10.12.4 display sleep bug

Upgraded to 10.12.6 yesterday with 2 external Acer monitors on iMac 5K and so far so good - but we've been there before. Seems like it takes a few days for the disease to set in.

Did have an usual screen scramble on the iMac when the system woke up this morning so things are different.

I have been working directly with Apple field support on the problem and they did seem to be making progress so let's hope for the best.

Likewise... have had it happen twice today so far on 10.12.6... seems like it takes a few hours and sleep/wake cycles for the disease to set in.

I've notified the Apple field support guy assigned to my case and submitted a new sysdiagnose file.

Would recommend those of you who have not submitted a Bug Report to bugreport.apple.com to do so referencing your experience with 10.12.6. You only need to have an Apple developer account (not a developer subscription) so its free. Just sign up with your Apple ID.

My latest saga, Updated to 10.12.6 and still have the sleep bug. Since I am jumping in new here I run a 5K 27" iMac (Late 2015), 4GHz i7, 32GB memory, AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB, 2 flanking 4K Samsung 28" monitors off the thunderbolt and started getting this problem with the update of 10.12.4. I have an active case open with Apple but starting to think they are just guessing and have no idea what the problem is. I have sent them multiple diag files and they have me deleting some apps and extensions that have not helped at all.

It's Russian roulette every time I have to wake my system from a sleep mode as to which monitor will be black. Sometimes it's the iMac display and the two 4K displays come up, sometimes its the center and right, or just the left/right or maybe all. The only fix is to reboot and they all come up fine. NEVER had the issue until 10.12.4.

So, as it stands: 10.12.6 STILL has the bug, Apple STILL has no clue, my frustration is building and it may affect my future purchases if they cannot get this fixed soon. I don't want my system hacked all up with deleting apps, files, and other BS because I have FCPX projects that are critical and affecting them in any way would be bad.

When I was at WWDC and in my discussions with field support, I pointed out that this disproportionately effected high-value customers with high-end iMac configurations with multiple expensive monitors. These are the thought-leaders that Apple should be cultivating and coddling.

I would advise EVERYONE who has this bug to hold their ground - I agree 100% that it is a waste of our time to delete apps, reinstall operating systems, etc, on our Valuable Production Systems to solve a bug that didn't exist in 10.12.3 - and many people are talking about going back to 10.12.3 now.

In addition, as even the NY Times reported, power users are turning to building Hackintoshes because the Mac Pro went obsolete and what you could get with a high-end iMac, although nice, was a generation behind the state-of-the-art at 2-3x the price.

Apple just announced a new VP of People (don't ya just love that) and she said that Apple gets the best out of 120,000 people - it is hard to believe that an organization with that many people can't solve this one problem. It's not self-driving cars guys - if you can't solve this, would I trust an Apple self-driving car?

So voting with our pocketbooks is unfortunately all we've got left!

I agree with you 100%. It's very concerning to me that Apple is either unwilling to fix the problem or cannot fix the problem. Regardless, it is an issue that will affect the "Power Users" as you have referred to and these are the people that spend the money on high-end systems. The techs are trying to do their job but it's obvious that they are just guessing and trying to provide the customers that have this issue with some level of service even though they have no clue!

If Apple is reading this, I would have to say: Please take this serious and throw some resources at it to fix the problem because it's only going to cost you more time and money in the long run with support and lost revenue from customers that have to find other Non-Apple solutions to get around this issue. I would also tell you it's not an app, nor is it a re-install of the OS, extension or anything else silly like that. It was NOT present in 10.12.3 and appeared within a day or so of updating to 10.12.4. This all you need to know. Just look at what was changed that could affect the video displays in power save/sleep mode.

Eric

Trying to see if there are alternatives to downgrading to 10.12.3, I've got as far as an install of 10.12.1 and an upgrade to 10.12.3. Using TimeMachine to look at the delta's and given that all major corporates, particularly Apple, think we all have super fast internet connections, I have to wonder if they just throw the kitchen sink along with everything else when they provide an update. So fishing through the update files when I upgrade to 10.12.4 may not be as useful as I'd be hoping. None the less, if I can narrow down the offending file and see if 10.12.6 can use its 10.12.3 version to work round this, I'll be happier.

I'd be even happier to hear that macOS High Sierra doesn't have the problem.

Well that didn't work :-(

Returned (again) for repair, and stress testing showed problems with power supply & logic board. Now been advised that these are being replaced, so fingers crossed when I get it back.

Hope all goes well for you. I don't think this issue is a hardware problem considering the massive amount of people that started experiencing it after the 10.12.4 update. It's been months for me and Apple still has no answers. I have emailed the support guy recently and they will NOT even respond anymore.

Thanks, Apple!!! Way to go with supporting your customers...

I know it's commonly cited but rarely proven, but something tells me this may be one of those flukey occasions where a software issue has caused a hardware problem.

*If* 10.12.4 was routing too much power and/or heat to the GPU or part of the logic board, that might explain issues with either display failures/errors or random shutdowns. It would also explain why rewinding back to earlier versions or installing subsequent updates (19.12.5 & 6) fail to resolve the issue.

On the plus side, because I'm in the EU (for now, until Brexit kicks in), Apple have had to pick up the £780 tab for the new logic boand & PSU.

@Mort - Who has said that rolling back didn't fix the problem? Rolling back fixed it on two machines here. We're keeping those two systems unpatched and off the internet so they can continue with multiple heads.

Problem still persist with the 10.12.6 but at first it seemed fixed. However, if either of my identical setups (5k i7 32Gb + Dell 4k) is asleep, say over night, then it is seemingly random if the machine wakes up.

Apple is so slow to fix this that I have; 1) banned Apple purchases in my lab (I am the head) and 2) purchased 8 HP desktops (these actually work!).

Yes, the problem will manifest itself more with an overnight sleep. It's almost like there are multiple levels of power saving stages and once it's been sleeping for a while it enters that last stage where the problem appears to manifest itself the most. I too have a 5k, i7 32gb + 2 Samsung 4K's.

It's extremely troubling to have to deal with this issue on a daily basis, Apple needs to put some effort into getting this fixed!

I originally had this issue with a 2015 iMac 5K and Dell 24" 4K. I recently purchased the 2017 iMac 5K. With 10.12.6 and the same Dell 24" 4K, the problem persists but does seem to occur less often with 10.12.6. I continue to use my workaround of turning off the Dell monitor before putting the iMac to sleep but that's annoying to do. I'm going to attempt to use a different external monitor to see if it has the same issue. If I change the iMac and the external monitor and the problem persists, there's really nothing more I can do. Its up to Apple.

I've spent the last few hours downgrading to 10.12.3. The migration assistant worked fine apart from an issue with the Mac Mail database which required me to move my email out of the appropriate folder, fire up Mail, then copy over selected files (pretty much everything apart from the envelope files) and rebuild the mailboxes.

Not ideal being 3 minor releases behind but having two monitors is more useful than one and bug fixes. Although I will review what I'm missing out on just in case.

Not sure about the etiquette of closing a bug by saying it's a duplicate of a report I can't see because it's on someone else's account. Hopefully the system will tell me when they've figured things out.