
  Welcome to Apple!
- foepys 10y ago
  Does anybody why that is? Does Apple have a real reason here or is it just some kind of arbitrary rule to sell more displays? Considering that even 2012 iMacs are listed I would rule out special display attributes like e. g. 10bit color.
  - Kametrixom 10y ago
    It could be that they just don't want to deal and test with older versions. By only specifying a certain number of supported displays they essentially guarantee it works for those, that doesn't mean however it can't work on others, you just don't get the assurance of it.
    - apostacy 10y ago
      I have never really brought it when they say that they are disabling some feature because they can't support it, as if there's an avalanche of phonecalls that is swamping their tech support resources. By that logic, why don't they just disable support for any third party monitors? Actually, better not give them ideas...
      - mikeash 10y ago
        They haven't disabled it, they just don't officially support it. It works fine, you just can't get help from them if it doesn't.
- james_pm 10y ago
  But yet, Night Shift works just fine on my Dell U2412M. Toggling Night Shift on/off using the switch in the Notification panel (right side) shows the Night Shift effect just as it does on the built-in display on my Macbook Pro (late 2014).
- ertemplin 10y ago
  Night Shift works on my Dell UltraSharp U3415W
- 0x0 10y ago
  It works fine on my random circa 2006 Dell monitor.
- OberstKrueger 10y ago
  On a Mac Mini (Late 2014), it works just fine on an LG 25UM58-P monitor. Looks and works the same as Night Shift does on iOS.
- emehrkay 10y ago
  I use a 27" iMac as the screen for a Mac mini, I wonder if it will work. I will report back later
  - emehrkay 10y ago
    Oh yeah, it works
- apostacy 10y ago
  It makes me sad that people on the Internet always try to find some justification for Apple's decisions. It is nonsense that there's some special requirement for this. Apple decided to do this because they could. I used Flux to dim my display on my non-jailbroken iOS8 iPad 2, and quite enjoyed it for reading in bed. Then, Apple held my iPad hostage[1], and forced me to update to iOS9 if I wanted to unlock it. And I could no longer use Flux, and nightshift is disabled for the iPad 2. There is no technical reason why I couldn't change the color temperature on my iPad 2. I did it for months. Apple just wanted to coerce customers into buying new hardware. This is no different from Apple having a whitelist for TRIM support of SSDs in earlier versions of macOS. People were under the impression that there was some good technical reason for this. But actually, it could be enabled with a simple perl oneliner: > sudo perl -pi -e 's|(^\x00{1,20})[^\x00]{9}(\x00{1,20}\x54)|$1\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00$2|sg' /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage It is only a matter of time until there is a oneliner to enable nightshift for all display devices. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986523 [2] https://gist.github.com/clarencesong/3768688 https://gist.github.com/clarencesong/3768688
  - mrsteveman1 10y ago
    > This is no different from Apple having a whitelist for TRIM support of SSDs in earlier versions of macOS. People were under the impression that there was some good technical reason for this. I used to force-enable TRIM on my non-Apple SSDs for years, it was irritating but I think they were right to be cautious. Disk controllers have a history of serious bugs being triggered by external commands. My go-to example is my Samsung HD204UI drives, they shipped with a firmware bug[1] that led to write corruption whenever a specific command was issued to the drive. Samsung issued a firmware fix without bumping the firmware version, so even today several years later, smartmontools prints a warning every time it runs, because it's impossible to tell which drives have been fixed. Stuff like that is so common[2][3][4] the Linux kernel maintains a list[5] of devices that certain commands shouldn't be used on for various reasons. One has TRIM completely disabled, several have NCQ TRIM disabled due to known corruption issues, including one I still own: the very same drive I used to force-enable TRIM on when it was in my Macbook. [1] https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks [2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/cda57b1b05cf7b8b99ab4b732bea0b05b6c015cc https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/cda57b1b05cf7b8b99a... [3] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71371 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71371 [4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fstrim/+bug/1449005 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fstrim/+bug/144900... [5] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/ata/libata-core.c#L4313 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/ata/li...
- yankcrime 10y ago
  Just to add another datapoint: It works fine using my 27” Acer B276HUL that’s configured using a hacked EDID file. If it works with this third-party setup, it’s probably safe to say it’ll work with any.
geerlingguy 10y ago
I tried it out, and it's nice and simple, but still allows a custom setting for how much shift occurs, and you can trigger it manually, at custom times, or at 'sunset and sunrise'. It has all the features of f.lux that I'd ever need, so I'm happy to uninstall f.lux on my Macs now.
- copperx 10y ago
  Why are you happy? and does it work with 3rd party external displays, like Flux does?
  - shurcooL 10y ago
    > Why are you happy [to uninstall f.lux]? (I'm not OP.) Not having to install a 3rd party app to have same functionality means it's easier to reinstall macOS from scratch, or start with a fresh Mac in the future. Less baggage.
  - TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
    Not GP, but I'm happy with it because I only need this to work for my laptop display. If I have my TV or external monitor hooked up, I'm either working or consuming media, in which case I don't want the color shift.
0n34n7 10y ago
I'll stick with f.lux just because I'm growing tired of Apple stealing ideas for software features, instead of coming up with them.
- xrisk 10y ago
  Since when does making a competitive software become an instance of 'stealing'?
  - ianai 10y ago
    Apple has, for decades, incorporated OS-level feature apps into its OS. This kills which ever third party developed that app. I don't necessarily think it's wrong at a technical nor market level - but it sure hurts that third party. Here's hoping some of them become employed at Apple or have the option to do so at some point... But at the same time, I doubt flux really cares. By the nature of that project I think they probably prefer to see vendors 'doing the right thing'.
    - apostacy 10y ago
      Apple forcibly prevented flux from working on iOS. [1] It worked fine on my iPad 2. Apple killed it, and then withheld the feature from me until I brought a new iPad. It would be like if they reached into your computer and locked the sound output to a certain volume, and told you to fix it by buying a new macbook. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2015/11/12/flux-iphone-sideloading-shut-down/ https://9to5mac.com/2015/11/12/flux-iphone-sideloading-shut-...
    - Someone 10y ago
      “Apple has, for decades, incorporated OS-level feature apps into its OS” As the lower layers get commodified, every OS vendor does that. Examples of features that, at one time, used to be third-party: - graphics libraries - font technologies - audio synthesis - MP3 encoding - video playback - text-to-speech - speech-to-text - TCP/IP support - printer drivers - antivirus
- Eric_WVGG 10y ago
rhinoceraptor 10y ago
I really hope they release it for the watch at some point, since I use it to track my sleep.

