Apple seeds fifth developer beta of macOS 10.12.4 with Night Shift [u]

Apple on Tuesday issued a fifth beta of macOS 10.12.4 to developers, bringing the software update one step closer to a public release.

The new code should be available through Apple's official developer portal, or else through the Mac App Store's Updates tab for people already in line for beta distributions. A public seed could potentially follow within the next few days.

It's not yet clear what changes are in the fifth beta, but the main addition in macOS 10.12.4 should be Night Shift, a carryover of a feature first introduced to iPhones and iPads with iOS 9.3. As on those devices, Night Shift for Mac gradually warms color temperatures to reduce exposure to blue light, which can potentially help people get to sleep more easily.

The update also expands dictation support to more languages, adds better PDFKit APIs, and enables cricket scores in Siri. Other focus areas include iCloud Analytics, and standard bugfixes and performance tweaks.

It's not clear when the finished version of 10.12.4 will be available, but the first beta appeared in late January. If Apple follows its typical rollout schedule, there's unlikely to be more than one or two additional beta seeds.

The update may be the last — or next to last — before Apple unveils macOS 10.13 at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Update: The new macOS 10.12.4 version is also available to public beta testers.

9 Comments

lkrupp 19 Years · 10521 comments

About 7 years ago

10.12.3 is pretty damn stable in my opinion. macOS has been rock solid for me. One by one little glitches get fixed. No wonder the enterprise is starting to gravitate to Macs.

wonkothesane 12 Years · 1738 comments

lkrupp said:

10.12.3 is pretty damn stable in my opinion. macOS has been rock solid for me. One by one little glitches get fixed. No wonder the enterprise is starting to gravitate to Macs.

Same for me, even on my (officially) unsupported machines.

MacPro 18 Years · 19845 comments

"... but the main addition in macOS 10.12.4 should be Night Shift"

That's odd, I've had Night Shift with last couple of developer releases of macOS.

dewme 10 Years · 5775 comments

MacPro said:

"... but the main addition in macOS 10.12.4 should be Night Shift"

That's odd, I've had Night Shift with last couple of developer releases of macOS.

Yeah, I'm seeing Night Shift in action right now on Beta 3 and it's been in there for the last couple of betas. BTW I haven't experienced any discernible sleep benefit whatsoever from the blue light reduction so far. Maybe it takes a while for the brain to react? I suspect most people these days have sleep disruption from things other than excessive blue light exposure, like stress, anxiety, and fear of a zombie apocalypse. ;-)

MacPro said:

"... but the main addition in macOS 10.12.4 should be Night Shift"

That's odd, I've had Night Shift with last couple of developer releases of macOS.

I fürs what's meant here is that NightShift is the main new feature when compared to 10.12.3.