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Dark Mode is Apple’s latest snake oil

by on03 June 2019


Fake science

Dark Mode is the "best feature" of macOS 10.14 Mojave, and the fruity cargo cult Apple claims that it can create a distraction-free working environment that’s easy on the eyes. However it turns out that if it is true then Apple fanboys do not have human brains.

Third-party developers have bought into Dark Mode and adapted their apps to support Dark Mode. The only problem is that the central concept is fake science.

According to TidbitsApple’s marketing claims about Dark Mode’s benefits fly in the face of the science of human visual perception.

Dark Mode is not easy on the eyes, in any way. The human eyes and brain prefer dark-on-light, and reversing that forces them to work harder to read text, parse controls, and comprehend what you’re seeing. Dark Mode likely makes those who turn it on slower and less productive.

Vision research has shown that humans prefer dark-on-light. That’s because, in the real world, the background of any scene around you is usually bright.

Humans evolved outside, and we are active during the daytime and asleep when it’s dark and our brains have evolved to care about are the objects in front of the background. Those objects are by definition darker than the background because they’re illuminated by the sun, or indoors, by whatever lights may be on. Light-colored objects stand out from a bright background because they’re illuminated from some direction other than precisely behind you. That makes for indirect illumination, putting much of the object in shadow and thus darker than the background.

Three month old babies shown images with both light-on-dark and dark-on-light components look toward the latter first. If the thin lines of the text are black and the background is white, however, white from both sides washes over the entire line, lightening it evenly, so the edges aren’t blurred. Blur is a bad thing because of how the human eye relies primarily on contrast when extracting detail from an image.

So why on earth did Apple get so enthusiastic about Dark Mode?  Word on the street is that it plans to put it in iOS 13. Surely Apple could not have ignored the science in favour of differentiating its product from others?

What it appears to have done is come up with some fake science to support Dark Mode even when it must have known the tech is a  productivity hit for most people most of the time.

Last modified on 03 June 2019
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