Note (November 21st 2013): Update added in the fix section for issue that occurred after upgrading to Mavericks (OS X 10.9)
Note (January 23 2020): Update added in the fix section for issue that occurred after upgrading to Catalina (OS X 10.15)
I really like the Dell monitor so this first part is a comparison and why I went with it. If you ended up here on a search for a blurry Dell monitor connected to your Mac, just jump down to the next section where you see “The Fix!”
So this was not as straight forward as I expected, but the end result was great at least. I do a lot of work that requires numerous things on the screen at the same time; consoles outputting data, monitoring software, etc. I run my Mac Book Pro 15 Retina at typically either 1920 x 1200 or an even higher resolution of 2560 x 1600 (requires third party app called SwitchResX) so I can maximize the screen use. Fortunately I have good eyes; most people find my screen nearly unreadable.
When at my office, I wanted to have an external monitor, and I figured why not go as high res as possible for the same reasons I run my screen on the MBPr itself at high res. I was considering the Apple 27″ Thunderbolt display, about $1k at the time of this article, but also noticed some great reviews of the Dell UltraSharp U3014 30″. I purchased it for about $1200 but as of mid-July 2013, Amazon just dropped the price to $989!
Here are the differences, some good, some bad:
| Dell U3014 30″ | Apple Thunderbolt 27″ Cinema Display | |
| Maximum Resolution | 2560 x 1600 (native) | 2560 x 1440 (native) |
| Aspect Ratio | 16:10 | 16:9 |
| Video Inputs |
|
Thunderbolt In (Via Fixed Cable) |
| Video Outputs | DisplayPort Out | Thunderbolt Out |
| USB 3.0 |
|
|
| SD Card Reader | Side Mounted | |
| Gigabit Ethernet | Rear Mounted RJ-45 | |
| Power Output | 12v DC | Magsafe for Mac Books |
| Screen material | Traditional LCD monitor | Glass face |
I went with the Dell monitor for a few reasons; first, it has a higher resolution and I like a LOT of stuff on my screen at once. Next, my office has windows and is pretty bright during the day; I get glare from my MacBook screen so I knew I’d have the same issue with the glass-faced Apple monitor; third, I may connect a PC to it from time to time so the Thunderbolt won’t work for me. If you’re exclusively Apple, the Apple display is pretty damn nice; you plop your Mac Book down, plug in the combo Thunderbolt+Magsafe cable and now you’ve just got one small cable running across your desk that takes care of USB ports, wired gigabit Ethernet (via the monitor’s port), display and you can chain more Thunderbolt devices behind it (such as things other than monitors). It also looks a lot nicer on your desk; the Dell has your traditional old school boxy PC monitor feel with its big plastic bezel.
Where the Dell comes out ahead, besides the resolution and input options, are the fact that it has the card reader and two USB ports on the side. If you commonly bring these types of things with you, it’s a lot easier to easily plug in there than going around the back of the monitor. Of course, for some stupid reason, Dell put them mid way up on the side; this is a 30″ monitor, so mid way up is a foot off your desk. They should have put them at the bottom on the left similar to how the controls are on the bottom right. In any case, while you can’t chain other non-display devices off of it, you can at least add more DisplayPort devices chained. Final gripe; the USB ports turn off when the monitor goes to sleep; so you can’t leave something on it to charge while not using the computer.
The Fix!
OS X 10.15 (aka Catalina): Well you’d think that Apple could fix this bullshit after seven years, but nope. However, my Mavericks fix did persist through each future iteration up to and including Catalina. What caused me to learn this problem still exists is my DisplayPort connector on the Dell U3014 monitor died and I had to switch to HDMI. That switch reverted my monitor back to the incorrectly detected YCbCr mode and I had to start this process again. That’s when I realized some directory paths have changed, so the blow process will now clarify where a Catalina-specific deviation is needed.
