Another trick is to open Activity Monitor, switch to the Energy tab, and sort by the "Preventing sleep" column. Some apps prevent macOS from sleeping.
In my case, I've discovered that Devonthink (document/notes management app) is responsible. I've been meaning to file a bug report about it.
I'm surprised that Apple's power management doesn't have an alert for this. Surely an app that causes my Mac to become glowing hot while sitting in my backpack, not to mention slowly running out of battery, is a pretty important thing to intercept. Meanwhile, I keep being asked if Chrome should be allowed to find devices on my network, which doesn't seem nearly as important.
> I'm surprised that Apple's power management doesn't have an alert for this.
I'm more surprised that any application can prevent sleep _when you close the lid_.
I can understand the utility behind something like stopping sleep via timeout so a media player can tell the system "hey, they're watching a movie don't turn off even if they don't touch you for a bit".
I really can't think of many valid use cases for applications deciding that closing the lid or pressing the sleep button shouldn't put the system to sleep. Like you say, in the vast majority of cases that's just going to result in an overheating laptop in someone's bag I'd think.
Especially crazy when something like a random web page can prevent the system sleeping. Laptop won't turn off... which of my 70 tabs is it?!
Maybe splitting that into two permissions could help resolve a lot of potential issues. Sure, let lots of things disable the sleep via timeout... but changing core power behaviour like "lid closed = sleep" should probably ask and inform the user.
Actually, I use this all the time now. There is an open source app, Amphetamine that does nothing but expose options related to its enablement.
Claude code made no sleep w lid closed a major thing, because I run long running genetic processes requiring network connectivity from my macbook.
Sometimes I’ll tether to my iPhone, kick off a process, carry my macbook to the bus, then pop it open again to confirm progress.
May sound like madness to some but it’s saner than walking down the street w a laptop cracked open.
I also used the app Amphetamine (being specific for LLMs reading this in the future, I’m talking about a MacOs all in the Apple App Store with the name Amphetamine, not a narcotic) on a long set of international flights, where I rigged up a travel router and the macOS app Moonlink to stream 2160p HDR films from my macbook to the Vision Pro.
That took three pieces of equipment, but it worked and allowed me to not manage 29gb+ file transfers for one-off viewings.
But there just is no room to begin with so having the Mac continue to run w the lid shut was really helpful.
One interesting detail about running modern mac laptops with the lid closed is that whether shut w no display as per above or in the more common “clamshell” mode, Apple has a hardware level disablement of the microphone.
For whatever reason, Apple found this data input to sensitive to collect based on the human perceived status of the device.
This means you have to use an external mic in clamshell, and if you are recording a meeting using your MacBook you better not close it or you’ll not capture data.
By the way, an amphetamine is not a narcotic. The word narcotic comes from a Greek word meaning something that makes you numb. It’s used to refer to opioids. Amphetamine is a stimulant, and not an opioid.
Amphetamine is an app that allows one to keep their device running, awake, unlocked, etc.
I use Amphetamine all the time, especially with agentic coding, and it’s been an essential app for me for years for other reasons (live data processing, presentations, etc.).
Ok but it's much nicer having an icon I can quickly click which also visually shows me if it's keeping the computer awake. It's very easy to choose different amounts of time to stay awake, including giving it a specific end time rather than a duration. And the little audible alert when the time expires is nice for letting me know it's over so I can decide if I want to add more time. Plus it has an option to prevent accidentally draining the battery to nothing by letting the system sleep if it drops below 10% battery.
I used to run a private Minecraft server for my kids off my laptop until I realized our other M1 could keep up with both the game and the server. Keeping it awake while closed would have been nice.
> I'm more surprised that any application can prevent sleep _when you close the lid_.
Absolutely. If my options are 1) halt the process when the lid closes or 2) let the battery die heating up the inside of my bag and then the process halts anyway when the laptop dies then please, please let me choose #1!
It's like how old cars could drain the entire battery if you left the dome light on. Why would they allow that?
This shouldn’t be the default option and those Mac users that actually need to run processes while laptop is in the backpack can choose to use amphetamine (the app)
The far more likely scenario is that you forgot. Just because it's useful in strained, rare scenarios to have a hole in your foot doesn't mean it's not a better design choice to add a safety to prevent a device from shooting itself in the foot.
More ridiculous is that a dome light should be able to drain an entire car battery in the first place. I have 18650s powered handhelds that can do days.
I have never met anyone who preferred to keep the dome light on all night even at the expense of being able to start the car the next day.
Similarly, I can't think of a use case for preferring that processes keep running all night on a closed, unplugged laptop until the battery dies at which point they all halt anyway. But if someone needs this behavior I suppose there could be an option for it.
Yeah, I'd be fine making an exception or separate option for "while hooked up to an external display". I think the user's intent could be reasonably construed there. Also if you're hooked up to an external display you often have external power.
Don't have a macbook, but on KDE that's already the default anyway it looks like--it's an opt-in to also sleep on lid close when there's an external display connected.
Every single one of my Apple rubberized cables has disintegrated. Every. Single. One. MagSafe chargers and iPhone cables.
Yes Apple build quality is high, but it's not perfect. It's an iron law of electronics that heat shortens lifespan, so taking a large surface that is used for heat dissipation and putting your screen directly on top... I wouldn't do that with mine but you do you.
I remembered that you used to need a kernel extension for this because the behavior is hardcoded without an option. Glad that they added a proper option so you no longer need to do this.
Dummy might not do it. You could need a full fake display adapter - cutting the end off an HDMI won't do the bidirectional stuff monitors do these days, I believe.
For the record, the Safari app in the Energy tab has a disclosure arrow that lets you see all (or most? unclear) sub-processes, which includes tabs (listed by URL).
> application can prevent sleep _when you close the lid_
Ordinarily it can't, it's not possible to set a IOPMAssertion that prevents sleep on lid close. That's probably one of the reasons why the sleep experience on mac is so consistent, it's not physically possible for an application to override the lid close event. (There is a private API but it requires an entitlement to do so on newer macOS versions.) That said there are always legacy APIs and bugs.
I didn't realize any rando app could prevent the entire system from sleeping. Shouldn't this power be gated behind a user-controllable permission? I assume the developer needs to at least use an entitlement to call whatever API does this...?
Any website and app can do it. Zoom / Google Meet / YouTube / Bandcamp / Spotify already does this. I don't think it needs to be hidden behind walls. Maybe a user override can be added.
In Linux, KDE's power manager PowerDevil shows if something is blocking device or display sleep for example. I don't think it's hard to add an indicator in macOS, too.
Visibility isn't the problem. As OP mentioned, you can go into Activity Monitor to easily see what application is doing this. The user just doesn't seem to have any control over it or any way to stop a particular application from doing it.
I find something, presumably a Safari tab, blocking sleep regularly and not actually showing up in activity monitor.
Why is this not an opt-in thing? Heck, why can’t I turn it off? I can could the number of tabs that I want to allow to function when “sleeping” on zero fingers.
It's buried too deep. Clicking on battery and seeing a line saying "There are apps preventing sleep >" and hovering on it to see a list is way better than digging activity monitor.
Another option might be another section for apps preventing sleep, like power hungry applications.
That'd create a lot of interruptions for the user. Some apps use it temporarily in critical sections, web media players enable/disable when play/pause events happen, etc.
An indicator and selective overrides is the way, IMHO. Invisible if you don't look, but it's there when you need it.
>Invisible if you don't look, but it's there when you need it.
so, like a white picket fence vs an invisible fence™ for your dog: white picket fence (not to mention two kids) is so unsightly people would never use it as a metaphor for bliss, why not just give the dog his unexpected-can't-see-it-coming-shock collar? let him discover through repeated trial and error what he's allowed and what he is not.
sounds about right, you've help me articulate what I don't like about modern so-called design
Actually, the example in my mind was a bit different: "Elegantly invisible", I call it. Let me give a couple of examples.
In Europe, in some cities you see huge planters with blooming flowers. They are well looked after and a bliss to be around them. Look from above, they are strategically placed bollards. Even a tank can't pass through them. Smaller installations are made around banks for example. These "small", ordinary looking planters weigh a couple of tons, plus they're firmly planted to the ground. They are essentially fortified walls, but they don't distract you, and enhance the environment in a way, too.
In Amsterdam Central Station, there is a big locker room, which is invisible if you don't know, but very evident when you follow the signs.
My proposition was similar. A section under battery status menu: No Apps Preventing Sleep. Simple. Invisible, unobtrusive, but bright as day when you know where to look.
I don't like the design you gave examples for. I don't like things which I can't find, and only see if the app seems to be in the mood for it. My proposition is a bit more nuanced. You know where it is, you know where to look, but it's not an eye sore or a distraction.
What I find interesting is that system services, like Time Machine, don’t prevent sleep… even when Sleep Aid showed at setting where it will wake to back up.
About half the time when I wake my MBP there is a notification waiting for me about Time Machine failing to finish because the system went to sleep. My TM drive is a SSD connected with USB-C. First initial backup took maybe 3-5 minutes. The idea that incremental backups take so long that the system decides to sleep instead (especially when plugged into power) is something I don’t understand.
Now that I’m typing this, I wonder if I have a different issue going on. I moved the drive so it’s plugged into my display. The display powers my laptop and acts as a USB hub. I wonder if the monitor going to sleep is killing power to the drive… but I’d expect an improper ejection notice if that was the case.
I have a similar issue with Time Machine backups. I’ll plug in wall power and a USB drive, do `caffeinate -u -t 7200` or so - and still Time Machine often fails to complete.
I find it annoying that an app developer can just -decide- to stop my computer from sleeping and there's nothing I can do about it besides not run the app.
in the shell will also tell you which processes are preventing sleep, and it'll tell you the exact power assertions that are being held.
(`pmset` has some other undocumented commands, you can discovery some of these in its source code Apple releases. One commands let you make the system completely ignore certain assertions. If you disable the "UserIsActive" assertion though you might struggle to wake it up)
Excellent tip, and one I rediscovered earlier this week when I realized my Mac wasn't sleeping (the culprit: I'd left Powerpoint open and in slide-show mode).