66 points by totorokun 10y ago

System requirements for Night Shift: Night Shift requires macOS Sierra 10.12.4 and one of these Mac computers, using the built-in display or the displays listed: • MacBook (Early 2015 or newer) • Apple LED Cinema Display • MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or newer) • Apple Thunderbolt Display • MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer) • LG UltraFine 5K Display • Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer) • LG UltraFine 4K Display • iMac (Late 2012 or newer) • Mac Pro (Late 2013 or newer) So this doesn't work on arbitrary 3rd party displays, only Apple ones. That's a pretty big constraint. Edit: Some people are saying it works on their 3rd party monitors anyway. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT207513 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT207513

vmasto 10y ago
That's very weird, does anyone have any insight about this decision on a technical level?
- shurcooL 10y ago
  My guess is that the Night Shift feature depends significantly on the color profile, various options (color temperature, gamma, contrast, sRGB setting, etc.) and calibration of the display. With their own displays, they have full control over that in software, and can produce expected results. It'd be much harder to have predictable results with 3rd party monitors that users configure themselves, so Apple probably opted to outright not support those monitors. It's also a lot easier to test the feature on a limited combination of hardware.
  - lloeki 10y ago
    Was about to say basically the same thing, since f.lux works by dynamically altering the colour profile (which results in interesting bugs and glitches here and there). They've been going out of their way to make things work across the board.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      I had to stop using f.lux on my Mac Pro because of this. Every five minutes my screens would blink as it adjusted the color profile. Not quite worth it! If for some reason Night Shift were to cause a similar problem, Apple wouldn't want to put effort into fixing it if it happened with third-party displays. By having an official list, they're free to tell people having problems with other hardware "tough luck, sucks to be you."
- copperx 10y ago
  I don't think there's one at the moment, but if I were Apple's CEO, I would make all Apple devices have two types of backlights: regular LED backlighting, and LED backlighting with no blue components. A hardware solution would be more costly, but it would be the "Apple" way. Be aware that even if you use Flux or Night Shift your display still emits significant blue light. It could be marketed as a big feature on an Apple keynote, given how much we use devices at night.
  - ianai 10y ago
    I think changing to OLED screens is the next logical step toward that? Personally I wish there were display options sans backlight.
    - antfarm 10y ago
      On my white iBook, it was possible to see what's on the screen, even when backlight was turned off, through the translucent apple logo, if the display was lit from the back, by the sun or a lamp. I always wished there was a display that could be lit by an external lightsource, e.g. a library lamp.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    I would love to see a display with, say, 8 primaries instead of 3. With a careful choice of pixel pattern, it should be possible to get much wider color gamut (especially among intense light reds and blue-green colors which are very poorly supported by “RGB” displays), without causing the metamerism problems that very colorful 3-primary displays have. Unfortunately there’s a big chicken–egg problem since images and other content are all created with the expectation of current display technology. They definitely don’t want to completely drop the short-wavelength primary for many purposes, but it would be nice to have a “late night writing mode” where that is possible.
    - illicium 10y ago
      There is no chicken-and-egg problem because the OS already does color management to map your source color space (sRGB, mostly) to your target monitor's color space. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to view sRGB content correctly on wide-gamut monitors, for example. The real challenge is in developing display backlight and phosphor technology to reproduce colors outside of the standard gamuts.
- smoser 10y ago
  If it works like iOS it changes the tint based on the contents of the screen so it could require some extra processing power to dynamically change the tint level.
- kristofferR 10y ago
  It's because they have a whitelist of allowed version numbers: https://pikeralpha.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/4398/ https://pikeralpha.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/4398/
- apostacy 10y ago
  I would strongly suspect that there is absolutely no technical justification for this decision at all. This was a political and marketing decision, to punish customers who use third party devices. This falls neatly into line with Apple's agenda. Apple refused to support TRIM on SSDs, unless you make on small patch to their kext. I would imagine that there is something similar for this feature.