OS X 10.9 (aka Mavericks) update, November 21st 2013: After upgrading my MBPr 15 from 10.8.4 to 10.9, my computer would not boot past the Apple screen when the external monitor was attached. If I connected the monitor while the computer was running, it would just turn itself off as if it had no signal. I ended up having to swap my Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter and my monitor’s mini-DisplayPort cables between the two Thunderbolt ports and then my monitor worked again, albeit with the RGB issue having returned. So I had to run through this procedure all over again after upgrading to 10.9 and now I’m back to working again. No explanation for why the port swap was necessary. The 10.9 upgrade appears to have removed the fix files from the Overrides folder as well, which I’m sure is related, but doesn’t explain the port issue. Now back to the original story…
Here’s where the problems began. At first, I did not realize that the Thunderbolt ports on a Mac Book are also Mini-DisplayPorts. So, not knowing that, I purchased a $100 device to go Thunderbolt to DVI-D along with a DVI cable (which apparently was included in the box). This kind of worked great but made a mess of my desk. Kind of because while the picture was perfect at 2560 x 1600, two problems resulted:
- If I came in with the Mac sleeping, hooked in and woke it up (by opening the lid), the external display would never be detected. I tried numerous combinations of plugging the usb (to power the device) in first, thunderbolt in first, before resuming, after, etc. Nothing worked, always had to reboot.
- If the screen was put to sleep, when awaking, all my windows would jumble over to the laptop display (since I use both). That was incredibly annoying.
So as I’m getting ready to box everything back up and buy the stupid Apple monitor, I notice my monitor came with a mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable. I plugged it in for the hell of it and hey it works. Apparently mini-DP and Thunderbolt are the same connector and Apple has wired the Thunderbolt jacks to work with both. So that eliminates the need for the $100 converter box and the extra thick DVI-D cable running across my desk.
But wait, something is wrong with the picture; it’s fuzzy or blurry and looks like shit. Fortunately some searching lead me to this thread on a forum about the same issue:
http://embdev.net/topic/284710#3027030
Apparently the Mac Book detects this type of monitor, when using DisplayPort, as if it were a TV and uses the wrong color mode, YCbCr instead of RGB. Of course as is typical in the Apple world, Apple folks blame the non-Apple hardware, but in reality you can fix it in your Mac but in no easy way. I’m going to reproduce the script and steps posted in the forum above just in case that site ever goes away. Also, supposedly Apple is working on a fix for this issue but it’s not present yet in OS 10.8.4 which I installed a few days ago (Summer 2013).
You’re going to need the following Ruby script (it still works even in Catalina / 10.15.x):
#!/usr/bin/ruby
# Create display override file to force Mac OS X to use RGB mode for Display
# see http://embdev.net/topic/284710
#
# Update 2013-06-24: added -w0 option to prevent truncated lines
require 'base64'
data=`ioreg -l -w0 -d0 -r -c AppleDisplay`
edid_hex=data.match(/IODisplayEDID.*?<([a-z0-9]+)>/i)[1]
vendorid=data.match(/DisplayVendorID.*?([0-9]+)/i)[1].to_i
productid=data.match(/DisplayProductID.*?([0-9]+)/i)[1].to_i
puts "found display: vendorid #{vendorid}, productid #{productid}, EDID:\n#{edid_hex}"
bytes=edid_hex.scan(/../).map{|x|Integer("0x#{x}")}.flatten
puts "Setting color support to RGB 4:4:4 only"
bytes[24] &= ~(0b11000)
puts "Number of extension blocks: #{bytes[126]}"
puts "removing extension block"
bytes = bytes[0..127]
bytes[126] = 0
bytes[127] = (0x100-(bytes[0..126].reduce(:+) % 256)) % 256
puts
puts "Recalculated checksum: 0x%x" % bytes[127]
puts "new EDID:\n#{bytes.map{|b|"%02X"%b}.join}"
Dir.mkdir("DisplayVendorID-%x" % vendorid) rescue nil
f = File.open("DisplayVendorID-%x/DisplayProductID-%x" % [vendorid, productid], 'w')
f.write '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">'
f.write "
<dict>
<key>DisplayProductName</key>
<string>Display with forced RGB mode (EDID override)</string>
<key>IODisplayEDID</key>
<data>#{Base64.encode64(bytes.pack('C*'))}</data>
<key>DisplayVendorID</key>
<integer>#{vendorid}</integer>
<key>DisplayProductID</key>
<integer>#{productid}</integer>
</dict>
</plist>"
f.close
Now for the steps:
- Save the above file to your Downloads folder using the text editor, call it whatever you want, we’ll just call it bugfix.rb for the purposes of these instructions.
