White Screen of Blindness (WSOB) bug on macOS 15.4 update

Latte Other Software & Development
1

I posted about this on the MacPowerUsers forum. I thought I would share here for my fellow macOS users.

Upon update to macOS Sequoia 15.4, many users are greeted by a blindingly solid white wallpaper on the desktop. If you go into Settings to change it back, only the default colors (or images) will work, but custom colors will fail and reset the wallpaper to white.

When I went searching on the internet for an answer, I found that it affected many users, including Dr. Drang and others (e.g., 1, 2, 3). The pictures from this post summarize the problem quite well:


(Screenshots by Dr. Drang)

We’ve dubbed this the “White Screen of Blindness” (WSOB), named of course after Microsoft’s woeful Blue Screen of Death.

The quick workaround for many of us has been to create a very small (1x1 or 2x2 pixel) image of the solid color that we want and then use that image to fill or tile across the screen.

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2

No such problem here on M2 Pro Mini or M1 MBA. Mini partial screenshot:

SCR-20250409-lkfi
SCR-20250409-lkfi1920Ă—1375 521 KB

Are you—and anyone else who has had this problem—using Intel hardware by any chance? Or is that you are using a single colour desktop rather than an image?

:slight_smile:
Mark

3

Wallpaper images work fine, as do the default solid colors available in settings.

But try setting a custom solid color and see what happens.

4

Yup, that was definitely the case for me. A colour I had set back during the beta, and haven’t touched since, is now being ignored.

Funny thing is the old 1px PNG trick is what I used way back in the day, before you could pick a solid colour. Maybe I still have some of those in a dusty folder somewhere…

5

Same here. Custom color → boom, white. :sunglasses:

6

The bug appears to have been fixed in 15.4.1. Thank goodness Apple got to it quickly.

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