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Screen brightness is at minimum all the time?

L

leo.andres.21

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 14, 2008
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Centre of the Attention
I recently installed the macOS high sierra developer beta 2 on my 2011 macbook pro 15 inch. The beta 1 was fine, I did not encounter any hardware issue such as this, mostly the fan spinned up quite a bit and the machine ran really hot.
But since I updated to beta 2 yesterday, it's now running at the lowest possible brightness all the time. I turned off auto brightness as well as manually adjusting with the f1 f2 keys, or the controls in system preferences, nothing changes.
The keyboard on the other hand is on full brightness the whole time too. It doesn't seem anybody is experiencing this, which is unfortunate.
I just reinstalled the beta 2 again and it's still the same. Maybe I'll downgrade to Sierra, just to confirm it's the beta that's the problem.
 
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My brightness is stuck at 60%, when I use F1 and F2 the on screen popup whos the brightness level changing (number of dots) but the actual screen brightness doesn't change, same with the slider in System preferences, I can move it to the top and bottom and it stays their but the actual brightness doesn't change.

I installed Beta 2 on a spare hard drive but the issue remained there.

My keyboard backlight is fine.
 
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Yeah, I clean reinstalled it but still it did not work properly. So I decided to downgrade back to Sierra and it works just fine. The problem seems to be with High Sierra beta 2.

I could bear a bit sluggishness and my laptop getting warm, but I'd rather not use a dark display in the bright summer.
 
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Yeah, I've been having brightness issues on my iMac as well. Shutting off the auto-brightness function might have helped - for me, it starts up very dim on boot but I'm able to change it after I'm logged in.
 
Exact same thing on my Late 2011 MBP 15". Well, waiting for beta 3. "let there be light".

Well, SMC reset solved it for me.

The brightness is higher, and I am not touching the slider or buttons to see if that works. Higher brightness is fine, don't want it to bungle up again in my tinkering.
 
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On my mid 2012 15" Macbook Pro I made a clean install of the 10.13 public beta and migrated my old 10.12.6 public beta into the new installation. For excluding bad configurations I did that later again by doing another clean install and migrating the intermediate 10.13 created by the first step into the new clean install again.

All appears to run Ok, but the brightness buttons (F1/F2) don't work. They don't change the brightness and they don't show up the "brightness change icon" with the progress bar. All other function keys work fine, including the keyboard brightness control. I noticed, that in SystemSettings/Monitor/Monitor there is no option for automatic brightness setting like it was the case with 10.12.

I could partially walk around the brightness button problem by installing Brightness Slider from the app store and allocating special function keys for this app. As I found out meanwhile, Brightness slider however doesn't really control the backlight level, but only adds some (dimming) grayness to the screen picture. So it does not help with potential wearing out of the backlight hardware, but only with the subjective appearance of the screen. The alternative Brightness app from bergdesign, which shall influence the backlight level, simply doesn't work under High Sierra.

But anyway the bigger (and most probably associated) killer problem is that my system can go into sleep mode only once. After it has entered sleep mode (or after I have sent it into that mode with Option/Command/Eject), I can awake the system only once (and for whatever reason this awakening takes app. 10 seconds until the screen lights up), but if the system enters sleep mode again after that, it can no longer be awakened, or to be precise: my screen then remains black, regardless of what I do. Keyboard brightness can then still be changed also in this mode, but the screen does not come back. I have to shutdown and restart the system with the power button.

What I observe in addition, is that during booting the typical intermediate blackening of the screen, which usually takes app. a quarter second or so, this blackening now takes app. 10 seconds. As now generally, booting appears to be much slower (while operations after booting appear not to be slower than expected).

SMC- and NVRAM resets didn't have any effect on the problem.

I have done a problem report via Apple's Feedback-Assistant.
 
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fkuebler said:
All appears to run Ok, but the brightness buttons (F1/F2) don't work. They don't change the brightness and they don't show up the "brightness change icon" with the progress bar. All other function keys work fine, including the keyboard brightness control. I noticed, that in SystemSettings/Monitor/Monitor there is no option for automatic brightness setting like it was the case with 10.12.

But anyway the bigger (and most probably associated) killer problem is that my system can go into sleep mode only once. After it has entered sleep mode (or after I have sent it into that mode with Option/Command/Eject), I can awake the system only once (and for whatever reason this awakening takes app. 10 seconds until the screen lights up), but if the system enters sleep mode again after that, it can no longer be awakened, or to be precise: my screen then remains black, regardless of what I do. Keyboard brightness can then still be changed also in this mode, but the screen does not come back. I have to shutdown and restart the system with the power button.
Click to expand...

Suffering from the exact same symptoms on my Early 2011 MBP 15". It's not the end of the world since this laptop is my secondary machine but I'd really like to see the problems resolved in the next update.
 
Muchos Gracias for telling us. So we relatively humble public public beta guys have reason for joyful waiting... :p
 
You can go ahead and install the beta 3. It is not as crippling at all as beta 2 on 2011 machines, owing simply to the brightness and sleep bug. That is fixed, and rest is a sweet OS to use. Memory efficiency is improving.
 
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Yesterday I downloaded High Sierra 10.13.1 and installed clean from a usb drive on MacBook 15 retina 2012. I have those exact problems as mentioned in #7 (all of them). wtf
 
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