- You’re going to need an external keyboard and mouse if you’re doing this from a Mac Book laptop and not a Macintosh desktop/tower.
- Disconnect all monitors other than the new Dell monitor. If you’re on a MacBook, attach a keyboard and mouse (or Bluetooth) along with the new monitor and shut the lid. It won’t go to sleep as long as the external monitor was working before closing the lid.
- Open a command prompt.
- Sudo to root; i.e. type:
sudo su - root
and enter your password.
- Now that you’re logged in as root, type the following (replacing username with your login name; for example, if you log in as JohnSmith, that’s what you need to use):
cd /Users/username/Downloads/ ruby bugfix.rb
- In that same directory, you should now see a folder named something along the lines of DisplayVendorID-10ac but the last part may change from one monitor to the next. If you are running a version of MacOS older than 10.15 (Catalina), then you should be able to successfully execute (by typing) the following, replacing the code with whatever matches what you see in the folder:
mv DisplayVendorID-10ac /System/Library/Displays/Overrides/
If you are running 10.15.x or later of MacOS, well you’re in for a (non)pleasant experience. 10.15 introduced the concept of a separate disk volume for operating system files, which is a good thing for security, but makes this process of fixing your monitor much more difficult. You’ll need to now:
- Reboot
- Enter recovery mode; i.e. Command-R while the Apple logo shows
- Enter your firmware password if set (which you should set if you have not yet done so; it allows you to enable secure boot to prevent someone from booting your system from an external drive)
- Enter your admin user password
- Start up Disk Utility and mount your Mac’s hard drive. The one you care about is the hard drive name that does not have ‘- Data’ on the end of it. If your computer was a factory fresh install, it is probably going to show up as “Macintosh HD” along with “Macintosh HD – Data”, and you care about mounting the former not the latter, although both will probably end up mounting. If you’ve done a reinstall the drives may be named something like “SSD Model#”
- Close Disk Utility
- Go to Utilities menu and start Terminal
- In Terminal, navigate to /Volumes, then your hard drive name without “- Data” on the end, then System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides/. The command to do this will be something like:
cd /Volumes/SSD\ AP0512N/System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides/
as that’s the name of my hard drive. You’ll notice how I used a backslash in front of the space. Yours may look something like
cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides/
- Do an ‘ls’ command and see if the directory output by your ruby script already exists; for example:
:/System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides# ls DisplayVendorID-10ac DisplayVendorID-38a3 DisplayVendorID-5a63 DisplayVendorID-11a9 DisplayVendorID-3cad DisplayVendorID-5b4 DisplayVendorID-15c3 DisplayVendorID-3ed2 DisplayVendorID-610 DisplayVendorID-1e6d DisplayVendorID-410c DisplayVendorID-68c DisplayVendorID-2283 DisplayVendorID-469 DisplayVendorID-756e6b6e DisplayVendorID-22d2 DisplayVendorID-472 DisplayVendorID-9e6d DisplayVendorID-22f0 DisplayVendorID-4c2d DisplayVendorID-daf DisplayVendorID-26cd DisplayVendorID-4d10 Icons.plist DisplayVendorID-2ac3 DisplayVendorID-4dd9 Models DisplayVendorID-34a9 DisplayVendorID-593a
- If such a directory does not exist, then execute the following, adjusting for the path username, directory name (from the ruby script output) and hard drive name as needed:
mv /Volumes/SSD\ AP0512N/Users/USERNAME/Downloads/DisplayVendor-10ac .
If the directory is already there, then execute the following, with five potential adjustments being the hard drive name, the username of your normal user, the DisplayVendor directory name in both source and destination, and the DisplayProductID file name:
mv /Volumes/SSD\ AP0512N/Users/USERNAME/Downloads/DisplayVendor-10ac/DisplayProductID-4083 DisplayVendor-10ac/
- If running 10.15+, reboot. If older, either reboot, or open the lid back up, disconnect the attached monitor and reconnect it. That monitor should now be running in RGB mode without all the fuzzy blurry badness and tons of 2560 x 1600 high res goodness.