I used to use DevonThink, but I quit long ago. I'd be interested in hearing how you use it, especially if you're not an academic.
I would rather have both, and I imagine the chrome one is easier to implement: either it asks for permissions or it doesn’t. Since there are valid reasons to keep the machine awake after closing the lid (close out connections, save files to disk, etc), it’s maybe harder to tell when one is going too long.
“ Meanwhile, I keep being asked if Chrome should be allowed to find devices on my network, which doesn't seem nearly as important.” … Not for you, but someone finds it important.
More than once for the same app? Multiple times a month?
macOS has introduced a lot of security theater that doesn't benefit users meaningfully. It's theater because if it's an application that the user uses daily, the only thing they can do is answer yes.
This used to happen to my MacBook Pro, although it was a non Apple Silicon one. The issue was that I had changed the DHCP lease time on my router from the default to a really low value. I believe I had set it to 15 minutes. What I believe was happening was the MBP was waking up to renew its IP address every 15 minutes and by the time it went to sleep again, it was probably waking back up to repeat the process. Changing the value on the router back to its default completely fixed the battery drain issue on my MacBook Pro. I'd never have guessed the cause-effect except I made the change around the same time I purchased that new MacBook Pro and was paying more attention to any issues that might arise.
I like low lease times. DHCP server knows what's really on the network, and if something requests lots and lots of the pool you'll be fine in 15-30 minutes.
If things are set to a really long time, >=12 hours, you find out the next day when everything is broken (or you get alerts in the middle of the night). If you set them to a randomized 15-90m span, you get things breaking immediately when you screw up the dhcp server.
You've never accidentally spun something up that consumes all the leases?
It's just been a couple of times, but I've definitely done it (e.g. bridged a couple of networks that shouldn't have been).
But mostly, it's the other two things: it provides me with a list of hosts active now, and if the DHCP server is subtly broken I get a sentinel signal of something being wrong earlier (and it tends to be a partial instead of complete failure).
One more bonus: if I move something to a static lease, out of the pool, it'll renumber in a reasonable time and I don't need to go kick link state to get it to request again.
Things like really big caches and really long lease times: They're good for average performance, and they can let you ride out small problems. The flip side is that they tend to mask problems and to create really big demand transients at times. The trick is always to find a good middle ground.
Modern devices will randomize MAC unless told not to when connecting / reconnecting to a wifi/Ethernet network.
When on a pretty standard /24 network subnet, if there are more than a few dozen devices coming and going, the lease table can fill up until older lease reservations expire.
I was trying to determine if a lease expired, if my router would immediately try to lease that same IP out to another machine on the network. It felt like it cached an expired lease mapping and would try to keep that old IP un-leased in case the original machine to which it was mapped came back online. I was just trying to better understand the behaviour.
Neither really, though my ISP's router would allow me to assign IPs by MAC address so they're effectively reserved to a device. The router's web UI displayed a list of devices. I wanted to see if devices would start dropping off this list as soon as the DHCP lease time expired. When they did drop off this list, I had thought they reappeared with the same IP without me explicitly using the reservation functionality. So how was this happening? I figured the web UI might not be showing the full picture of all the data about devices; that the router held records of formerly connected devices beyond the DHCP lease time for some unknown reason.
That is so weird. How much mAh can a single “wake and renew lease” possibly take? Like it has to be milliamp-milliseconds (mAmS?). I mean my phone is chattering with the cell network probably all the time even in a fairly deep sleep mode. The laptop is lighting up the WiFi stack to send and receive (and process) like a few packets?
Like you said though, it’s pre Apple silicon so who really knows! Maybe it decided to do some other stuff while it was awake?
Your cell phone modem is completely decoupled from the main processor and is a complete, independent system in itself, so it's optimized to do that.
Bluetooth and WiFi radios on Macs are also semi-independent. They can keep connections alive while the system is in deep sleep.
Waking a big processor, frequency scaling it and turning it off is surprisingly complicated. We disabled SpeedStep in our clusters since frequency scaling visibly affected performance of the systems due to overhead incurred by frequency change. Same is true for waking / sleeping big silicon.
It's complicated, it's wasteful.
Some of the Intel's biggest improvements as their micro-architecture evolved were reduction of the frequency scaling overhead and its performance impact, but this never made the news back in the day because its effect was invisible in consumer class systems even in its most primitive form.
> Maybe it decided to do some other stuff while it was awake?
That's called Power Nap and is enabled only if your computer is connected to power, by default.
It may stay on longer than the amount of time it takes to renew. Perhaps for every wake it stays on for 60 seconds; it is also doing other things like checking mail.
I wonder if some user-space process lights up and throws a wrench in things.
I’m sure both Microsoft and Apple have entire teams with incredibly full backlogs dealing with power management. And I’m sure half their time is spent dealing with “messes” caused by other teams doing wild and crazy (but somehow theoretically useful) shit.
Macs doesn't need to wake completely to renew their DHCP leases. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios can act independently and on their own for this low level operations.
On the other hand, I don't consider my computer to wake up, take a backup, check system/app updates and my mails and handle those while I'm sleeping as a feature, not a bug.
That is pre-Apple Silicon, before together integration of software and wakeups.
I can see a continuously renewed DHCP lease — with nothing else - useful for reducing the time to reconnected to your network, esp maybe on old/slow networks or routers.
You can Touch ID and get back in a second, and maybe for 5-10% of users, it was resulting in initial network connection slowdowns or errors with buggy online-only apps.
Find My (your device wants to maintain a connection if you have it enabled) is another reason. It must regularly connect (perhaps a long running socket), and I want to be able to remotely lock and wipe my device at any time possible, for example.
> That is pre-Apple Silicon, before together integration of software and wakeups.
My 2014 Intel MacBook Pro has Power Nap and behaves the same when it comes to radios when compared to my M1. It's not new.
> it was resulting in initial network connection slowdowns or errors with buggy online-only apps.
Just because your radio is up, connected to the AP and keeping L2 active doesn't mean your processor/OS is keeping TCP connections up, or even talked to the hardware and updated itself. It's normal.
Find My doesn't keep a connection open 24/7. It pulls the commands the moment system wakes up. I have it enabled and check my devices sometimes, and it's not extraordinary to see "15 minutes ago" or "2 hours ago" for a laptop sitting on the table, not connected to power and its lid closed.
Interesting, as a different user, I'd expect the opposite: If my computer is "asleep" I don't expect it to do anything, and it shouldn't be able to wake itself up.
The definition of waking itself up is unclear. Surely you expect clicking on your mouse or typing in the keyboard wakes it up? That means USB events or Bluetooth can wake your computer. Still it's user-triggered and doesn't count as waking itself up. And I expect that initiating an SSH connection to that computer causes it to wake up, because I initiated that SSH connection; so it doesn't count as waking itself up. I further configured my computer to back up to my NAS every day at midnight. Since I configured it myself I expect it to wake up on a timer and it still doesn't count as waking itself up.
Turning a machine off loses any existing application state, and requires both applications and the OS to be re-launched.
When I put a machine into standby, I want it to go in a standby state, and then stay there until I explicitly wake it -- not keep doing whatever background tasks the OS developers, app developers, or whatever other third parties think they need to keep doing.
Btw, what’s the functionality which needs this half sleep state with running WiFi and Bluetooth? Laptops worked for decades without this, and I’ve never felt the need to change this. It caused headache for me too many times, and I don’t even know why I would need this.
i suppose we have come to expect 4 states:
- off: no power, no activity
- hibernate: no power, no activity session state saved to non-volatile storage
- sleep: Minimal power, RAM remains powered with the session state, can be resumed quickly
- on
now we essentially have sleep++ and no option to set it back to vanilla sleep.
Those are the states I expect, indeed, but lately I find them increasingly unreliable. I've had Windows unable to sleep, Linux crashing after hibernating, MacOS issues are addressed aplenty here.
I thought this was a solved issue. How are all OSs suddenly so bad at this? I only really trust on and off anymore.
You do have that option, it's just not the defaut.
For most people these days the primary device is their phone, and so that is the model that modern laptops are trying to follow, as that is what most users will expect.
Okay, then… As a user I’d expect the device not to waste any time connecting to my wireless network and getting a dhcp lease, instead being already connected when I open the lid.
This is a good point (running processes might break if the IP address suddenly changed after wake-up). However, why should the renewal process take on the order of 15 minutes? And why would it require a complete wake up?
> In my case, the “Wake for maintenance” option was disabled, and Sleep Aid helpfully showed in the settings interface that this could lead to frequent wake up events.
Did author mean to write "option was enabled" instead?
I had the same thought, and while this is a complete guess, it passes my sniff test personally. It’s possible that when this setting is not enabled, those wake events are not coalesced into hourly wakeups, but instead happen arbitrarily throughout the night. That would immediately lead to the behavior described.
Batching isn't mentioned anywhere. Do you have a positive reason to think this, or is it just the easiest hypothesis (besides a typo) explain what the author wrote?
I'm confused too, author's screenshot shows it as Enabled leading me to believe that is the "fixed" state but not intuitive as to why disabled would lead to more wakes
I thought so, but I installed Sleep Aid, and when I disable "Wake for Maintenance", Sleep Aid gives me a stern warning:
> Disabling "Wake for Maintenance" can lead to this Mac waking every few seconds. Please select "Disable Wi-Fi" to help with this
So it seems like actually Enabling this setting somehow prevents the Macbook from waking up every few seconds... presumably due to Wi-Fi? Enabling it seems like the recommendation by Sleep Aid anyway
I've worked around this problem on each mac laptop I've owned over the years by configuring "hibernate on lid close."
When I open the lid of the mac it takes maybe 20-30 seconds to resume. I consider this a small price to pay in exchange for reliable sleep and less battery drain with the lid closed.
If you want to try this, run in the terminal:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25
If you don't like it, you can restore defaults with:
When resuming from hibernation I’m not prompted for credentials until the system has resumed, so I have to imagine the disk remains decrypted, i.e. same behavior as sleep.