bostand 10y ago
Welcome to Apple!
foepys 10y ago
Does anybody why that is? Does Apple have a real reason here or is it just some kind of arbitrary rule to sell more displays? Considering that even 2012 iMacs are listed I would rule out special display attributes like e. g. 10bit color.
- Kametrixom 10y ago
  It could be that they just don't want to deal and test with older versions. By only specifying a certain number of supported displays they essentially guarantee it works for those, that doesn't mean however it can't work on others, you just don't get the assurance of it.
  - apostacy 10y ago
    I have never really brought it when they say that they are disabling some feature because they can't support it, as if there's an avalanche of phonecalls that is swamping their tech support resources. By that logic, why don't they just disable support for any third party monitors? Actually, better not give them ideas...
    - mikeash 10y ago
      They haven't disabled it, they just don't officially support it. It works fine, you just can't get help from them if it doesn't.
james_pm 10y ago
But yet, Night Shift works just fine on my Dell U2412M. Toggling Night Shift on/off using the switch in the Notification panel (right side) shows the Night Shift effect just as it does on the built-in display on my Macbook Pro (late 2014).
ertemplin 10y ago
Night Shift works on my Dell UltraSharp U3415W
0x0 10y ago
It works fine on my random circa 2006 Dell monitor.
OberstKrueger 10y ago
On a Mac Mini (Late 2014), it works just fine on an LG 25UM58-P monitor. Looks and works the same as Night Shift does on iOS.
emehrkay 10y ago
I use a 27" iMac as the screen for a Mac mini, I wonder if it will work. I will report back later
- emehrkay 10y ago
  Oh yeah, it works
apostacy 10y ago
It makes me sad that people on the Internet always try to find some justification for Apple's decisions. It is nonsense that there's some special requirement for this. Apple decided to do this because they could. I used Flux to dim my display on my non-jailbroken iOS8 iPad 2, and quite enjoyed it for reading in bed. Then, Apple held my iPad hostage[1], and forced me to update to iOS9 if I wanted to unlock it. And I could no longer use Flux, and nightshift is disabled for the iPad 2. There is no technical reason why I couldn't change the color temperature on my iPad 2. I did it for months. Apple just wanted to coerce customers into buying new hardware. This is no different from Apple having a whitelist for TRIM support of SSDs in earlier versions of macOS. People were under the impression that there was some good technical reason for this. But actually, it could be enabled with a simple perl oneliner: > sudo perl -pi -e 's|(^\x00{1,20})[^\x00]{9}(\x00{1,20}\x54)|$1\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00$2|sg' /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage It is only a matter of time until there is a oneliner to enable nightshift for all display devices. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986523 [2] https://gist.github.com/clarencesong/3768688 https://gist.github.com/clarencesong/3768688
- mrsteveman1 10y ago
  > This is no different from Apple having a whitelist for TRIM support of SSDs in earlier versions of macOS. People were under the impression that there was some good technical reason for this. I used to force-enable TRIM on my non-Apple SSDs for years, it was irritating but I think they were right to be cautious. Disk controllers have a history of serious bugs being triggered by external commands. My go-to example is my Samsung HD204UI drives, they shipped with a firmware bug[1] that led to write corruption whenever a specific command was issued to the drive. Samsung issued a firmware fix without bumping the firmware version, so even today several years later, smartmontools prints a warning every time it runs, because it's impossible to tell which drives have been fixed. Stuff like that is so common[2][3][4] the Linux kernel maintains a list[5] of devices that certain commands shouldn't be used on for various reasons. One has TRIM completely disabled, several have NCQ TRIM disabled due to known corruption issues, including one I still own: the very same drive I used to force-enable TRIM on when it was in my Macbook. [1] https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks [2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/cda57b1b05cf7b8b99ab4b732bea0b05b6c015cc https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/cda57b1b05cf7b8b99a... [3] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71371 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71371 [4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fstrim/+bug/1449005 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fstrim/+bug/144900... [5] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/ata/libata-core.c#L4313 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/ata/li...
yankcrime 10y ago
Just to add another datapoint: It works fine using my 27” Acer B276HUL that’s configured using a hacked EDID file. If it works with this third-party setup, it’s probably safe to say it’ll work with any.