- If at some point you hear Apple has fixed this, you can remove /System/Library/Displays/Overrides/DisplayVendorID-10ac or, for 10.15+/System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides/DisplayVendorID-10ac (but that is really, via recovery mode, /Volumes/<hard drive model, not ‘- data’>/System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides/DisplayVendorID-10ac)
THANK YOU !!!! I just bought a U3014 and had no clue how to hang it on my MacBookPro Retina (mid 2012). I tried HDMI, but only 1920×1080. Then I called Dell Tech Support… OMG… bounced thru 3 people, the last one told me, “We only help you if you have a Dell computer.” When I pointed-out the Dell website makes no mention of the U3014 being supported only on Dell computers, they told me to call Apple before returning the display. Would they have known the TB port is also a mini DP? Dunno, but it just came up 2560×1600 glorious pixels. There does seem to be some halos around high contrast edges, so I’ll have to try your patch next. I’m so thankful for your post… thanks for sharing that. — Jim
Glad I could help Jim! Definitely try the fix too; it will cure that remaining issue for you. Kind of annoying but once you have the monitor working at its proper resolution and color mode it’s a whole new world.
Really great tip. I would like to have the same setup.
Just one question, will the brightness on the Apple keyboard works for U3014?
Thanks.
Give me a week and I’ll test that out for you; I’m out of the office this week.
Sorry for delayed reply; the keyboard brightness does not affect the monitor, at least in my case from MBPr to U3014 via mini-DP/thunderbolt.
Should the 4081 file be in the root of the Overrides folder or should it remain within its Vendor folder and the Vendor folder should be in the Overrides? I’ve shut down after trying both and still getting the saturation issue.
Hey Chad, I see what you mean, I honestly don’t know at this point if I missed a step from my documentation or the Mac OS moved the folder. Seems odd that I’d have missed a huge step but certainly possible. In any case, what was the DisplayProductID-4081 for me (4081 may not be the same id for your monitor), and what had been present in /System/Library/Displays/Overrides/ on my computer, seems to be located at /System/Library/Displays/Overrides/DisplayVendorID-10ac/ on my MacBook now. I may have completely missed the step of moving the DisplayVendorID folder since the Ruby code does appear to output it. If that is what occurred, then the ~/Downloads/DisplayVendorID-????/folder is what should be moved to Overrides.
Oh, one other thing I see in my command history: I did a chown -R root:wheel on the /System/Library/Displays/Overrides/DisplayVendorID-10ac/ directory structure to set the ownership to match the other directories in there. The files were readable either way so I don’t think this matters but thought I’d mention it.
So, from your computer, while ONLY the Dell monitor is connected (i.e. lid closed if on a MacBook), run this command:
ioreg -l -x -w0 | grep DisplayVendorID
You should see something like this:
| | | | | | “DisplayVendorID” = 0x610
The 610 is my MacBook’s internal monitor so you should get something else, perhaps 10ac like I have on my computer for Dell. If that’s the case, try moving the DisplayProductID-4081 into the relevant /System/Library/Displays/Overrides/DisplayVendorID-???? folder on your computer and reboot again. Hopefully that will get it working.
I’ll have to re-run this when back at my Dell monitor so I can update the documentation.
I deleted everything, rebooted, then retried. It’s still running in yPbPr input mode.
Does this problem only happen over the DisplayPort cable? What about the Mini DisplayPort? Or HDMI? Or DVI (I’d have to get an adapter for this, but that’s not an issue).
I’ve only done this from a MacBook Pro but on there I’m using the mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable that came in the box with the monitor. On my MBPr, it has two Thunderbolt ports on the left side that actually function as mini-DP ports as well. You definitely don’t want to use HDMI as it can’t drive the monitor past 1080p resolution which is far less than it can do. You can use DVI but if your Mac behaves like my MBPr, it will not come out of sleep correctly. I had to use a Thunderbolt to DVI adapter when I tried that though. If your mac has a native DVI port, I don’t think you’ll even need this fix because my monitor worked fine when I was doing DVI.
I tried a DVI-D adapter and I can only get 1920×1080 on the monitor, even while holding Option in the Display window.
