10.12.4 display sleep bug

Tried to submit a report today, but unfortunately my developer account has lapsed and I don't have a need to renew it at this time. Did you ever get a chance to submit a report or get contact info for someone that can help get this in to the right channel?

Just to update... I did file a report on bugreport.apple.com but also (possibly because of contact at WWDC) I was contacted by a field quality engineer from Apple and I've connected him with my bug report. I'm going to call him next week when I get home to discuss the issue.

I have had similar experiences where it appears that the bug has been fixed. Don't be fooled. It will be back. There appears to be some sort of temporary situation where this bug doesn't occur for 2-3-4-5 days and then - bam - when you think all is going fine, the iMac monitor stays black. I had that happen while I was at WWDC and then on Friday the bug came back and I filed the bug report.

I emphasized the fact that many of us experiencing this issue are high-value, professional customers with expensive configurations and it was discouraging for us to experience this problem after what should have been a harmless OS update. I am getting a feeling that we will be seeing some activity on this issue.

Cheers, Joe

I sincerely hope so Joe. I fit your description of having a high end setup. At the time of purchase, it was the highest available configuration of the 5k iMac along with two 4K monitors. Nothing I have tried has solved the issue for good. The only work around I have now is setting my iMac to lock when screen saver turns on and leaving the screen saver on for a longer duration in hopes that I return before the screens sleep. Using a hot corner to activate the screen saver.

I've had my iMac 5K (i7 4GHz, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) for almost 2.5 years connected with 2 LG Thunderbolt 4K monitors. In all that time I've experienced the issue twice. I've been on 10.12.5 since it came out via all intermittent updates without issue.

Yesterday I've reinstalled the mac with erase and since then I am experiencing the issue as well. More than 10, 15 minutes of sleep and the internal display doesn't turn on, the external ones do.

Funny thing is that when I open Displays from the System Preferences I do get a window for the built-in display, but it gets displayed on one of the external ones.

I've chatted with Apple support and they still do those "reset the SMC and NVRAM"-suggestions. After that came: "testing it in safe mode without the external displays". According to "them", if "after performing a clean install there are still issues then it points to a hardware issue". I've asked how it can "still" be a hardware issue if there was none to begin with but no real reply to that. So I'm now stuck having to test this in safe mode before any further action is undertaken.

It's a real issue and front-line support and AppleCare do not have solutions.

If you have an Apple developer account, follow my instructions in an earlier reply and go to bugreport.apple.com and file a MacOS bug report like I did. Piling on will increase pressure.

If you don't have your own developer account, find a friend who has one so you can get this into the system.

And, actually, we're talking about a developer ACCOUNT - not a developer SUBSCRIPTION - so anyone can have a developer account and log in to bugreport.apple.com AFAIK. A developer subscription is what you need to publish apps. Just go to developer.apple.com and sign up your apple ID to become a developer.

As long as you have signed up as a developer, it doesn't matter that your subscription has lapsed - that's for publishing apps and support incidents. You can still use your developer account to log bugs AFAIK.

Blizzke,

I know this is similar but not the same, but as I have mentioned on this thread a few times I have had the same issue you all appear to be going through on my Mac mini (late 2012). My 2 external displays were: HDMI > HDMI & Thunderbolt > DisplayPort. If my machine slept for more than 15 minutes the ThunderBolt > DisplayPort monitor failed to wake up and my mouse juddered on screen when moved.

I did the clean install, SMC, NVRAM etc etc like everyone else here. The fix for me (and as I said this is a Mac mini so slightly different but worth a try if you have the option), was to change the ThunderBolt > DisplayPort to ThunderBolt > DVI. Since I swapped that over I have had no issues for easily 2+ weeks. For the record I also tried ThunderBolt > ThunderBolt / miniDisplayPort and these had the same sleep wake issue. Both of my monitors are Dell Ultrasharp 24" - 2013 & 2010. So I very much doubt this is a hardware issue as my Mac mini is fine now (monitors are working on the relevant ports with other devices).

Thank you for the suggestions. Unfortunately both monitors only have HDMI and DisplayPort. So using DVI wouldn't be an option for me. If it really is a thunderbolt issue - which a lot of the discussions seem to support - perhaps it would be enough to break the data connection by using the HDMI functionality.