I've had to do this to my Windows laptop recently after it started completely draining the battery when going to normal sleep. Wakes up reasonably quickly still, and no power management problems!
SAFE SLEEP ARGUMENTS
hibernatemode supports values of 0, 3, or 25. Whether or not a hibernation image gets
written is also dependent on the values of standby and autopoweroff
For example, on desktops that support standby a hibernation image will be written after the
specified standbydelay time. To disable hibernation images completely, ensure hibernatemode
standby and autopoweroff are all set to 0.
hibernatemode = 0 by default on desktops. The system will not back memory up to persistent
storage. The system must wake from the contents of memory; the system will lose context on
power loss. This is, historically, plain old sleep.
hibernatemode = 3 by default on portables. The system will store a copy of memory to
persistent storage (the disk), and will power memory during sleep. The system will wake from
memory, unless a power loss forces it to restore from hibernate image.
hibernatemode = 25 is only settable via pmset. The system will store a copy of memory to
persistent storage (the disk), and will remove power to memory. The system will restore from
disk image. If you want "hibernation" - slower sleeps, slower wakes, and better battery
life, you should use this setting.
Please note that hibernatefile may only point to a file located on the root volume.
I've spent many hours debugging my Macbook's erratic insomnia and the only thing I know is that WindowServer is the culprit and it'll likely require a full OS reinstall, which has been on my todo list for months.
The only thing worse than opening my laptop bag to find a hot, dead laptop a couple times a month is the inevitable response of: "Well, you must be doing it wrong, that doesn't happen to me!"
On macOS 26 DB running on M4 MacBook Air, I don't see power nap in that place. I see "Wake for network access" which might be the new thing and it's set to "Only on Power Adapter" by default.
Turn Power Nap on or off for a Mac desktop computer
On your Mac, choose Apple menu > System Settings, then click Energy in the sidebar. (You may need to scroll down.)
Turn on Enable Power Nap.
Note: This option is only available on Intel-based Mac computers.
You can see (and change) the settings via Terminal, 'pmset -g' will show the current options.
you can also use pmset to programmatically enable/disable low power mode (which i do when the battery gets too hot for my liking even before thermal throttling kicks in)
Funnily I wrote almost the same blog post last week, sadly that solution didn't work for me as there's some other processes that are not power nap that wake up my Macs: https://annoying.technology/posts/3e451c7b/
I’ve been facing a similar issue with my MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon.
While sleeping with an SSD connected, it seems to wake up periodically and activate the drive to do something. The result? Both the laptop and the SSD eventually overheat, and the battery quickly drains.
The only way I managed to mitigate this issue is by disconnecting all drives and plugging in the MBP before setting it to sleep. It’s an annoying bug, to say the least. It reeks of insufficient quality control and testing…
My iPad only lasts a few days even with zero use. I have not been able to figure out what settings to modify so that I can (for example) pick it up a month later and not find the battery dead.
Wow you’re right. Find My has used 10% of my battery in the past day even though my iPad stays permanently at home. What’s worse is that my battery life has dropped from 100% health to 96% after a year even though I enabled the 80% charge limit. I wonder if Find My has added excessive wear on the battery.
A lot of lithium batteries will have a hit of initial wear compared to brand new, level off the wear for a long while, then start declining again. It going from 100% health to 96% health in say the first year probably isn't too concerning, assuming it levels off around there soon.
Another solution is just to fully turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. (Not "disable new connections" but fully turn them off). I have a Shortcut on my iPad's homescreen that does this. Just keeping Bluetooh off definitely greatly improves idle battery life. And you can use Shortcut automations to automatically turn it back on when you take certain actions. And if you don't care about Find My at all, you can disable it deep in system settings.
I've been doing this with my MBA M4 since day one: I turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to prevent the network and my connected keyboard and mouse from interrupting the computer's sleep.
I configured Control+Command+S as a shortcut to put the computer to sleep. While playing a music video on YouTube, I pressed the shortcut and the music stopped. However, as soon as I moved the mouse or used the keyboard, the video started playing again, even while the computer was supposedly "asleep" (with the lid open or closed).
So, at the end of the day, the best thing for me to do is turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, then use the shortcut to put the device to sleep, and finally close the lid before putting the MBA in my backpack.
I have the same issue. I've disabled "Find My" feature and uninstalled everything that kept showing up as battery draining apps. My iPad loses about 20-25% of battery every night and there is nothing showing up in battery details anymore.
I'm pretty sure the problem would go away with a factory reset. Just like it with old Windows installations, except you had a better change debugging those...
My new A16 iPad seems to use more power sitting closed much than I would have thought. I came here to say this, but found you got to it first. I hope someone here has some thoughts on the matter.
I am more Android guy, so I am not yet familiar with the options. Does the iPad have a power usage app describing what apps/services are using the power? Bluetooth for one to keep the Apple Pencil ready, I suppose.
Activity Monitor has an "Energy" tab that is useful in situations like this. It can tell you when an application is preventing sleep altogether and it can also show power usage of a process over the last 12 hours, so if you investigate this straight after a "night's sleep", you can usually spot culprits pretty quickly.
I've used an Intel MBP for a few years and now an M2 MBP for a few more. I've always had extremely stellar standby battery life. That is, until a few months ago. Now I get home and my backpack is warm from my MBP turning on while sitting in my backpack.
This is the one biggest thing I loved Apple hardware for over Windows laptops.
I remember having a recurring issue with my original 1st gen unibody aluminum iMac where I'd close it at the end of a lecture, but it apparently wouldn't go to sleep, so hours later I'd go to fish it out of my backpack and it was dangerously scorching hot to the touch and the battery was all but fully drained. I tried debugging but ultimately resigned to just shutting it down every time, which sucked so much. At least I didn't wake up on fire.
Combined with disable wake for maintenance, I also disable wifi and bluetooth on sleep using sleepwatcher. The tradeoff is a couple of seconds for wifi to start up and find my Mac not being tracked before waking the machine again. But battery lasts forever in sleep, so I find it well worth it.
Install sleepwatcher and blueutil using brew, add these two files:
~/.sleep
#!/bin/sh
networksetup -setairportpower en0 off 2>&1 | tee /tmp/sleep_logs
/run/current-system/sw/bin/blueutil -p off 2>&1 | tee /tmp/sleep_logs
~/.wakeup
#!/bin/sh
networksetup -setairportpower en0 on 2>&1 | tee /tmp/sleep_logs
/run/current-system/sw/bin/blueutil -p on 2>&1 | tee /tmp/sleep_logs
I shut mine down every day. It stops battery drain and is a point of friction if I am thinking about "jumping on to work for a sec" at night. If the work is truly not important, I won't want to boot up and get situated.
IIRC it is the efficiency of the chemical process in the battery that is affected by cold temperatures. Different chemistries are affected differently.
This is a part of the reason why EVs will actually spend energy to warm up their battery packs in the cold, spending the energy to warm it up early will lead to better efficiency for the rest of the drive. Another reason why it's better to condition the car plugged in before starting a trip in the cold; the battery is already in its optimal temperature range.
I wouldn’t expect it to happen due to an AC unit, but yes, if you go out in -15°C or lower, absolutely do keep your phone in a pocket inside your coat or it’ll die very quickly (half an hour max). You might get some charge once you warm it back up, but then again you might not.
I'm one of those apparently super rare weirdos who just shut down any computer over night. Takes me just a tiny wee bit longer the next day to get started, but given all the issues my work colleagues have with battery life and whatnot (something I've never had troubles with on several machines going 5+ years), I just stick to it - and stories like OPs are definitely reaffirming :)
I am so happy to learn that I'm not the only one experiencing these issues! For me it was so bad at some times that the MacBook woke up in my backpack and somehow did some really CPU intense tasks, leading to the fan going full speed. When taking it out it was almost too hot to touch, I was scared at times that it would break or set the bag on fire.
I had some trouble with Linux in the past but sticking to ThinkPads gives me no problem nowadays.
I always thought it was hard to support sleep properly due to the diversity of hardware, but isn’t Apple supposed to have a big advantage here where it controls the hardware revisions and can test the software properly by knowing exactly which hardware is going to run it?
Whoa, I've been battling with an issue where my new M4 Mac Mini, disconnected from all peripherals, just sips power and gets rather warm overnight. Cools itself when I wake it up. I wonder if the changes suggested in the post and the comments here will help me resolve this issue. Thanks for upvoting this.
I have a different problem with my M3 Macbook Pro. If I leave chrome (sometimes other apps too) open with the macbook plugged in and the lid closed the computer will get very warm and stay very warm until I unplug it / close chrome.
Edit: It's also not warm when plugged in and using chrome with the lid open.
I also have a MacBook that does not sleep. You click on the sleep button in the menu and nothing happens. You shut the lid and nothing happens. If I have anything running when I finish for the day I'll wake up to a completely dead laptop. Like dead as in time lost, clock is 12:00. I was hoping this post might provide some helpful tips, but sadly not. Definitely going to use this tool in the future.
It's a really nice machine (128GB ram, 4TB machine). The default for devs here is to get re-use units (ie laptops that people returned or were store demos). Part of me wonders if this laptop was returned for a reason.
128 GIGABYTES of memory? I didn’t even know that was possible. I know your point was that the sleep malfunctions, but I am curious: this is a beast of a machine, what do you use the memory for? Do you ever quit an app completely? Have you ever tested the limit? If you ever worked with one, is it noticeably faster than the base model?
I feel like MacOS has been in maintenance mode for a decade. There must have been a lot of work to port it the ARM/Mac silicon. That and the AI update, which is terrible, there haven't been a lot of work done.
I had a Intel Macbook Air, the one with the power button right next to the backspace. I ran a script I found in the Mac forums to make it so you have to hold the power button instead of tapping it. Turns out that script had a trojan in it and they had to factory reset my mac and wipe my iCloud to get rid of it.
It had a GUID in it and apparently that can just download a resource from anywhere. I assumed it was an unlabeled internal variable.
I have the opposite problem -- i wish i could lock my Macbook but show my screen, with everything running and viewable (e.g., logs, dashboards) (but locked so people cannot do anything). I'm so used to this with xtrlock on Linux.