Ah, yeah for DVI-D, I think you’ll need the SwitchResX app because Apple doesn’t want you going above what they feel is good enough. Here’s a link:
http://www.madrau.com/indexSRX4.html
You can go all the way to 2560×1600 with that. You don’t need it when doing DisplayPort/Thunderbolt but do with DVI. I have that on my MBPr because I like to run the built-in screen at native resolution.
It works!
There’s a bug in your script on this page. You have:
Dir.mkdir("DisplayVendorID-%x" % vendorid) rescue nil
f = File.open("DisplayVendorID-%x/DisplayProductID-%x" % [vendorid, productid], 'w')
f.write '
'
And they have on the linked site:
Dir.mkdir("DisplayVendorID-%x" % vendorid) rescue nil
f = File.open("DisplayVendorID-%x/DisplayProductID-%x" % [vendorid, productid], 'w')
f.write '
'
Copy/paste bug? Using this script (http://embdev.net/attachment/highlight/168316) and following your instructions fixed everything.
Weird. It didn’t paste properly. You’ve got some HTML comments in your script in your post that isn’t in the linked script.
Yikes I see what you mean; the xml tags got stripped out of the original when I pasted it in to wordpress; similar to your comment having them stripped as well. I just re-pasted the code in source edit mode so it shows up correctly now. Thanks for finding that.
I’ll just add that an external keyboard is unnecessary at least if you’re using a power book or probably anything with a backlit display as the class type of the built-in screen is AppleBacklightDisplay instead of AppleDisplay which is what the script chooses.
To get an idea of that, run
ioreg -l -i -r -n display0
Hi – Thanks for this information !!
I have a iMac (21,5″ mid 2011 – OS 10.7.5)
I am very interested in a DellU3014 as a second monitor for CAD work, but I was skeptic about the combination, so I did some research, and found this thread.
In the fix, You mention to close the lid on a MacBook, to close down the screen.
Can I do this fix on an iMac? How to close the screen on an iMac?
Also in 4. you mention “open a command prompt” – where?
I suspect it has something to do with Terminal
http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/introduction-to-the-mac-os-x-command-line
BUT – since i have NOOO experience in programming…
I must admit I am slightly petrified with the thought of fucking up my iMac,
inexperienced, and tinkering with… something :-)
And what do I do, if something goes wrong? Is it possible to unknowingly make changes to something vital in OSX in the proces?
… argh, the irrational fear of the uneducated !!
I see this patch is really needed, though – DELL makes some cool monitors.
Perhaps the instructions could be for dummies too ?
– absolutely, demeaningly, condescendingly explicit – in detail :-))
Thanks – or ill just buy the smaller thunderbolt display, and let Apple have its way :-)
All the best
Hans Henrik
Hi Hans, in my particular case, the reason for connecting the monitor and then closing the lid was specific to my use of a laptop. The script looks for the active monitor so with both screens active, I didn’t want it to pick up the wrong one, although someone else commented on this post that stated it would not pic up the wrong one since the vendor is not Apple in the case of the Dell monitor.
So, with that being said, on your imac, I think you’ll be fine just following the steps and not worrying about only having the Dell active. Correct on the use of Terminal.
As long as you follow the steps precisely, there is no danger; the worst case is it would not allow the computer to display properly on the second monitor, but your first would remain as-is.
Thankyou ! Now.. you mention some fixes in the steps,
that is added after upgrading to OSX Maverick – are those marked with red?
And what would my steps be , with OSX Lion ? (10.7.5)
Nope, there was no difference in the steps after going to Mavericks, I just had to run everything all over again because the custom setup got lost for whatever reason.
For your 10.7.5 machine, all the steps should still be the same. The red text in steps 6 are where you have to replace the word “username” with the actual login name you use to log into your computer. If you’re set up to not require a login, I’m not actually sure what the username would be, however, you can still determine what it is by adding the following as a new step 4.5 in between steps 4 and 5; just type the command “id” once you’ve opened the command prompt. It should spit out something like this:
uid=1000(hans)
if your username was hans for example. Then in step 6 you’d type:
cd /Users/hans/Downloads/
ruby bugfix.rb
The red text in steps 7 and 9 are going to be specific to your computer and monitor. So after you complete step 6, open Finder and navigate to your Downloads directory and look for a folder that starts with the name DisplayVendor; that is the one you need to move in the command shown in step 7.
