Using Night Shift on Your Mac

The main new feature of the new Mac OS Sierra 10.12.4 is NightShift. That's the ability to shift the colors of your screen particularly used for people when they want to look at their Macs later at night before going to bed. 

So the way you activate it is you go to System Preferences and under System Preferences you go to, of course, Displays and there is a new NightShift tab right here. Now you can set NightShift to go on on a schedule. So you can set it, for instance, to work from sunset to sunrise. In other words it will shift the colors of your screen when the sun's not up. Or you can set it for Custom and then set specific times. You can also just have it turned off and then you can turn it on manually here by clicking here and it will turn on until the next day. 

Then you can also adjust the color. So if you have it on you can adjust to be less warm or more warm. So this to me looks very much like the normal colors and you can't really tell the difference. More warm really takes a lot of the blue out and makes everything look much more red. Then you've got kind of the middle setting there. 

So you can set it to go anyway that you want. Just have it go on automatically is how most people use it. It's probably much more useful if you're going to be using your Mac at night. If not it really doesn't matter. If you have a MacBook then of course you may find yourself using it late at night on the sofa or in bed and it might useful to have this turned on.

Now it doesn't work with all Macs. It works with newer Macs. There is a page here that Apple has that has a list of compatibility. So you've got mostly newer Macs. It's got to be 2012 or later but for somethings it has to be newer than that. It also depends on your display. So, of course, built in MacBook displays are taken for granted but then it lists certain displays that you have to have. I don't actually have any of these displays. I've got a 3rd party equivalent to the old Apple cinema display and it works just fine on that. So it may work even if you don't have the exact display here. 

Now if you want to know more about the science behind this you can go to Wikipedia page, the Effect of blue lights technology, and it goes into detail about why this sort of thing is popular on both tablets and laptops today.