I might just try to purchase a couple DP to HDMI cables and see if that resolves anything (but it still annoys me beyond measure as it worked before in this configuration). For me, the monitors don't have to be on DP. I've resorted to disabling sleep and going with a black screensaver for now to avoid having to restart the mac every morning.

It's really a shame that you have to resort to patchwork and workaround for hardware of that price class. For me this is not the first time, had other issues on my macbooks as well. I've been a loyal Apple customer for many years, but my absolute faith in the quality of the brand has been wavering more and more. Not going to turn this into some kind of rant but I find myself growing more certain that my next purchase will probably not be an Apple device anymore.

The bug report folks asked me to add this to my bug report so you may want to answer the same questions when you file yours...

- Is there a reliable recipe for reproducing the issue?

Yes.

1. Configure a Sierra iMac system with at least one external displayPort / Thunderbolt monitor (my configuration is iMac 5K with Acer 2160x3840 external monitors on Thunderbolt to displayPort cables)

2. Set Energy Saver to "turn off" displays at x minutes, and allow the system to sleep

3. Wait for system to (a) turn monitors off and (b) go to sleep (which also means that you don't have any processes running that keep the system awake)

4. Wake system up with mouse or keyboard

5. External monitor(s) wake up and show desktop. Internal iMac monitor does not turn on. Otherwise system is running.

6. Only reboot restores the internal iMac monitor

- With that recipe how often do you hit it (ie if you try the recipe X times, it happens Y/X times)?

100%

- Have you noticed any specific things that seem to prevent the issue from happening?

Only if you prevent the system from sleeping and/or prevent the displays from turning off.

Wow, it's affecting you 100% of the time? It's not 100% here, it is incredibly random. Sometimes both displays fail to come up (then I have to remote in to reboot). Most days it happens at least once. I had a good run though last week for 3-4 days without it happening. Each time I wake the machine up, it's a gamble. I'm considering disabling the sleep, but I really hate to do that.

I did put the steps to re-create the issue in the report.

Perhaps you can reference my report on yours as well: 32825183

Yes, it is 100% fixed for me. I also noticed different colour of login screen background. It is gray-ish now which is different from what I remember prior that update.

And one maybe unrelated note:

Also when messing around with my system and investigating the issue I recall that I noticed that I had duet display kernel extension still active because it was presenting some logs in syslog. I have reinstalled duet display with the latest (1.6.4.3). But I cannot confirm if this change fixed the issue. I did this around same time when updating to 10.12.6-16G18a.

I'm curious how many of affected users here also installed duet display in their system before...

I still have this issue with 10.12.6 beta (16G24b) on my two 5k iMacs with Dell 4k external monitors. I have no confidence Apple can fix this issue. The 'Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when display is off' is unchecked and this change did make the problem better with some of the developer builds but it has never completely gone away. Now the behaviour is more likely to occur when the computer has been asleep for long periods or overnight. Having spent many thousands on these computers and Apple Extended Care I consider that I have paid for Apple to fix this issues, not for me to do their troubleshooting for them ...

Has anyone tried this with today's 10.12.6 update?

I moved my second monitor over to a PC a while ago and have been doing my work on that. I'd hate to move it back only to find that I had to move it yet again.

So far so good :-)

The release notes contained 2 elements I'd been looking out for:

Intel Graphics Driver

Available for: macOS Sierra 10.12.5

Impact: An application may be able to execute arbitrary code with system privileges

Description: A memory corruption issue was addressed with improved memory handling.

and

Intel Graphics Driver

Available for: macOS Sierra 10.12.5

Impact: An application may be able to read restricted memory

Description: A validation issue was addressed with improved input sanitization.

Fingers crossed the fix is pervasive!

Downloaded and installed this morning - not looking good I'm afraid on my Acer K242HQK.

About the only thing I haven't changed is the cable.

Before I caught this thread I ended up changing my ageing WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo for 2 x LaCie drives - so I'm down about $500 so far in messing about with this issue.

I'm also setting up to downgrade to 10.12.3