Apple is claiming to help people sleep, but their displays are really far from achieving 'circadian darkness'. With both, you're going to see orange, and most people won't understand that there can be a tremendous amount of blue-green light in that orange light. Here's what Night Shift does before bedtime:Īnd here's what f.lux does before bedtime: Night Shift's defaults are pretty gentle, and for most people they won't reduce the impact of a screen by very much. I have two things to say about Apple's copy of f.lux. I hope you’ll try it out and let us know what you think (and there are instructions for uninstalling in our FAQ if that’s what you would prefer to do).

We have been working largely in stealth mode for the last couple of years with all this in mind, and soon we will begin releasing some of what we've created. That's our ultimate goal with f.lux, and I don't see any of that foundation in their copy. We want to really understand this, and we will need a lot of help to do it. In fact this question of light and sleep (and human health) is an area of very active scientific research. Making software with an accurate understanding of human biology and circadian timing is incredibly complicated, the most interesting problem we've ever come across. Today our approach is different: we are working every day to understand how light affects human biology, not strictly sleep, and we are constantly applying what we learn to updates and new features for f.lux. Those needs change across seasons, and over your lifetime. Every person has individual needs, and those needs are different based on your sensitivity to light, your own chronobiology (imagine early birds and night owls), your own schedule, and other factors too. We figured we'd solved the blue light problem and that there just wasn't much left to do. To be fair, we thought it was pretty easy after our first year making f.lux (Night Shift today looks a whole lot like our first version). At the risk of sounding flip here (and I'm not trying to), it is not difficult to turn screens slightly less blue at night, and from what we've seen so far, it appears that's their approach. We have been thinking about this problem for years, and we have learned far more about both the science and human biology than I could ever put into a forum post. If you care about sleep, I hope you'll stick with f.lux. Our position is if you want a slightly warmer screen it can probably do that. It will all depend on what you mean by 'does as good a job at 'warming' the color at night.' By our measurements their settings do not reduce very much alerting blue light.

Night shift mac warm