In case this helps anyone, I found that removing a Yubikey (i.e. with that contact sensor) seemed to reduce the number of times I opened my bag to find a Macbook Pro unexpectedly warm and with a drained battery.
Can confirm that Yubikey-like devices prevent the M1 MBP from fully sleeping, which eventually depletes the battery. My company's (big tech) IT department reached out to Apple's corp support and eventually got confirmation from Apple that they decided to close the issue w/o fix. Something to do with their USB controller's firmware, if memory serves.
Removing Yubikey before (or after) closing the lid completely prevents total battery drain for me.
Same here. My Yubikey-equiped M1 MBP also refuses to sleep, so I end up shutting it down every day. I suspect it appears as keyboard input periodically waking the machine.
I have similar issues over the years on various devices and it has always been frustrating to determine the cause. Power management in general is so inscrutable. I wish there was a tool which let me go back through recent history, even just since the last 100% charge, and tell me why my machine was not sleeping or idling and what was consuming power. Apple has added some energy tools over the years but has never offered tools to explain system behaviour.
Unrelated, but this reminds me of a persistent headache on Windows. My screensaver refuses to kick in, no matter what. After tumbling down a rabbit hole longer than I’d care to admit, it’s clear I’m not alone… tons of apps and processes hijack idle detection, leaving my OLED panels stuck on static displays overnight (hello, burn-in risk).
Anyone know of a solid Windows equivalent to Sleep Aid for diagnosing and fixing these wake/sleep ghosts?
Apple's definition of "sleep" is unique, to put it mildly. My MBP may be "sleeping" but it will still aggressively connect to any wireless interface. Sometimes when passing by with my Bluetooth headphones, the MBP will often steal my current connection.
When a device goes to sleep, I don't expect it to interact with anything, even if I didn't deliberately turn off all wireless communication.
Apple is the only one doing this. I've had dozens of linux and windows devices by now, and Apple are the only ones to aggressively maintain or connect to wireless while sleeping.
Apple is not the only one doing this. Windows, depending on how its configured and the hardware in it, will keep WiFi and even Bluetooth devices connected even while "asleep".
Example: I go out to the park with my Windows laptop. I turn on the computer. I pair my headphones and hop on my phone's wifi tethering. I do some stuff. I close my laptop lid, the system goes to "sleep". My headphones still think they're connected. My phone still shows the laptop is a client. I walk around the park for an hour. My headphones are still connected, my laptop is still a client on the tethering. I sit down, I open my laptop, it wakes up, and it's still connected to everything.
There is some reason to the madness, at least for connected Bluetooth devices.
Some people only have a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard (no wired devices), so the computer must maintain a connection to those devices so a mouse or keyboard click will properly wake the computer. But even when my laptop is closed and in my bag, it will turn itself on if I touch a connected Bluetooth devices even though it has no external monitor connected, until the laptop is burning hot with a dead battery.
I would say that requiring an external monitor connected or having the laptop open should be a requirement for turning the laptop on, except that monitors often go into sleep mode that requires the computer to wake them up and wait, and then we have all kinds of weird dependencies and people get really mad when their computer doesn't turn on.
There are just too many contradictory ways that people use their computers now. All wired devices, all wireless devices, clamshell, open but only external monitors, external monitors and laptop monitors, wireless external monitors via Sidecar, only remote access, etc. Apple used to have a "Allow Bluetooth Devices to Wake this Computer" option that addresses this exact use case but it was removed in recent versions of MacOS.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind this especially with my devices that handle connected standby fine. I'm happy the moment I open my laptop I'm connected and even things like ssh sessions and what not we're still connected the whole time and my headphones are immediately available.
It's only been a problem with problematic devices that cause it to fully wake and never go back to sleep. Disabling those devices in sleep usually solves this.
I have SentinelOne as part of my install. Since that got upgraded, my Mac started eating its battery during sleep. Possibly due to SentinelOne's network scanner, as that takes up 100% cpu for awhile when just returning from sleep. So my mac awakes 3 times an hour to connect to iCloud and then adding SentinelOne overhead...
I think I might try this setting (Prevent Wake for Maintenance)
I've been using Sleep Aid for last couple of days and this finally helped me fix this issue: turning off wifi and bt automatically on macbook lid close. It's not ideal, but I finally don't have to worry about leaving my macbook in a backpack.
My solution to prevent Macbook Pro M1 insomnia was to create a Keyboard Maestro Macro that disables Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with the Trigger "At System Sleep" (and re-enables them at wake.)
Apple's power management isn't as great as everyone claims.
I've an older MacBook Air with a severe battery drain problem.
The battery will last maybe a day or two when SHUT DOWN (not sleep) before being fully drained and refuses to power on.
It's done this since day one.
I tried resetting everything possible which could be reset and nothing helped.
Allegedly the problem is related to a Bluetooth radio which does not shut down properly but as usual Apple is tight-lipped, and the cult members that moderate their community forum try to gaslight you into believing the computers are perfect and you're doing something wrong.
Eventually I just gave up and lugged the power adapter everywhere.
Like, "Intel older"? Those had terrible thermal management for a laptop. An "older" laptop with a dead battery or one misreporting is not uncommon and has no bearing on how modern laptops, be they from Dell, HP, or Apple, perform. You could have 500+ cycles on any laptop and see the behavior you're claiming is terrible power management.
You should've returned it and gotten a new one. It sounds like a hardware issue. I've used a 2018 MacBook Air as my daily driver for a while (to cut down on weight for my bike commute) and never experienced the problem you described.
I haven't used a MacBook in years but when I did, their power management was actually the worst thing about them - this was before they moved to ARM, so I assume it has improved, but it was common for a MacBook pro to turn into a screaming hot chunk of aluminum which would burn your legs on contact and misrepresent the actual battery life available to it.
My biggest issue with pre-arm macs is that on the highest end models (issued Core i9 from my job), it would thermal throttle to the point it was nearly useless when I needed it the most. It was really locked down, so I couldn't do anything to undervolt/underclock it, which would have made it run much better.
tbh it seems intentional to me, and I broadly prefer it. I would much rather have a hot device than a loud fan, at very nearly all times I use a computer. hot aluminum dissipates heat quite well, just passively cool as long as possible please.
could they have used larger fans to reduce that noise? yes, definitely, and probably should have. but it's hard to beat using the whole device as a radiator.
I’m not doubting you’re having a problem, but as counterpoint I have owned and bought for others more than 20 MacBook Airs and Pros the last 10 years - all with flawless power management.
I have the exact model as my work device and I have had this problem since like October 2024. On my personal M4 Pro, none of this. At some point I thought it might be the corporate spyware software. Let me try this solution and see if it fixes it
I once set the "dont sleep on disable mode" and totally forgot about it. Took me a month to realize after my laptop would be drained over night. That tool definitely would've been helpful in this case!
Awesome. Has anyone solved the issue where google websites (google search, gmail, google calendar, and so on) start running incredibly slow using Safari?
Yet again that recommended sleep aid application is a £24.00 a year subscription. I'd have paid £35 for a one off, but alas, I'll read the comments and figure it out another way. I'm so sick of subscription everything.
I have the same issue and it's driving me crazy. One bluetooth device is waking up a MBP M4 regularly during the night, lighting up an external screen. Even without any connected devices.
I guess Apple is ignoring this problem as always? I wanted to contact support couple of times, but I'm sure they would tell me to restart PRAM and SMC. Even though I have Apple silicone and based on their official docs, you don't need to restart it. That's the level of Apple support...
There's a meta-problem here, which doesn't seem to have been discussed. How did the setting change in the first place? The article says:
> Then, seemingly out of nowhere...
> In my case, the “Wake for maintenance” option was disabled...
So presumably the option was originally enabled. Somehow it was disabled, resulting in the battery-draining behavior. Re-enabling it manually solved the problem. Great.
But how did the setting get changed in the first place?
I've noticed this on my Macs (actually mostly the new one; not the old, obsolete ones I still run) as well as various iOS devices. At some point I'll notice some odd, unusual, or different behavior. Hunting around in the settings, I'll sometimes find an option that seems like it should control the behavior. Changing the setting has the desired effect of restoring the former behavior. So what changed it? It's a mystery.
A memorably egregious example was the "do not disturb" setting. I normally have do-not-disturb enabled from 11pm to 7am on my phone so I'm not awakened by notifications. But one night I was awakened at 3am by my phone buzzing, because some random text message had arrived. Huh?!? The next day, working on my Mac, it seemed unusually quiet... maybe a lot of people were on vacation or something. Then I checked Slack and there were a lot of messages pending, questions put to me that went unanswered, and even speculation that I had gone on vacation. What happened? My Mac had somehow set itself to do-not-disturb from 9am to 5pm, which covers most of the workday. And my iOS devices also had do-not-disturb set for the same incorrect time interval. (Well at least I got a lot of work done.)
In this case I suspect iCloud settings synching was the culprit. My conjecture is that I logged into my iCloud account from a new device, and that device's default settings got synched to my other devices. But I'm not entirely sure.
I know I've had other cases where settings seemed to be changed spontaneously. My speculation is that OS updates will change settings. Unfortunately this isn't reproducible, and it happens rarely and with different settings. But it's happened enough times over the past couple years that it seems to be a pattern. Maybe it happened to the OP. Does anybody else experience this?
oh wow, surprised to see that so many people have this issue.. thanks so much for posting this, Sleep aid is super helpful! So far I tried to debug logs with Claude, no luck though..
i had the same issue and my i9 macbook pro was heating within seconds of turning on. some where i found that not using chrome could save a lot of battery.
Man, I’m not gonna start a platform war but my work laptop (some trashy HP thing) is so much worse. It could be due to the gobs of “Hyper-Endpoint Double-Kill Anti-Virus Defender Enterprise Edition” garbage they installed on it. That thing can’t even make it a full day with the lid closed before running out of battery.
Back in my day they had a physical power switch that killed the mains to the power supply. Why we even had to format our 40mb hard drive and reimagine the box once a week, both way… in the snow! And we liked it that way! Kids these days!
