How to turn all Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac) screen red – & get some sleep

We night owls aren’t ready to ditch our screens before bed. Fair — sometimes the best work happens in the quiet dead of night. But this phone in your hand ships with a default that’s not on your side: a bright, blue-white glow tuned to keep you alert (and, conveniently, scrolling) at exactly the hours you wanna start to wind down.

Here’s the good news. That default is a setting, not a sentence. In about ninety seconds you can teach any Apple device a second mode — RED MODE — and flip to it with a triple-click when the sun goes down 🌙

It’s a tiny act of ownership: making the machine serve your body clock instead of someone else’s engagement graph. Which, if you’ve been around here a while, is kinda our whole point.

Why red?

Screens throw out a lotta blue light. Your brain reads blue light as daytime — it suppresses melatonin, the hormone that tells you it’s bedtime, and nudges your circadian rhythm to stay switched on. Great at 9am. Sux at midnight.

Red light sits at the opposite end. It’s the least disruptive part of the visible spectrum for melatonin, which is why darkrooms, submarine bridges and astronomers’ torches have all been red for decades 🤓 Drop your screen into a deep red tint after dark and you get the two things you want: way less blue light in your eyes, and a display so nice-and-gentle-dim it stops hyper-stoking your nervous system and nixing sleep.

iPhone & iPad: the 90-sec setup

1. Open Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size.
2. Tap Colour Filters and toggle it on.
3. Choose Colour Tint from the list.
4. Drag the Intensity slider all the way right, then drag the Hue slider all the way right until the whole screen glows deep red.

That’s it — your device now has a red mode. But you don’t wanna dig through Settings every night, so next we give it an easy ON switch.

The bit that makes it stick: a triple-click toggle

1. Go to Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut (right at the bottom).
2. Select Colour Filters.

Now triple-click the side button (or the Home button on older devices) and the screen flips red. Triple-click again and it’s back to normal. I toggle this on every evening and angle the phone light away from my eyes when setting up some audio to send me to 😴

Two more ways to wire it up, if you want options:

• Back Tap (Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap) — assign Color Filters to a double or triple tap on the back of the phone. Kinda witchy 🪄
• Action button (iPhone 15 Pro and later) — assign Color Filters and toggle red mode with a long press.

Mac: same idea, System Settings

1. Open System Settings → Accessibility → Display.
2. Turn on Colour Filters.
3. Set the filter type to Colour Tint, then push the intensity and hue toward red.

The bit that makes it stick: triple-click toggle

1. Go to the Shortcuts Menu: Stay in the Accessibility settings menu. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the right-hand pane and click on Shortcut.

2. Select Colour Filters: You’ll see a list of features that can be triggered by a triple-click. Check the box next to Colour Filters. You can uncheck other options if you want the red tint to toggle immediately without a menu popup.

Depending on your Mac hardware, you can now toggle the red tint instantly using one of these physical inputs:

• MacBooks with Touch ID / Power Button: Triple-click the Touch ID / Power button quickly.
• Desktop Macs (iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio): Triple-press Option + Command + F5 on your keyboard.
• Macs with Magic Keyboard with Touch ID: Triple-click the Touch ID key on the keyboard.

The radical idea of owning your tech

A red screen’s a wee thing – but this is the same move we make with everything around here: notice a default that was chosen for you; decide it doesn’t serve you; change it.

Devices are full of these — settings tuned for manufacturer’s metrics, not yours. Most people never change the settings because they don’t realise they’re allowed to. You totally are. And once you start pulling the levers on the tech you already own, it’s kind of addictive, and you move on to bigger stuff: like running your own AI on your own machine, built into your life instead of rented back to you. Because autonomy feels good.

Own the settings. Own the machine. Get good sleep 🤍

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Liked teaching yr tech a new trick?

That’s the whole thran project in miniature — spotting a default someone picked for you, and taking it back ✊

We’re a wee Derry outfit building desktop computers that run capable AI privately — on your own machine, nothing shipped off to anyone’s cloud — and we publish free, plain-English guides so you can build your own. If making tech serve you is your idea of good times, come get the good stuff: the build diary, the DIY guides, and first dibs (plus an early-bird waitlist discount) when the machines go on sale.