Working Late on Your Mac? Turn on Night Shift to Help Your Sleep

ByEmily Dolloff

Research suggests that exposure to blue light fools your body into thinking it’s daytime, making it harder to fall asleep if you work late on a Mac with a bright white (which has a lot of blue light) screen. To help, a macOS feature called Night Shift subtly changes the colors of the screen as the sun sets to reduce the amount of blue light hitting your eyes. In essence, everything gets slightly warmer. To configure your Night Shift schedule—so it turns on and off automatically—go to System Settings > Displays > Night Shift. You can set any times, but Sunset to Sunrise adjusts for the sun’s movement in your location throughout the year. One warning: if you edit photos or videos, or work on graphics where specific colors matter, Night Shift’s color changes may be problematic.

(Featured image by iStock.com/PeopleImages)

Social Media: If you regularly work at your Mac late at night and have trouble falling asleep, consider turning on Night Shift to reduce your blue light exposure. By default, it makes the colors of your Mac warmer from sunset to sunrise.

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    It looks like a cold weekend in Vermont and I won’t bore you with the forecast down here in the Keys but I hope you have an awesome weekend!

    Thank you so much for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily, Hadley & Amy_

  • CES Random Thoughts

    I talked a bit about the big Consumer Electronics Show last week and it is rapidly fading in the rearview mirror. I have gone to this show every year for the past decade or more. We actually exhibited our Chill Pill speakers and Hammerhead products at one CES but mostly I have come as a “buyer” to look for new products and trends.

    The Las Vegas convention center is a gigantic venue and the CES show spills out into the parking lot in front but also into some of the surrounding hotels and resorts. The Sands convention center was the second largest and housed some of the more interesting booths. This was the location for 3D printing, health care, fitness, home automation, robots and drones. There were sophisticated baby monitors, constant reporting thermometers, implanted blood glucose monitors and even a company that sold wireless sensors that monitor your soil’s nutrients and moisture. Home automation was huge with several competing standards vying to challenge Apple’s HomeKit. This year more companies were showing HomeKit compatible products so I think that Apple’s vision of your interconnected home is not far off.

    There are lots of ways to move from the Sands over to the LVCC but the best way is the free buses offered by CES. Cabs and the monorail are possible but the buses seem to be the fastest and they are free and comfortable. For me it was a great way to rest my weary feet for a few minutes before going to the other venue to continue walking through the crowds. At the convention center there are three main halls and the international pavilion over at the Westgate (formerly, Hilton). The Center hall is dominated by the big guys with gigantic booths for Samsung, Intel, LG and others. Those booths are usually mobbed so I quickly walked through to check out the TVs and moved on. The North Hall is where the iLounge was born and products for iPad and iPhone dominate that section. The biggest part of the North Hall, however, was the Auto section with concept cars being shown my several manufacturers including Ford, Audi, Mercedes and new electric car upstart Faraday.

    In the past several years the iLounge area and the international area were dominated by all sorts of cases for iPhones and iPads. This year there were a few in each section but cases were definitely not the dominate category. Over at the international pavilion there were lots of hover boards but unlike previous years, demos of the scooters were restricted to the booth area. Nevertheless, all sorts of scooters were being shown. I searched for interesting USB-C products and found some hubs that were not quite ready for prime time and a bunch of cables. I did see the USB-C displays that incorporate a hub and that could be the real solution for the office set-up for the USB-C equipped MacBook.

    I never seem to be able to coordinate my meetings by hall. It seems that I’ll have one meeting in the North Hall, the next in the South Hall and then another back at the hotel. I rode the buses a lot and got to see the whole show floor that way.

    I did find some interesting products that we may add to our offerings, and had some great meetings so it was worthwhile to visit this show that is a window on future technology.

  • Apple Stands Up The Street

    $50.6 Billion in revenue, $10.5 Billion in net profit and $235 Billion in the bank. Let’s get one thing straight, 99.9% of the companies in the world would love to have those kind of numbers. And while this fell into the range of Apple’s forward-looking guidance, it did fall short of the expectations of the analysts.

    This was the first time in 13 years (!) that Apple posted lower year-over-year sales. Apple saw lower iPhone sales than last year at this time. However, keep in mind that was when the iPhone 6 was at its peak. Nevertheless, Apple sold 51.1 million iPhones and said they are having difficulty keeping up with the demand for the recently released iPhone 5se.

    Mac sales and iPad sales also declined as expected with Apple selling a bit over 4 million Macs and 10.25 million iPads. On the bright side, Services revenue increased 20% to almost $6 billion and “other” products which include Apple TV, Apple Watch, Beats and iPod generated $2.189 billion which is 30% growth.

    Apple’s board of directors both increased the dividend paid on Apple shares to $0.57 which is about a 10% raise and increased their share buy-back program. With Apple being so widely held, this dividend increase makes Apple one of the largest payers of dividends in the world. Since the start of their dividend and share re-purchase program, Apple has returned over $163 billion to shareholders, the majority of that being in the form of share buy-backs.

    Apple’s guidance for the current quarter which ends at the end of June also projects a year-over-year decline in revenues. They forecast sales in the range of $41-$43 billion which is also lower than analysts predicted.

    There is no sugar-coating these results which were for the most part, a miss. Forecasting demand, revenue and margin is tricky and there are a bunch of factors that enter into this calculation and a bunch more that are ready to blow up the forecast. International monetary trends, new product introductions are all a bit of a wild card.

    There is some good news hidden in the report. Apple said that the iPhone enjoys an unprecedented 95% loyalty rate, Apple Pay is seeing 1 million new users a week, 13 million people subscribe to Apple Music and Apple’s installed base is 1 billion devices and growing.

    Apple had a huge hit with the iPhone 6 and that did push sales to a peak level last year. It was an anomaly, however, and Apple’s business is still incredibly strong, just a bit more down to earth. You can’t hit home runs every time at bat! Tim Cook says the product pipeline is strong and I believe him.

    Hey, I didn’t have to come up with a new adjective to describe what Apple did to the street this quarter. That’s a fringe benefit. Putting this all into perspective is important. It is not like Apple is losing money or losing customers. In fact, the opposite is true. In three short months, they made over $10 billion in profit and sold millions and millions of iPhones, iPads and Macs! Now, if Small Dog could just do a tiny fraction of that…