I’m trying to connect Dell U3014 monitor to an older Mac Pro (2009) running Mac OS X 10.6. And no matter what I do the colors on that display are insanely aggresive. For example the red is so red that it’s almost magenta.
At first I’ve noticed that display preferences in the OS says that my monitor runs under 60hz NTSC. So I’ve browsed the web an found your solution to force to RGB mode. It worked in a sense that now display preferences shows the monitor correctly. However those awful colors remained the same. In Color tab I cannot even get Calibrate button to work. As soon I click it Mac OS says that “there is not factory default profile installed” or something along those lines.
I have also noticed that if I quickly switch back and forth between “Force EDID” and other color profiles I get the correct colors. However as soon as I close System Preferences window the colors become incorrect again. And it’s not only that “Force EDID” profile. Strangely enough I can only get 2 or 3 color profiles to stick. All others jumps back to the default as soon as I close the preferences.
Any ideas how to fix this?
Hi Vilius, unfortunately I have no experience with the U3014 prior to 10.8 and never ran into that problem so I’m afraid I don’t have any ideas.
Wel I did all the above and the DP still looks like crap. They only way to get it crisp is with that $100 apple dvi-d to TB adaptor. WTH?
The other thing is that I think that the monitor was working with DP 1.2 before I ran the Ruby script. Now all I get is a blank screen. I had to return the monitor to DP 1.0 (or 1.1) whatever the default is on the (U3014) to get a display. Anyway Im going to delete the overide 10ac folder and go back to dvi-d and eat the 100 bucks and have that crappy adaptor on my desk. Any ideas before I throw in the towel?
What kind of Mac are you connecting to? Do you have an HDMI port you can try just to make sure that works normally (even though the resolution will be less than ideal)? Also, make sure you’re trying to run the monitor at 2560 x 1600 when connected via DP.
Thank you very much. Saved me from sending back my Dell 3014
:)
Your post just saved yet another soul. Moment ago I’ve tried your script with late 2013 Mac Pro and two U3014 – it worked perfectly. Thank you!
For those trying with similar setup – I run the script with both monitors connected at t he same time and after restart both were running in RGB mode.
Awesome; glad it worked out!
Thanks! Totally fixed my problem.
You should apply for a job at Apple.
Awesome article.
I am trying to connect macbook pro 2011 with dell u3014. hdmi works ok but limited to 1080p. i want to ask whether to go for mdp to dp cable or apple tb to dvi dual link if i need full resolutions. thanks
Either one will give you access to the full screen resolution, but going with a DVI adapter, in my experience, cost more, and gave me problems when resuming from sleep. The mini-DP to DP cable will not have any issues, is super cheap, and I’ve been using that for several years now.
Hi There! I’m not a ruby expert, but when I cut and paste your script into Atom and save as a .rb and try to run, I’m getting these errors. Do I need to convert to something?
/Users/username/Downloads/bugfix.rb:18: syntax error, unexpected ‘;’, expecting ‘)’
…scan(/../).map{|x|Integer("0x#{x}")}.flatt…
/Users/username/Downloads/bugfix.rb:18: numeric literal without digits
…./).map{|x|Integer("0x#{x}")}.flatten
/Users/username/Downloads/bugfix.rb:18: syntax error, unexpected end-of-input, expecting ‘}’
…./).map{|x|Integer("0x#{x}")}.flatten
I’m sorry about that; this stupid wordpress plugin I use to display code allowed it to switch back to html escape sequences. I just updated it again.
The original version is at http://embdev.net/attachment/168316/patch-edid.rb
My HP ZR2440w started switching to 1920×1080 resolution after upgrade to mavericks. Correct resolution is 1920×1200. Applied some fix I found on internet.
After upgrade to El Capitan the fix broke and I had same problem again. I managed to fix it with the patch-edid.rb -ruby script with few changes:
1. In El Capitan
/System/Library/Displays/Overrides
is now located at
/System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides
2. SIP, system integration protection has to disabled to be able to copy the override files to correct location.
http://www.macworld.com/article/2986118/security/how-to-modify-system-integrity-protection-in-el-capitan.html
PS. Thanks Apple for making this so easy!