geerlingguy 10y ago

I tried it out, and it's nice and simple, but still allows a custom setting for how much shift occurs, and you can trigger it manually, at custom times, or at 'sunset and sunrise'. It has all the features of f.lux that I'd ever need, so I'm happy to uninstall f.lux on my Macs now.

copperx 10y ago
Why are you happy? and does it work with 3rd party external displays, like Flux does?
- shurcooL 10y ago
  > Why are you happy [to uninstall f.lux]? (I'm not OP.) Not having to install a 3rd party app to have same functionality means it's easier to reinstall macOS from scratch, or start with a fresh Mac in the future. Less baggage.
- TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
  Not GP, but I'm happy with it because I only need this to work for my laptop display. If I have my TV or external monitor hooked up, I'm either working or consuming media, in which case I don't want the color shift.

0n34n7 10y ago

I'll stick with f.lux just because I'm growing tired of Apple stealing ideas for software features, instead of coming up with them.

xrisk 10y ago
Since when does making a competitive software become an instance of 'stealing'?
- ianai 10y ago
  Apple has, for decades, incorporated OS-level feature apps into its OS. This kills which ever third party developed that app. I don't necessarily think it's wrong at a technical nor market level - but it sure hurts that third party. Here's hoping some of them become employed at Apple or have the option to do so at some point... But at the same time, I doubt flux really cares. By the nature of that project I think they probably prefer to see vendors 'doing the right thing'.
  - apostacy 10y ago
    Apple forcibly prevented flux from working on iOS. [1] It worked fine on my iPad 2. Apple killed it, and then withheld the feature from me until I brought a new iPad. It would be like if they reached into your computer and locked the sound output to a certain volume, and told you to fix it by buying a new macbook. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2015/11/12/flux-iphone-sideloading-shut-down/ https://9to5mac.com/2015/11/12/flux-iphone-sideloading-shut-...
  - Someone 10y ago
    “Apple has, for decades, incorporated OS-level feature apps into its OS” As the lower layers get commodified, every OS vendor does that. Examples of features that, at one time, used to be third-party: - graphics libraries - font technologies - audio synthesis - MP3 encoding - video playback - text-to-speech - speech-to-text - TCP/IP support - printer drivers - antivirus
Eric_WVGG 10y ago

rhinoceraptor 10y ago

I really hope they release it for the watch at some point, since I use it to track my sleep.