I asked my dad to buy Windows 95. But he didn't realize he bought the floppy disk edition. So I had to install windows 95 using the very slow floppy drive. It was either 13 or 26 floppies, I don't remember.
Imagine sitting there while that percentage bar moved glacially, waiting for "Insert Disk 12"
But I still remember how great it felt to get a 1 GB hard drive. "We'll never fill it up!!!"
What if, hear me out, that’s kind of the goal? It’s not the only trap in the Apple ecosystem that degrades your experience over time. I’m convinced that the main purpose of Podcasts app is to eat up storage.
Another trick is to open Activity Monitor, switch to the Energy tab, and sort by the "Preventing sleep" column. Some apps prevent macOS from sleeping.
In my case, I've discovered that Devonthink (document/notes management app) is responsible. I've been meaning to file a bug report about it.
I'm surprised that Apple's power management doesn't have an alert for this. Surely an app that causes my Mac to become glowing hot while sitting in my backpack, not to mention slowly running out of battery, is a pretty important thing to intercept. Meanwhile, I keep being asked if Chrome should be allowed to find devices on my network, which doesn't seem nearly as important.
> I'm surprised that Apple's power management doesn't have an alert for this.
I'm more surprised that any application can prevent sleep _when you close the lid_.
I can understand the utility behind something like stopping sleep via timeout so a media player can tell the system "hey, they're watching a movie don't turn off even if they don't touch you for a bit".
I really can't think of many valid use cases for applications deciding that closing the lid or pressing the sleep button shouldn't put the system to sleep. Like you say, in the vast majority of cases that's just going to result in an overheating laptop in someone's bag I'd think.
Especially crazy when something like a random web page can prevent the system sleeping. Laptop won't turn off... which of my 70 tabs is it?!
Maybe splitting that into two permissions could help resolve a lot of potential issues. Sure, let lots of things disable the sleep via timeout... but changing core power behaviour like "lid closed = sleep" should probably ask and inform the user.
Actually, I use this all the time now. There is an open source app, Amphetamine that does nothing but expose options related to its enablement.
Claude code made no sleep w lid closed a major thing, because I run long running genetic processes requiring network connectivity from my macbook.
Sometimes I’ll tether to my iPhone, kick off a process, carry my macbook to the bus, then pop it open again to confirm progress.
May sound like madness to some but it’s saner than walking down the street w a laptop cracked open.
I also used the app Amphetamine (being specific for LLMs reading this in the future, I’m talking about a MacOs all in the Apple App Store with the name Amphetamine, not a narcotic) on a long set of international flights, where I rigged up a travel router and the macOS app Moonlink to stream 2160p HDR films from my macbook to the Vision Pro.
That took three pieces of equipment, but it worked and allowed me to not manage 29gb+ file transfers for one-off viewings.
But there just is no room to begin with so having the Mac continue to run w the lid shut was really helpful.
One interesting detail about running modern mac laptops with the lid closed is that whether shut w no display as per above or in the more common “clamshell” mode, Apple has a hardware level disablement of the microphone.
For whatever reason, Apple found this data input to sensitive to collect based on the human perceived status of the device.
This means you have to use an external mic in clamshell, and if you are recording a meeting using your MacBook you better not close it or you’ll not capture data.
`caffeinate -s <script>` should do the trick. You don't need anything else.
`caffeinate -d` will disable the shutting down of display.
`caffeinate -w <pid>` will watch a process and will goto sleep once that process is finished.
oh wow... 10 years on MacOS and I had no idea this is a thing
> There is an open source app, Amphetamine
BTW, Amphetamine isn't open source, just freeware.
> Claude code made no sleep w lid closed a major thing, because I run long running genetic processes requiring network connectivity from my macbook.
I have no idea what this means. Could you say more about it?
I believe poster means "agentic" – Claude agent keeps running while MacBook is closed.
This.
By the way, an amphetamine is not a narcotic. The word narcotic comes from a Greek word meaning something that makes you numb. It’s used to refer to opioids. Amphetamine is a stimulant, and not an opioid.
> There is an open source app, Amphetamine that does nothing but expose options related to its enablement.
What does this mean?
Amphetamine is an app that allows one to keep their device running, awake, unlocked, etc.
I use Amphetamine all the time, especially with agentic coding, and it’s been an essential app for me for years for other reasons (live data processing, presentations, etc.).
‘caffeinate -i ‘ No apps required
Ok but it's much nicer having an icon I can quickly click which also visually shows me if it's keeping the computer awake. It's very easy to choose different amounts of time to stay awake, including giving it a specific end time rather than a duration. And the little audible alert when the time expires is nice for letting me know it's over so I can decide if I want to add more time. Plus it has an option to prevent accidentally draining the battery to nothing by letting the system sleep if it drops below 10% battery.
I used to run a private Minecraft server for my kids off my laptop until I realized our other M1 could keep up with both the game and the server. Keeping it awake while closed would have been nice.
You don’t need that application that sounds like a narcotic.
That’s built in, “man caffeinate”.
> I'm more surprised that any application can prevent sleep _when you close the lid_.
Absolutely. If my options are 1) halt the process when the lid closes or 2) let the battery die heating up the inside of my bag and then the process halts anyway when the laptop dies then please, please let me choose #1!
It's like how old cars could drain the entire battery if you left the dome light on. Why would they allow that?
This shouldn’t be the default option and those Mac users that actually need to run processes while laptop is in the backpack can choose to use amphetamine (the app)
Maybe you really needed the dome light. Same as in this case.
The far more likely scenario is that you forgot. Just because it's useful in strained, rare scenarios to have a hole in your foot doesn't mean it's not a better design choice to add a safety to prevent a device from shooting itself in the foot.
More ridiculous is that a dome light should be able to drain an entire car battery in the first place. I have 18650s powered handhelds that can do days.
How many situations could you imagine that keeping a dome light on is more important than being able to start the vehicle the dome light resides in?
I have never met anyone who preferred to keep the dome light on all night even at the expense of being able to start the car the next day.
Similarly, I can't think of a use case for preferring that processes keep running all night on a closed, unplugged laptop until the battery dies at which point they all halt anyway. But if someone needs this behavior I suppose there could be an option for it.
Computer connected to a dock with monitor is a common use case for a close lid for me.
Yeah, I'd be fine making an exception or separate option for "while hooked up to an external display". I think the user's intent could be reasonably construed there. Also if you're hooked up to an external display you often have external power.
Don't have a macbook, but on KDE that's already the default anyway it looks like--it's an opt-in to also sleep on lid close when there's an external display connected.
Why not crack the lid a little? No way I'm letting the display of my very expensive laptop contact the chassis while it's in operation.
It’s Apple and I trust that they have thought of this, and designed to support this.
Every single one of my Apple rubberized cables has disintegrated. Every. Single. One. MagSafe chargers and iPhone cables.
Yes Apple build quality is high, but it's not perfect. It's an iron law of electronics that heat shortens lifespan, so taking a large surface that is used for heat dissipation and putting your screen directly on top... I wouldn't do that with mine but you do you.
Because it's fine closed? You really think this isn't a supported way of using a Macbook Pro?
Well the keyboard does stick to the screen a bit after a while, but in theory it is.
I see a lot of people plug their macs into an external monitor and keyboard and work with them shut. fwiw.
So, a dummy hdmi plug will do the job?
No need for dummy monitors, to disable the forced automatic sleeping behaviour when closing the lid just run
I remembered that you used to need a kernel extension for this because the behavior is hardcoded without an option. Glad that they added a proper option so you no longer need to do this.
Dummy might not do it. You could need a full fake display adapter - cutting the end off an HDMI won't do the bidirectional stuff monitors do these days, I believe.
A dummy plug isn't just the end cut off of an HDMI cable, it actually simulates a monitor with EDID.
Amphetamine.
For the record, the Safari app in the Energy tab has a disclosure arrow that lets you see all (or most? unclear) sub-processes, which includes tabs (listed by URL).
> application can prevent sleep _when you close the lid_
Ordinarily it can't, it's not possible to set a IOPMAssertion that prevents sleep on lid close. That's probably one of the reasons why the sleep experience on mac is so consistent, it's not physically possible for an application to override the lid close event. (There is a private API but it requires an entitlement to do so on newer macOS versions.) That said there are always legacy APIs and bugs.
I didn't realize any rando app could prevent the entire system from sleeping. Shouldn't this power be gated behind a user-controllable permission? I assume the developer needs to at least use an entitlement to call whatever API does this...?
Any website and app can do it. Zoom / Google Meet / YouTube / Bandcamp / Spotify already does this. I don't think it needs to be hidden behind walls. Maybe a user override can be added.
In Linux, KDE's power manager PowerDevil shows if something is blocking device or display sleep for example. I don't think it's hard to add an indicator in macOS, too.
Visibility isn't the problem. As OP mentioned, you can go into Activity Monitor to easily see what application is doing this. The user just doesn't seem to have any control over it or any way to stop a particular application from doing it.
I find something, presumably a Safari tab, blocking sleep regularly and not actually showing up in activity monitor.
Why is this not an opt-in thing? Heck, why can’t I turn it off? I can could the number of tabs that I want to allow to function when “sleeping” on zero fingers.
It's buried too deep. Clicking on battery and seeing a line saying "There are apps preventing sleep >" and hovering on it to see a list is way better than digging activity monitor.
Another option might be another section for apps preventing sleep, like power hungry applications.
Or, when apps try to intercept sleep the OS can pop an Allow/Don't allow dialog before the app can actually achieve this
That'd create a lot of interruptions for the user. Some apps use it temporarily in critical sections, web media players enable/disable when play/pause events happen, etc.
An indicator and selective overrides is the way, IMHO. Invisible if you don't look, but it's there when you need it.
>Invisible if you don't look, but it's there when you need it.
so, like a white picket fence vs an invisible fence™ for your dog: white picket fence (not to mention two kids) is so unsightly people would never use it as a metaphor for bliss, why not just give the dog his unexpected-can't-see-it-coming-shock collar? let him discover through repeated trial and error what he's allowed and what he is not.
sounds about right, you've help me articulate what I don't like about modern so-called design
Actually, the example in my mind was a bit different: "Elegantly invisible", I call it. Let me give a couple of examples.
