Supported Mac models for Night Shift in Sierra 10.12.4+

People looking for Night Shift support in High Sierra 10.13.2 you should visit my follow up Supported Mac models for Night Shift in High Sierra 10.13.2.

Night Shift was introduced in macOS Sierra 10.12.4 (Build 16E144f and Public Beta-1) and is controlled by the CoreBrightness.framework and you’ll need at least one of the following – or later – Mac models:

MacBookPro9,x
iMac13,x
Macmini6,x
MacBookAir5,x
MacPro6,x
MacBook8,x

Apple did not release any information about this. Not just yet, but I know this because I located the checks for it in said framework, and there it checks for matching Mac model names:

MacBookPro
iMac
Macmini
MacBookAir
MacPro
MacBook

Night Shift is however not supported – by Apple – on older Mac models. No. There are checks for minimum requirements, which I looked up with help of:

nm /S*/L*/PrivateFrameworks/CoreBrightness.framework/CoreBrightness|grep _ModelMinVersion

000000000001d490 S _ModelMinVersion

Ok. Now we know the offset. Time to dump the data with help of:

xxd -s 0x1D490 -l 24 /S*/L*/PrivateFrameworks/CoreBrightness.framework/CoreBrightness

0001d490: 0900 0000 0d00 0000 0600 0000 0500 0000
0001d4a0: 0600 0000 0800 0000

MacBookPro9,x
iMac13,x
Macmini6,x
MacBookAir5,x
MacPro6,x
MacBook8,x

I opened the CoreBrightness binary in a hex editor (app) and change the coloured byte that matches with the used hardware. After that I saved the file and copied it to the original location.

The next step is to re-sign the patched framework binary with:

sudo codesign -f -s - /S*/L*/PrivateFrameworks/CoreBrightness.framework/Versions/Current/CoreBrightness

Well. Now you know how I did it, and in case you happen to own a Mac model that isn’t supported, yet, then you could try to patch the matching value in CoreBrightness.framework as some readers here confirmed that this is working for them with older/unsupported hardware.

Note: The colours that I used should help you to find the byte that you need to change.

Anyway. This my friends is how it is done. Have fun now.

Edit: The order of the MacBook Pro and iMac was wrong – see comments. Fixed thanks to the heads up from Thomas and Nicolinux.

Note: You may only use this patch in your script/software/app if the source code is available, preferable on Github, you are not asking for donations, and clearly state that this is my work. Thank you.