Ask HN: Is your mac's time synchronised?

1 pointandruby2 comments

You can check it on https://time.is/

On 2 different mac's I've seen time differences of over a minute. Coworkers have the same issue.

Unlocking the Date & Time setting page trigger macOS to synchronise its time, but it doesn't do this otherwise.

I find it strange that modern hardware has such a large clock skew. It's also worrying that the macOS ntp system doesn't seem to work.

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Does it happen following a cold boot, or wake from sleep, or has it been awake for some time? My Mac's been off for a week and just booted it, macOS 10.12.6, and the time is exact. That's next to impossible with a hardware clock, it had to have found an NTP server during or shortly after boot.

I only notice when ssh'ing into servers or when posting something on github which then humanizes the timestamp as "posted 50 seconds from now" :)

So it's a combination of sleep and cold boot. I guess somehow the ntp just never syncs except when explicitly unlocking the settings page.

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