MacOS 10.15 Catalina Bug: LG 5K Display Resets to Maximum Brightness Every Reboot

Lloyd Chambers:

There are so many bugs in Catalina that I could spend weeks writing them up. Here’s one that is not just eye-popping (literally), but of great annoyance to me as a photographer — I need the display to remain stable and predictable.

After every reboot, the LG 5K display goes to maximum brightness.

Chambers quotes from several others encountering the same issue. A DF reader — also a professional photographer — wrote to me about this bug last week. He (the DF reader) was using a $6,000 new 16-inch MacBook Pro. I say was, past tense, because after a few days he returned it because this brightness issue was no small thing for him, because he sets his display brightness precisely using a display calibrator. Doing this several times per day every day quickly drove him mad.

Is this the worst bug in the world? Not even close. It’s a paper-cut bug. No data loss, no crash, not some sort of thing where something doesn’t even work — just an annoyance. But no one wants to use a tool that gives you half a dozen paper cuts every day. And MacOS 10.15 is chockablock with paper-cut bugs. And it’s not like the LG 5K Display is some obscure unsupported display — it’s the one and only external 5K display sold by Apple itself.

★ Wednesday, 22 January 2020