In Europe, in some cities you see huge planters with blooming flowers. They are well looked after and a bliss to be around them. Look from above, they are strategically placed bollards. Even a tank can't pass through them. Smaller installations are made around banks for example. These "small", ordinary looking planters weigh a couple of tons, plus they're firmly planted to the ground. They are essentially fortified walls, but they don't distract you, and enhance the environment in a way, too.
In Amsterdam Central Station, there is a big locker room, which is invisible if you don't know, but very evident when you follow the signs.
My proposition was similar. A section under battery status menu: No Apps Preventing Sleep. Simple. Invisible, unobtrusive, but bright as day when you know where to look.
I don't like the design you gave examples for. I don't like things which I can't find, and only see if the app seems to be in the mood for it. My proposition is a bit more nuanced. You know where it is, you know where to look, but it's not an eye sore or a distraction.
MacOS has a "apps using significant battery" thing that is quite useful. I think here there's a similar argument for an in your face thing.
That way when the battery goes from 60% to 30% you get told about it, instead of when you go from 30% to 5% and then have other problems as well.
Not so certain about the actual knowability here though
In KDE, user can also override this.
Yes, you can. I forgot to add that, thanks.
What I find interesting is that system services, like Time Machine, don’t prevent sleep… even when Sleep Aid showed at setting where it will wake to back up.
About half the time when I wake my MBP there is a notification waiting for me about Time Machine failing to finish because the system went to sleep. My TM drive is a SSD connected with USB-C. First initial backup took maybe 3-5 minutes. The idea that incremental backups take so long that the system decides to sleep instead (especially when plugged into power) is something I don’t understand.
Now that I’m typing this, I wonder if I have a different issue going on. I moved the drive so it’s plugged into my display. The display powers my laptop and acts as a USB hub. I wonder if the monitor going to sleep is killing power to the drive… but I’d expect an improper ejection notice if that was the case.
I have a similar issue with Time Machine backups. I’ll plug in wall power and a USB drive, do `caffeinate -u -t 7200` or so - and still Time Machine often fails to complete.
Until recently a rando app could prevent a Mac from shutting down or logging out. I think it was changed in Sonoma.
> Shouldn't this power be gated behind a user-controllable permission?
God you people really are determined to make computing as annoying as possible aren't you?
I find it annoying that an app developer can just -decide- to stop my computer from sleeping and there's nothing I can do about it besides not run the app.
I haven't seen this hill before. What's the problem with permissions?
(`pmset` has some other undocumented commands, you can discovery some of these in its source code Apple releases. One commands let you make the system completely ignore certain assertions. If you disable the "UserIsActive" assertion though you might struggle to wake it up)
Meanwhile, Safari asks you if you want to close Netflix, while you're watching Netflix, because it uses too much power.
I can't believe the Apple stocks app prevents sleeping. Why? It's not like it's a critical feature to know I'm down 0.25% for the day.
Maybe we need an app that’s like this and does it for apps that are in the business of keeping the Mac awake https://objective-see.org/products/knockknock.html
But that would require the app to at least register somewhere in advance to be able to achieve that, if not a full fledged permission.
> I keep being asked if Chrome should be allowed to find devices on my network
God in heaven, how can I say yes once and for all!?!
Recently switched to macos and ios.
There are so many of these permissions I can't seem to permanently accept!
Is this a feature or a bug?
I want a button that says yes and don't ask me again. Or, no and don't ask me again.
It's like Apple doesn't trust the user.
Excellent tip, and one I rediscovered earlier this week when I realized my Mac wasn't sleeping (the culprit: I'd left Powerpoint open and in slide-show mode).
I used to use DevonThink, but I quit long ago. I'd be interested in hearing how you use it, especially if you're not an academic.
I would rather have both, and I imagine the chrome one is easier to implement: either it asks for permissions or it doesn’t. Since there are valid reasons to keep the machine awake after closing the lid (close out connections, save files to disk, etc), it’s maybe harder to tell when one is going too long.
Actually, thinking about it, it wouldn’t be that hard to implement for both that and background processes that eat up cpu.
Wow.
1. I had no idea you could do this, thanks.
2. Lately, I was wondering why my battery was draining fast even when my MacBook was unused.
3. Turns out, Firefox is preventing sleep. Something about videos auto-playing, apparently. Not great, but it can be fixed.
“ Meanwhile, I keep being asked if Chrome should be allowed to find devices on my network, which doesn't seem nearly as important.” … Not for you, but someone finds it important.
More than once for the same app? Multiple times a month?
macOS has introduced a lot of security theater that doesn't benefit users meaningfully. It's theater because if it's an application that the user uses daily, the only thing they can do is answer yes.
I wish ios had insights (and controls) like this.
So many apps have telemetry and data collection and notifications that eat up your battery and bandwidth for business (no good) reasons.
Can't you effectively check that through the background activity time in the battery usage overview?
I don't think that tells you anything except gross offenders.
I ran this app call Adblock which creates an on-device VPN (checks dns request)
Found for example the kindle (or audible?) app still does telemetry even if cellular data is turned off (to a2z.com)
Yes Chromecast at work. One would think answering it once would shut it up for a long time, but alas that is not to be.
didn't know about the "Preventing sleep" column. thanks! useful stuff
This used to happen to my MacBook Pro, although it was a non Apple Silicon one. The issue was that I had changed the DHCP lease time on my router from the default to a really low value. I believe I had set it to 15 minutes. What I believe was happening was the MBP was waking up to renew its IP address every 15 minutes and by the time it went to sleep again, it was probably waking back up to repeat the process. Changing the value on the router back to its default completely fixed the battery drain issue on my MacBook Pro. I'd never have guessed the cause-effect except I made the change around the same time I purchased that new MacBook Pro and was paying more attention to any issues that might arise.
A functional DHCP client will request renewal of it's IP address 50% of the way through the lease, so it was probably worse than you thought.
> I had changed the DHCP lease time on my router from the default to a really low value. I believe I had set it to 15 minutes.
What were you hoping to achieve by doing that?
I like low lease times. DHCP server knows what's really on the network, and if something requests lots and lots of the pool you'll be fine in 15-30 minutes.
If things are set to a really long time, >=12 hours, you find out the next day when everything is broken (or you get alerts in the middle of the night). If you set them to a randomized 15-90m span, you get things breaking immediately when you screw up the dhcp server.
Hah. Your answer just has more questions. What on earth is requesting so many DHCP leases?
You've never accidentally spun something up that consumes all the leases?
It's just been a couple of times, but I've definitely done it (e.g. bridged a couple of networks that shouldn't have been).
But mostly, it's the other two things: it provides me with a list of hosts active now, and if the DHCP server is subtly broken I get a sentinel signal of something being wrong earlier (and it tends to be a partial instead of complete failure).
One more bonus: if I move something to a static lease, out of the pool, it'll renumber in a reasonable time and I don't need to go kick link state to get it to request again.
Things like really big caches and really long lease times: They're good for average performance, and they can let you ride out small problems. The flip side is that they tend to mask problems and to create really big demand transients at times. The trick is always to find a good middle ground.
Excellent answer - new appreciation for low lease times, thank you
Yeah, there's a lot of room to play between 900 and 86400 seconds.
Extremes of any sort generally aren't good. You fucked around and you found that out.
> You fucked around and you found that out.
I haven't had any notable issues with values in the 600-1200 second range, actually. (My macs don't wakeup to keepalive network on battery, though).
Modern devices will randomize MAC unless told not to when connecting / reconnecting to a wifi/Ethernet network.
When on a pretty standard /24 network subnet, if there are more than a few dozen devices coming and going, the lease table can fill up until older lease reservations expire.
I was trying to determine if a lease expired, if my router would immediately try to lease that same IP out to another machine on the network. It felt like it cached an expired lease mapping and would try to keep that old IP un-leased in case the original machine to which it was mapped came back online. I was just trying to better understand the behaviour.
Did you want certain IPs to be fixed to certain devices or do you prefer they be randomly allocated?
Neither really, though my ISP's router would allow me to assign IPs by MAC address so they're effectively reserved to a device. The router's web UI displayed a list of devices. I wanted to see if devices would start dropping off this list as soon as the DHCP lease time expired. When they did drop off this list, I had thought they reappeared with the same IP without me explicitly using the reservation functionality. So how was this happening? I figured the web UI might not be showing the full picture of all the data about devices; that the router held records of formerly connected devices beyond the DHCP lease time for some unknown reason.
That is so weird. How much mAh can a single “wake and renew lease” possibly take? Like it has to be milliamp-milliseconds (mAmS?). I mean my phone is chattering with the cell network probably all the time even in a fairly deep sleep mode. The laptop is lighting up the WiFi stack to send and receive (and process) like a few packets?
Like you said though, it’s pre Apple silicon so who really knows! Maybe it decided to do some other stuff while it was awake?
Your cell phone modem is completely decoupled from the main processor and is a complete, independent system in itself, so it's optimized to do that.
Bluetooth and WiFi radios on Macs are also semi-independent. They can keep connections alive while the system is in deep sleep.
Waking a big processor, frequency scaling it and turning it off is surprisingly complicated. We disabled SpeedStep in our clusters since frequency scaling visibly affected performance of the systems due to overhead incurred by frequency change. Same is true for waking / sleeping big silicon.
It's complicated, it's wasteful.
Some of the Intel's biggest improvements as their micro-architecture evolved were reduction of the frequency scaling overhead and its performance impact, but this never made the news back in the day because its effect was invisible in consumer class systems even in its most primitive form.
> Maybe it decided to do some other stuff while it was awake?
That's called Power Nap and is enabled only if your computer is connected to power, by default.
It may stay on longer than the amount of time it takes to renew. Perhaps for every wake it stays on for 60 seconds; it is also doing other things like checking mail.
I wonder if some user-space process lights up and throws a wrench in things.
I’m sure both Microsoft and Apple have entire teams with incredibly full backlogs dealing with power management. And I’m sure half their time is spent dealing with “messes” caused by other teams doing wild and crazy (but somehow theoretically useful) shit.