In the install sequence, is step 7 Blank for a reason?
lol I see what you mean; it appears blank in the wordpress admin too, so I guess intentionally blank at this point. I’m going to leave it blank though because with the code snippets in the article, I’m worried if I edit it and save at this point, it may screw up some of the other parts of the article by changing characters to html codes, etc.
Thanks for the Macbook to Dell U3014 display quality fix, I have used it on several occasions and your blog post spells it out clearly. In Mojave, using the same updates as Tapio points out for El Capitan: (1) the destination directory is updated, and also (2) had to temporarily override SIP.
Oh.my.god! The difference it made :-O.
The instructions are slightly outdated for > Mojave. Overrides have moved to /System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/
Even as root you will still not be allowed to move the folder there. You have to disable SIP (by rebooting in recovery mode and running csrutil disable) or you won’t be able to move the folder into /System. Be careful, turn off networking. And don’t forget to turn it back on.
Thanks for the Mojave update!
As of 2020-03-02, the Catalina fix (thanks a ton for adding the updated steps for the Catalina!) can be made even clearer by updating the commands from Step 10 (just continuing to include the Downloads directory as the script output location from higher up in the same procedure, for consistency):
Current/confusing text in Step 10:
If directory does not exist:
mv /Volumes/SSD\ AP0512N/Users/username/DisplayVendor-10ac .
If directory exists:
mv /Volumes/SSD\ AP0512N/Users/USERNAME/DisplayVendor-10ac/DisplayProductID-4083 DisplayVendor-10ac/
More consistent/fixed text for Step 10 (my recommendation to continue the orignal tutorial):
If directory does not exist:
mv /Volumes/SSD\ AP0512N/Users/username/Downloads/DisplayVendor-10ac .
If directory exists:
mv /Volumes/SSD\ AP0512N/Users/USERNAME/Downloads/DisplayVendor-10ac/DisplayProductID-4083 DisplayVendor-10ac/
With this guide, I have fixed MacOS/macOS bug for Dell U3014 RGB/etc. several times over the years, and it is very useful and comforting to have the steps. So thank you a ton!
Good point, fixed with your updates!
Help! I have this monitor and a 2019 MacBook Pro running Catalina. As you mentioned, the DisplayPort cable doesn’t work and you were forced to switch to HDMI. Did you ever get it to work again using a DisplayPort cable? Any understanding of why it doesn’t work?
Nope, unfortunately not. I think Catalina is a complete garbage release but I’m stuck with it due to MBPr 16 use.
I am getting the following error on step 6:
bugfix.rb:1: syntax error, unexpected backslash, expecting ‘}’
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoart…
Could you please give some light what I am doing wrong.
I’m thinking your browser has added text to the ruby script somehow. What you quoted “rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoart” is normally part of an RTF-format text file, and is not displayed in the source code for the script on my page. Any chance you saved it in a manner that would not have come out matching? Or perhaps emailed it to yourself from one computer to another where the email client converted the source into RTF?
Hi, what should I replace ‘AP0512N‘ with? Sorry for the noob question.
If you haven’t done a fresh install of MacOS which included wiping out the disk partitions, you won’t have that. From the factory Apple will have the disks named “Macintosh HD” and “Macintosh HD – Data”. If you have done a disk erase, it the disk will be named after your disk’s serial number, so it will be different for each computer. You can, in terminal, do:
cd /Volumes/
ls
To have it show you what’s in there so you know what to use in the command.
Thanks for writing this guide. After implementing it many months ago on Catalina it made the U3014 look so much better when plugged into my MacBook Pro.
I had completely forgotten I did all this work when I updated to Big Sur today, and now it’s back to the way it was before. I haven’t gone through the steps again, and wanted to ask before I do: is there any reason why the steps would not work for Macs running Big Sur? Is there maybe a less-involved workaround that shipped with Big Sur?
Thanks again.
Unfortunately no idea; I tried Big Sur on a test system and it was such a disaster with software not working that I gave up and reverted.
Still a problem in 2021.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/big-sur-force-rgb-mode-for-displays.2268099/
Still works in 2021, but you need to go through the extra steps at the bottom of this article in order to create a snapshot of the disk under the new Big Sur APFS: https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/macos-up-to-11/