Maybe you can watch the infrared sensor through a camera to see if it's on? I looked at my TV remote with my smartphone's camera, and saw a light whenever I pressed a remote button. It looked like a small LED.
Macbook Pro 2015 is perfect but Macbook Pro 2016 and after cause problems
How's this for a good one... my PERFECT Macbook Pro 2013, that I have used without ANY problems for YEARS, along with 2 x Dell 23" CCFL LCD monitors, has "gone bad" on me.
Most bizarrely, I packed up the macbook, monitors, cables (ie everything) and brought it all home so I could 'work from home' under our local Covid19 lockdown. I plug it all back together and all of a sudden I'm experiencing insidious low level headaches and eye strain. Now this is a setup that has proved utterly faultless for me over the years. I've tried no lcd lights on, different angles, distances and various permutations such as resetting the PRAM. The OS does not appear to have had any recent updates either.
I've now completely reinstalled the laptop to an older OS - High Sierra - and, well, the problems are still evident. So I'm at a loss...
Fortunately my good PC is still workable so I am able to be productive. The thing is I experienced a similar situation with my PC (but not laptop) a while back. Things came right - around about the time I got my prescription updated - so maybe my prescription has changed??! But I don't totally buy that. Then it was PC bad, laptop good. Now it's laptop bad, PC good.
Either way, I cannot get my eyes checked due to the COVID lockdown and probably won't be able to for quite some time. All told, I'm completely bamboozled by all of this.
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Seagull is your lighting situation at home different?
@AgentX20 I would ask you the same question. I could not believe how much difference the lighting makes until I took my device home from work. At home I am okay except for the long-term damage from office work. In the office I cannot concentrate, I get eyestrain and neck pain within minutes, and I need to keep taking breaks and look elsewhere. It feels like gasping for air. I suspect it is a combined effect of fluorescent and LED light coming straight from the lamps into my eyes and offensive light reflected by the glossy screen. The visual experience looking at the screen is very different in the office and at home. It is like two different displays.
AgentX20 So I'm at a loss...
I experienced the same. Months into my new job under the overhead lighting I described above, my phone started looking bad. Earlier I could use it as long as I wanted. I blamed an auto update but now I am not sure anymore. I think my eyes accumulated so much stress from trying to cope with the new lighting, that at a certain point I developed some undiagnosed condition. I say undiagnosed because I visited multiple ophthalmologists, an orthoptist and a neurologist. I had even a brain NMR taken. No one found a worsening of my eyesight. They could only witness eye twitching, which has become an inseparable companion under those lights. This to say, it does not mean that your prescription needs an update. It could be else which goes unnoticed by doctors. I do not know how to call my symptoms, I just know I am "allergic" to certain lighting conditions which are fine for most people.
AGI Not really with the iphone X. I had a big improvement with my notebook (Dell latitude E5550 W10 1809). Now I can use it all day with zero issue, before the correction I had low eye strain with it (usable but not totally fine)! Unfortunately I couldn't try the MBP 16" with the correction because I sent it back before I get the eyeglass! I am planning to try again the MBP 16" 2020 at the end of the year, it's should have the mini led display also.
Seagull Yes, I have the same experience. I bought exactly the same setup I had at work, to use at home, only to then realize how the lighting is completely different in those two environments. Unfortunately, I have a lot more of natural light at work (in part because I'm at work during the day), so at night at home it's always a lot worse..
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JTL You are right, sorry.
Quoting:
In current use...the term NMR is preferable when one is describing the physical phenomenon itself or when referring to the measurements of the nuclear induction signal in physics or chemistry laboratories. The word "nuclear" is dropped when referring to imaging or spectroscopic techniques for humans or animals. Most scientific journals prefer to use the phrase MR imaging (rather than MRI) when referring to the clinical technique.
The goal of the analysis was to see if nerve pinching was the cause of eye twitching. No anomalies were detected.
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Lauda89 Interesting, cause my left eye has been 0.5 astigmatic forever and I never tried glasses. I will consider trying.
Yet I do not get why I had strong eyestrain between 2013 and 2016 and no issues between 2016 and 2018 and since 2018 it has been a nightmare again. All I did was changing jobs, devices and overhead lighting. Same eyes and no glasses.
tfouto 0.5 astigmatism, if I got it right (see his previous posts).
tfouto 0,5 astigmatism. But my right eye is worst than the left one because it has irregular astigmatism. I've also a bit of esophoria but I am not doing visual therapy or wearing prisms at this moment.
AGI I think that you should try. i see a big difference in reading and stay in front of a monitor. I don't use it for the rest of the day.
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Lauda89 But my right eye is worst than the left one because it has irregular astigmatism.
What is irregular astigmatism? Do you mean your eyes are asymmetric?
I was told that a small astigmatism is not unexpected for my left eye, which is a bit smaller and more stretched than the right eye. I feel quite relaxed reading on paper though, that is why I never opted for glasses.
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AgentX20 I've now completely reinstalled the laptop to an older OS - High Sierra - and, well, the problems are still evident. So I'm at a loss...
Want to try 10.11 for kicks? I suspect post 10.11 there are some GPU driver changes that affect even Nvidia GPUs. Trust me on this.
I might have a copy of the install image somewhere
JTL Want to try 10.11 for kicks? I suspect post 10.11 there are some GPU driver changes that affect even Nvidia GPUs. Trust me on this.
I might have a copy of the install image somewhere
I'm not sure there's any point. Numerous previous MacOS have run perfectly previously the only 'bad' version was the newest release. Now it's the last three, and I simply cannot explain that!
AgentX20 Numerous previous MacOS have run perfectly previously the only 'bad' version was the newest release. Now it's the last three, and I simply cannot explain that!
As for this, my closest working theory is either a system BIOS or VBIOS (GPU firmware) update may have been installed by an OS upgrade that borked something 
I wonder if there is a way to install 10.11 on a 2017 iMac (not officially supported), maybe run it from a USB drive? I already have 10.11 in a virtual machine, but without graphic acceleration it is unusable. So I cannot say how good it is for the eyes.