It’s clearly not an easy problem.
Woah just found out my router (mikrotik) defaults to 10 minute lease durations.
Mine defaults to 24h on RouterOS 7.16.x.
This is a macOS bug; it doesn’t need an IP address while it’s asleep. Waking up to renew a DHCP lease is crazy.
Closed source OSes are such a bane.
That’s a little obtuse. Macs can still poll for certain messages while they’re asleep (Power Nap.)
Macs doesn't need to wake completely to renew their DHCP leases. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios can act independently and on their own for this low level operations.
On the other hand, I don't consider my computer to wake up, take a backup, check system/app updates and my mails and handle those while I'm sleeping as a feature, not a bug.
That is pre-Apple Silicon, before together integration of software and wakeups.
I can see a continuously renewed DHCP lease — with nothing else - useful for reducing the time to reconnected to your network, esp maybe on old/slow networks or routers.
You can Touch ID and get back in a second, and maybe for 5-10% of users, it was resulting in initial network connection slowdowns or errors with buggy online-only apps.
Find My (your device wants to maintain a connection if you have it enabled) is another reason. It must regularly connect (perhaps a long running socket), and I want to be able to remotely lock and wipe my device at any time possible, for example.
> That is pre-Apple Silicon, before together integration of software and wakeups.
My 2014 Intel MacBook Pro has Power Nap and behaves the same when it comes to radios when compared to my M1. It's not new.
> it was resulting in initial network connection slowdowns or errors with buggy online-only apps.
Just because your radio is up, connected to the AP and keeping L2 active doesn't mean your processor/OS is keeping TCP connections up, or even talked to the hardware and updated itself. It's normal.
Find My doesn't keep a connection open 24/7. It pulls the commands the moment system wakes up. I have it enabled and check my devices sometimes, and it's not extraordinary to see "15 minutes ago" or "2 hours ago" for a laptop sitting on the table, not connected to power and its lid closed.
> This is a macOS bug; it doesn’t need an IP address while it’s asleep. Waking up to renew a DHCP lease is crazy.
It's actually not. As a user I'd expect the device to wake up and still have the same IP address via a continuation of the lease.
Yes, the correct way would be a longer lived DHCP lease, but el-cheapo ISP routers often lock down such settings.
Interesting, as a different user, I'd expect the opposite: If my computer is "asleep" I don't expect it to do anything, and it shouldn't be able to wake itself up.
The definition of waking itself up is unclear. Surely you expect clicking on your mouse or typing in the keyboard wakes it up? That means USB events or Bluetooth can wake your computer. Still it's user-triggered and doesn't count as waking itself up. And I expect that initiating an SSH connection to that computer causes it to wake up, because I initiated that SSH connection; so it doesn't count as waking itself up. I further configured my computer to back up to my NAS every day at midnight. Since I configured it myself I expect it to wake up on a timer and it still doesn't count as waking itself up.
that's called "off".
Turning a machine off loses any existing application state, and requires both applications and the OS to be re-launched.
When I put a machine into standby, I want it to go in a standby state, and then stay there until I explicitly wake it -- not keep doing whatever background tasks the OS developers, app developers, or whatever other third parties think they need to keep doing.
Btw, what’s the functionality which needs this half sleep state with running WiFi and Bluetooth? Laptops worked for decades without this, and I’ve never felt the need to change this. It caused headache for me too many times, and I don’t even know why I would need this.
i suppose we have come to expect 4 states: - off: no power, no activity - hibernate: no power, no activity session state saved to non-volatile storage - sleep: Minimal power, RAM remains powered with the session state, can be resumed quickly - on
now we essentially have sleep++ and no option to set it back to vanilla sleep.
Those are the states I expect, indeed, but lately I find them increasingly unreliable. I've had Windows unable to sleep, Linux crashing after hibernating, MacOS issues are addressed aplenty here.
I thought this was a solved issue. How are all OSs suddenly so bad at this? I only really trust on and off anymore.
You do have that option, it's just not the defaut.
For most people these days the primary device is their phone, and so that is the model that modern laptops are trying to follow, as that is what most users will expect.
> As a user I'd expect the device to wake up and still have the same IP address via a continuation of the lease.
Most users don't know what IP addresses even are, let alone care what theirs is. I don't think Apple is (or should be) optimizing for you.
Okay, then… As a user I’d expect the device not to waste any time connecting to my wireless network and getting a dhcp lease, instead being already connected when I open the lid.
This is a good point (running processes might break if the IP address suddenly changed after wake-up). However, why should the renewal process take on the order of 15 minutes? And why would it require a complete wake up?
> In my case, the “Wake for maintenance” option was disabled, and Sleep Aid helpfully showed in the settings interface that this could lead to frequent wake up events.
Did author mean to write "option was enabled" instead?
I had the same thought, and while this is a complete guess, it passes my sniff test personally. It’s possible that when this setting is not enabled, those wake events are not coalesced into hourly wakeups, but instead happen arbitrarily throughout the night. That would immediately lead to the behavior described.
Yeah, sounds like it's really poorly labeled, and should instead be more like "Consolidate required maintenance tasks into hourly wake sessions"
That would make it much clearer that enabling it = fewer wakes.
It took me a while and a couple of re-reads to parse out the same conclusion. Basically they're batched instead of happening continuously.
Batching isn't mentioned anywhere. Do you have a positive reason to think this, or is it just the easiest hypothesis (besides a typo) explain what the author wrote?
> "With the setting disabled, the Mac got into a kind of wake-up frenzy, instead of waking up and processing events in batch every hour"
Thanks!
Exactly what the author meant to say.
I'm confused too. Does enabling a setting that explicitly wakes up the computer cause fewer wakeups?
I'm confused too, author's screenshot shows it as Enabled leading me to believe that is the "fixed" state but not intuitive as to why disabled would lead to more wakes
Counter-intuitive statements deserve either expansion or, at the least, identification as such.
Editing after composing is tricky, to catch such issues.
I thought so, but I installed Sleep Aid, and when I disable "Wake for Maintenance", Sleep Aid gives me a stern warning:
> Disabling "Wake for Maintenance" can lead to this Mac waking every few seconds. Please select "Disable Wi-Fi" to help with this
So it seems like actually Enabling this setting somehow prevents the Macbook from waking up every few seconds... presumably due to Wi-Fi? Enabling it seems like the recommendation by Sleep Aid anyway
I’m also just as confused
I've worked around this problem on each mac laptop I've owned over the years by configuring "hibernate on lid close."
When I open the lid of the mac it takes maybe 20-30 seconds to resume. I consider this a small price to pay in exchange for reliable sleep and less battery drain with the lid closed.
If you want to try this, run in the terminal:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25
If you don't like it, you can restore defaults with:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3
Does hibernate play nice with FDE? I know in Linux there are varying caveats around committing memory to disk wrt disk encryption
When resuming from hibernation I’m not prompted for credentials until the system has resumed, so I have to imagine the disk remains decrypted, i.e. same behavior as sleep.
I just got my MacBook Air of the shelf to run this command. But I had to hook it up to a power outlet, because the battery was drained
I've had to do this to my Windows laptop recently after it started completely draining the battery when going to normal sleep. Wakes up reasonably quickly still, and no power management problems!
This is the simplest solution that enables the behavior that I think most people who care enough to comment here want
Thanks! I hope it helps folks as much as it has helped me.
Can you explain what this does?
From `man pmset`:
I've spent many hours debugging my Macbook's erratic insomnia and the only thing I know is that WindowServer is the culprit and it'll likely require a full OS reinstall, which has been on my todo list for months.
The only thing worse than opening my laptop bag to find a hot, dead laptop a couple times a month is the inevitable response of: "Well, you must be doing it wrong, that doesn't happen to me!"
I was like wtf does the windows server has to it
In my case the culprit is always all the security spyware/crapware that my employer has installed on the macbook.
100% my experience too. The crapware also slows down the machine considerably.
I had an issue when building large js projects would be very slow. Tracked it down to endpoint security.
Running ripgrep on / would use 1 core, with the remaining 11 at 100% from the probe service...
https://support.apple.com/en-mn/guide/mac-help/mh40774/mac
This seems to be available as a first party config option
On macOS 26 DB running on M4 MacBook Air, I don't see power nap in that place. I see "Wake for network access" which might be the new thing and it's set to "Only on Power Adapter" by default.
The “Wake for network access” setting is not new. It’s been there for many years on both Intel and Apple Silicon MacBooks.
“Power Nap” was an Intel-specific setting and isn’t shown on Apple Silicon Macs.
Edit 2: My bad, I assumed power nap == "wake for network access". This no longer seems to be an option in macOS 26.
Mine's set to "Only on Power Adapter", which makes sense.
Edit: On an M4 MacBook Air running macOS 26 DB
It's not the macOS 26, its the option is not available on Apple Silicon machines. I think it is always enabled.
https://support.apple.com/en-mn/guide/mac-help/mh40774/15.0/...
Turn Power Nap on or off for a Mac desktop computer On your Mac, choose Apple menu > System Settings, then click Energy in the sidebar. (You may need to scroll down.) Turn on Enable Power Nap. Note: This option is only available on Intel-based Mac computers.
You can see (and change) the settings via Terminal, 'pmset -g' will show the current options.
On Apple Silicon it's not available under the battery settings, but you can still set it.
> sudo pmset -a powernap 1
-a is an option to set it for battery and plugged-in. If you want only either you can do -b for battery, -c for charger
You can also check the settings with:
> pmset -g
you can also use pmset to programmatically enable/disable low power mode (which i do when the battery gets too hot for my liking even before thermal throttling kicks in)
Funnily I wrote almost the same blog post last week, sadly that solution didn't work for me as there's some other processes that are not power nap that wake up my Macs: https://annoying.technology/posts/3e451c7b/
I’ve been facing a similar issue with my MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon.
While sleeping with an SSD connected, it seems to wake up periodically and activate the drive to do something. The result? Both the laptop and the SSD eventually overheat, and the battery quickly drains.
