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Hands-On With the New Night Shift Mode in macOS Sierra 10.12.4

Tuesday January 24, 2017 3:24 pm PST by Juli Clover
macOS Sierra 10.12.4, seeded to developers this morning, introduces a major new feature: Night Shift for the Mac.

First introduced for iOS devices in iOS 9.3, Night Shift is designed to gradually shift the display of a device from a blue tint to a more yellow tint during the evening, cutting down on exposure to blue light. A quick overview of how Night Shift works on the Mac can be seen in the video below.

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Night Shift can be toggled on and off using the new Night Shift switch located in the Today section of the Notification Center.

nightshiftnotificationcenter
Preferences for Night Shift are available in the Displays section of System Preferences. In this section, users can schedule Night Shift to come on at sunset and turn off at sunrise or set a custom Night Shift schedule. There's also a manual toggle and an option to change the color temperature of the display.

nightshiftoptions
Night Shift-style functionality has previously been available on Macs through the popular and well-known f.lux software, but it will be a built-in feature in macOS Sierra in 10.12.4, eliminating the need for a third-party app. F.lux continues to offer a bit more customization, however, with the option to turn it off on a per-app basis.

macOS Sierra 10.12.4 is only available to developers at the current time, but it should be made available to public beta testers in the near future. It will likely be beta tested for at least a month or two prior to release, so expect to see the update in March or April.
[ 135 comments ]


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Kiwil01
18 months ago
They should include an option to include dark mode as a setting when night shift kicks in
Rating: 17 Votes
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truthertech
18 months ago

Night shift is really stupid.



Thank you for that carefully thought out analysis.
Rating: 12 Votes
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britboyj
18 months ago
Flux was a bit too finicky for my taste, but I enjoy nightshift on the phone. I'm looking forward to trying this out.
Rating: 12 Votes
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coolbreeze
18 months ago

The article kind of glosses over this. In short, blue light has been shown to affect our sleeping patterns. The more blue light you're exposed to, the later and worse your quality of sleep. It's become a bigger issue these days with so many people using phones and tablets before bed. Night Shift automatically reduces the blue light emitted from your device at a certain time of the night.

Yep. Use your iPhone/iPad/computer (f.lux for now) in nightshift/night mode. Get used to it for an hour or so.

Then turn it off. The blasting, searing blue light is horrific. You will wonder how you went all this time without night shift.
Rating: 11 Votes
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goobot
18 months ago
Does it affect the OLED bar too?
Rating: 10 Votes
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The Doctor11
18 months ago
I think I'll continue using flux. I like how I can disable flux when I'm in certain apps.
Rating: 10 Votes
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coolbreeze
18 months ago
Unable to exclude individual apps? Hmm.
Rating: 8 Votes
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Harmonious Zen
18 months ago

I don't see the point of this.

The article kind of glosses over this. In short, blue light has been shown to affect our sleeping patterns. The more blue light you're exposed to, the later and worse your quality of sleep. It's become a bigger issue these days with so many people using phones and tablets before bed. Night Shift automatically reduces the blue light emitted from your device at a certain time of the night.
Rating: 6 Votes
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philosopherdog
18 months ago
Flux has never really worked on full screen videos. Glad they're adding this feature.
Rating: 5 Votes
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stiligFox
18 months ago
Thing is - f.lux lets you really crank up the orange - to the point it will cause artifacting in the white parts of TV shows (like the light panels in Star Trek: TNG will show up as a freaky pink). This is why Night Shift on the iPad and iPhone won't go too too low - Apple still wants everything to look good.

So I imagine Night Shift on the Mac will be the same - it'll help, but maybe not to the extreme that f.lux goes. I imagine that'll be fine for most people, but I might stick with f.lux for a while longer.
Rating: 5 Votes

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