Mac Sequoia, Screen Flickering every few minutes

Hello, I currently have a m1 macbook 2020, everything else on my mac is working except that my wallpaper keeps flickering every few minutes.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 15.0

Posted on Sep 18, 2024 5:00 PM

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Posted on Oct 19, 2024 6:20 PM

Hey,


I discovered the problem and found a rather brute solution to it.


I opened Activity Monitor and waited for the screen flickering to happen. That’s when I noticed that the WallpaperImageExtension process was causing the wallpaper to restart—it was failing to find a wallpaper in its cache. You can confirm this yourself by opening Console from the Applications folder. Set the filter to "Errors and Faults" and search for WallpaperImageExtension. Every time the flickering happens, you'll see an error log pop up in the filtered list:



Since it wasn’t possible to stop or disable this service alone (because it’s a child process of com.apple.wallpaper), I had to stop the entire wallpaper service. This means no wallpaper at all, unfortunately.


Here’s how to disable it:


1- Boot your Mac in Recovery Mode by shutting down and then pressing the power button until the options page appears.

2- Open Terminal from the Utilities menu bar.

3- Disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) by running this command:

csrutil disable

4- Restart and boot normally, then open Terminal and run this command to unload the wallpaper service:

launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.wallpaper.plist


This will stop the wallpaper from restarting until your next reboot or whenever you want to use a wallpaper again.


Note: It's generally not recommended to disable SIP, but if this bug is driving you crazy, it’s worth doing for some peace of mind. To re-enable SIP, just reboot into Recovery Mode and run:

csrutil enable

However, be aware that once SIP is re-enabled, the wallpaper service will start again, and you won’t be able to stop it without repeating the process.


119 replies

Nov 23, 2024 9:54 PM in response to fydela

The screen model or manufacturer (i`m using 2 monitors, both DELL) has nothing to do with it, since this has been working for 2 years now.


However, this was now resolved, but i have no clue what resolved it.


What i did was:


Completly shutdown the macbook, remove the USB-C docking station i`m using, remove all It's cables, connect a different USB-C Docking station, turn on with only 1 monitor (i have two), that was stable for 24 hours, so i replaced back to the original one i had (that was flicking before), and connected everything back again as if nothing changed. and now, it works fine.


seriously, i got no idea what actually fixed it. but this is very annoying, and did not happen on OS 14.

Nov 14, 2024 12:33 AM in response to fixthisforkuromi

Found a temporal weird solution to this:

As soon as the flicker happens, I swipe the trackpad randomly very fast, idk somehow it prevents the next flicker.


Apple must take this issue ASAP, definitely software problem, it is super annoying and that a lot of users are experiencing this is just worse. Not to mention that if many users out there have changed the screen due to this issue.

I have the same machine with 15.1 and tried all except reinstalling my OS.

Nov 22, 2024 9:15 AM in response to Oranzieus

The problem seems to be with the external monitor compatibility so upgrading Mac OS probably won’t resolve the issue. Here is what others are reporting, unfortunately lots of different things to try: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/u405lh/m1_mac_dell_monitor_flickering_issue_fixed/?rdt=51447


What make and model is your external monitor, maybe the manufacturer has some suggestions?



May 17, 2025 10:56 AM in response to fixthisforkuromi

MacBook Pro M1 (2020) with Sequoia 15.4.1 ... it's not just the screen flickering, it's the external display going dark for 5-10 seconds every few minutes. I have a 1TB drive with 575GB free, so free space is not the problem. I can't find any online instructions for creating larger blocks of contiguous free space; I think Disk Warrior did this years ago. I'm able to create periods of time with relative stability by deleting the display preferences (suggested in other posts) and changing the screen resolution. Things that have not helped at all: setting the desktop to black and running caffeine. One post says to restart into safe mode and reinstall Sequoia.

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Mac Sequoia, Screen Flickering every few minutes

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