10.12.4 display sleep bug

Update: I have reached out to Apple several times in the last couple months and no response! It is quite apparent that Apple has given up on this problem or has just decided to ignore it. I was going to buy the new iPhoneX but decided to go with the Galaxy Note 8, likewise, I am angry enough at Apple that I am seriously considering replacing my macs with PC's. The other day I had the bug black out all my monitors after a quick flash of video and could not get them back after a couple reboots. Finally, on the third reboot, I was good but lost 2 USB drives that took another 15 minutes of my time to recover them correctly. All this happened because I was forced to do a hard power down because I could not access the desktop to correctly reset the machine!

Apple, get your act together!!!

Good news! I no longer suffer from this issue under macOS 10.13.

I have installed beta macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) - specifically GM 17A362a on my affected machine. I installed it from scratch by formatting a partition to APFS and installing the system cleanly. Then I reproduced my previous setup (reinstalled all the apps and jazz).

So far have been running it for 7-ish days with many instances of waking displays from sleep and not (yet) experienced the issue. Fingers crossed!

I am one of the original people to post on this issue, and have tried many things in an attempt to resolve it. So far, I can also confirm that this problem appears to be gone in macOS 10.13! I updated to the final release yesterday. I did not do a clean install, just updated. Everything seemed to install fine, file system converted to APFS, no issues with the process. I've intentionally set my display timeout very low, manually put the system to sleep, locked the screen, all many times. So far, so good.

Day one, my iMac woke from an overnight sleep and all monitors came up extremely smooth. One difference I did notice which I rarely noticed before is that the iMac screen (Center) came up first and did not flash or blank on or off, then the 2 flanking screens came up after the center in sync. Before it was just a random mess!

I updated to the official 10.13 release as soon as it came out in hopes to solve this issues. Several days later, and I haven't had a monitor not return to normal after the monitors have gone to sleep. So far, so good.

I have the same issue with sleep / wake mode, EXCEPT it started when I update to High sierra. I run parallels 13 with windows 10 on my mac and the problem only appears when P13 is running. when I close P13, the problem disappears.

Update:

It's been about 1 week since the update to High Sierra and the sleep bug seems to be gone at least for now. I have tested it every day, sometimes several times a day and so far it brings up all the displays correctly. I can see a big difference on how it seems to wake the displays now from what it did before. Before when the bug was occurring, it would bring up the displays in a chaotic random way. Now, it seems to be structured, the iMac display comes up first then the 2 flanking monitors come on in sync with each other. It's very smooth now. Also, I noticed some other differences such as if I switch inputs on one of the 4K monitors to show my PC on another input then switch back, the mac with quickly flash all screens and as if it is looking to resync everything correctly. This never happened before with the buggy version. So far everything looks good, fingers crossed that it stays this way!

Today is also the 1 week point for me with macOS 10.3, and I have also had no further issues. I only have a single external Dell P2715Q display attached. I am also running Parallels 13, with Windows 7 and Windows 10, still no issues. I have noticed when waking my system, the screens flash, and then flash again. I do not recall if that is the same as prior to this issue.

Just an update for those that had the issue:

Since the upgrade to High Sierra which I did the day of the release the problem has not returned so far. Has anyone else completed the upgrade and had the issue fixed?

Eric

The High Sierra upgrade made the problem happen way way less for me, but it has happened a couple of times where one of the side 4k monitors connected to my 5k iMac does not come up after sleep of the monitors. To fix it, I put the screens to sleep and wake them back up after about 1-2 seconds and all the monitors come back up just fine. I have not had to reboot to solve the issue as I had to before, and I have not seen my primary 5k display stay off after sleeping the monitors.

Some odd changes of coming out of sleep are that the side monitors sometimes show a messy splash of yellow mixed with some other colors all over the screens for a second or two before the monitors reset and come on normally. Never happened before High Sierra. Another thing is that it takes longer to come out of monitor sleep and I often type my password and hit return before the screens have reset completely and my password gets cut off and is not accepted. I have to be more patient when bringing my monitors out of sleep and logging in.

I too have seen the messy splash of yellow mixed with a few other colors for a brief second but I'll take that over a complete reboot each time. It's odd that Apple has this issue in the first place and does not have a much cleaner wake. It's just not the old Apple I guess.

Read this Apple Knowledge Base article.

If your Mac doesn't sleep or wake when expected - Apple Support

Same here with iMac 5K + Dell 4K monitor