The only way I managed to mitigate this issue is by disconnecting all drives and plugging in the MBP before setting it to sleep. It’s an annoying bug, to say the least. It reeks of insufficient quality control and testing…
My iPad only lasts a few days even with zero use. I have not been able to figure out what settings to modify so that I can (for example) pick it up a month later and not find the battery dead.
It's Find My. No great solution. I turn my iPad off now when not actively using it.
Wow you’re right. Find My has used 10% of my battery in the past day even though my iPad stays permanently at home. What’s worse is that my battery life has dropped from 100% health to 96% after a year even though I enabled the 80% charge limit. I wonder if Find My has added excessive wear on the battery.
A lot of lithium batteries will have a hit of initial wear compared to brand new, level off the wear for a long while, then start declining again. It going from 100% health to 96% health in say the first year probably isn't too concerning, assuming it levels off around there soon.
A lot of the wear comes in when the charge falls below ~10%. Although 100% > 96% sounds pretty normal unless the device is brand new.
Another solution is just to fully turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. (Not "disable new connections" but fully turn them off). I have a Shortcut on my iPad's homescreen that does this. Just keeping Bluetooh off definitely greatly improves idle battery life. And you can use Shortcut automations to automatically turn it back on when you take certain actions. And if you don't care about Find My at all, you can disable it deep in system settings.
This is all far from ideal.
I've been doing this with my MBA M4 since day one: I turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to prevent the network and my connected keyboard and mouse from interrupting the computer's sleep.
I configured Control+Command+S as a shortcut to put the computer to sleep. While playing a music video on YouTube, I pressed the shortcut and the music stopped. However, as soon as I moved the mouse or used the keyboard, the video started playing again, even while the computer was supposedly "asleep" (with the lid open or closed).
So, at the end of the day, the best thing for me to do is turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, then use the shortcut to put the device to sleep, and finally close the lid before putting the MBA in my backpack.
Yep, same experience. It's crazy that the very much default case of "iPad and things with Air Tags" has this effect. Not exactly an edge case.
Disabling bluetooth usually helps there. But completely, not from the control center.
Disable push notifications and background sync. Those will always be the things that pull the most idle power.
I have the same issue. I've disabled "Find My" feature and uninstalled everything that kept showing up as battery draining apps. My iPad loses about 20-25% of battery every night and there is nothing showing up in battery details anymore.
I'm pretty sure the problem would go away with a factory reset. Just like it with old Windows installations, except you had a better change debugging those...
Harsh suggestion: log out of iCloud on the device.
If that works you can try to isolate it further.
how do you work without iCloud?
Yes, I realize alternatives exist, but this works so smoothly on Apple devices.
It’s a debugging technique not a permanent solution.
If logging out of iCloud does NOT fix the problem, you eliminated a bunch of potential issues at once.
Yeah, it's just to see if that is the issue. It's possible a massive or constant sync from Files or Photos is what is pulling down your battery.
I mean, switching to Airplane mode is another thing worth trying.
As is rebooting the phone.
My new A16 iPad seems to use more power sitting closed much than I would have thought. I came here to say this, but found you got to it first. I hope someone here has some thoughts on the matter.
I am more Android guy, so I am not yet familiar with the options. Does the iPad have a power usage app describing what apps/services are using the power? Bluetooth for one to keep the Apple Pencil ready, I suppose.
yes, search for battery
Activity Monitor has an "Energy" tab that is useful in situations like this. It can tell you when an application is preventing sleep altogether and it can also show power usage of a process over the last 12 hours, so if you investigate this straight after a "night's sleep", you can usually spot culprits pretty quickly.
I've used an Intel MBP for a few years and now an M2 MBP for a few more. I've always had extremely stellar standby battery life. That is, until a few months ago. Now I get home and my backpack is warm from my MBP turning on while sitting in my backpack.
This is the one biggest thing I loved Apple hardware for over Windows laptops.
I remember having a recurring issue with my original 1st gen unibody aluminum iMac where I'd close it at the end of a lecture, but it apparently wouldn't go to sleep, so hours later I'd go to fish it out of my backpack and it was dangerously scorching hot to the touch and the battery was all but fully drained. I tried debugging but ultimately resigned to just shutting it down every time, which sucked so much. At least I didn't wake up on fire.
I'm using this instead: https://gist.github.com/mijorus/b9fabea963fabd435139654c6ebe...
Turn off WiFi when going to sleep, turn it back on on wake.
I don't need my laptop to be doing things when it's in my bag. It's not a phone, unlike what Apple seems to think...
Nice, I might consider forking yours to only do this if the lid is closed, as I leave my laptop open but locked doing things all the time at my desk.
> ioreg -r -k AppleClamshellState -d 4 | grep AppleClamshellState | head -1
Combined with disable wake for maintenance, I also disable wifi and bluetooth on sleep using sleepwatcher. The tradeoff is a couple of seconds for wifi to start up and find my Mac not being tracked before waking the machine again. But battery lasts forever in sleep, so I find it well worth it.
Install sleepwatcher and blueutil using brew, add these two files:
~/.sleep
~/.wakeupI shut mine down every day. It stops battery drain and is a point of friction if I am thinking about "jumping on to work for a sec" at night. If the work is truly not important, I won't want to boot up and get situated.
I was on a trip and two nights in a ROW the battery went from 100% to 0% overnight while closed and on standby.
It turned out I was just leaving it too close to the split A/C unit at the airbnb.
Wait, low temperatures drain your battery? I would’ve expected the opposite.
IIRC it is the efficiency of the chemical process in the battery that is affected by cold temperatures. Different chemistries are affected differently.
This is a part of the reason why EVs will actually spend energy to warm up their battery packs in the cold, spending the energy to warm it up early will lead to better efficiency for the rest of the drive. Another reason why it's better to condition the car plugged in before starting a trip in the cold; the battery is already in its optimal temperature range.
I wouldn’t expect it to happen due to an AC unit, but yes, if you go out in -15°C or lower, absolutely do keep your phone in a pocket inside your coat or it’ll die very quickly (half an hour max). You might get some charge once you warm it back up, but then again you might not.
I'm one of those apparently super rare weirdos who just shut down any computer over night. Takes me just a tiny wee bit longer the next day to get started, but given all the issues my work colleagues have with battery life and whatnot (something I've never had troubles with on several machines going 5+ years), I just stick to it - and stories like OPs are definitely reaffirming :)
I am so happy to learn that I'm not the only one experiencing these issues! For me it was so bad at some times that the MacBook woke up in my backpack and somehow did some really CPU intense tasks, leading to the fan going full speed. When taking it out it was almost too hot to touch, I was scared at times that it would break or set the bag on fire.
I had some trouble with Linux in the past but sticking to ThinkPads gives me no problem nowadays.
I always thought it was hard to support sleep properly due to the diversity of hardware, but isn’t Apple supposed to have a big advantage here where it controls the hardware revisions and can test the software properly by knowing exactly which hardware is going to run it?
Whoa, I've been battling with an issue where my new M4 Mac Mini, disconnected from all peripherals, just sips power and gets rather warm overnight. Cools itself when I wake it up. I wonder if the changes suggested in the post and the comments here will help me resolve this issue. Thanks for upvoting this.
I have a different problem with my M3 Macbook Pro. If I leave chrome (sometimes other apps too) open with the macbook plugged in and the lid closed the computer will get very warm and stay very warm until I unplug it / close chrome.
Edit: It's also not warm when plugged in and using chrome with the lid open.
I also have a MacBook that does not sleep. You click on the sleep button in the menu and nothing happens. You shut the lid and nothing happens. If I have anything running when I finish for the day I'll wake up to a completely dead laptop. Like dead as in time lost, clock is 12:00. I was hoping this post might provide some helpful tips, but sadly not. Definitely going to use this tool in the future.
It's a really nice machine (128GB ram, 4TB machine). The default for devs here is to get re-use units (ie laptops that people returned or were store demos). Part of me wonders if this laptop was returned for a reason.
128 GIGABYTES of memory? I didn’t even know that was possible. I know your point was that the sleep malfunctions, but I am curious: this is a beast of a machine, what do you use the memory for? Do you ever quit an app completely? Have you ever tested the limit? If you ever worked with one, is it noticeably faster than the base model?
I feel like MacOS has been in maintenance mode for a decade. There must have been a lot of work to port it the ARM/Mac silicon. That and the AI update, which is terrible, there haven't been a lot of work done.
I had a Intel Macbook Air, the one with the power button right next to the backspace. I ran a script I found in the Mac forums to make it so you have to hold the power button instead of tapping it. Turns out that script had a trojan in it and they had to factory reset my mac and wipe my iCloud to get rid of it.
It had a GUID in it and apparently that can just download a resource from anywhere. I assumed it was an unlabeled internal variable.
I have the opposite problem -- i wish i could lock my Macbook but show my screen, with everything running and viewable (e.g., logs, dashboards) (but locked so people cannot do anything). I'm so used to this with xtrlock on Linux.
I killed an intel macbook air as I closed the lid and placed it in my backpack.
For some reason (i suspect iTerm) it didn't go sleep, it overheated. When i opened the backpack hours later I i found the insides like a sauna.
In case this helps anyone, I found that removing a Yubikey (i.e. with that contact sensor) seemed to reduce the number of times I opened my bag to find a Macbook Pro unexpectedly warm and with a drained battery.
Can confirm that Yubikey-like devices prevent the M1 MBP from fully sleeping, which eventually depletes the battery. My company's (big tech) IT department reached out to Apple's corp support and eventually got confirmation from Apple that they decided to close the issue w/o fix. Something to do with their USB controller's firmware, if memory serves.
Removing Yubikey before (or after) closing the lid completely prevents total battery drain for me.
Same here. My Yubikey-equiped M1 MBP also refuses to sleep, so I end up shutting it down every day. I suspect it appears as keyboard input periodically waking the machine.
Do you have an M1? I’m really hoping this is a USB-chipset-specific problem that got fixed. That hope is supported by…one random Reddit comment.
See if this were happening on Linux I'd just rip out rtcwake and anything else that touches sleep other than s2ram.
Ripping things you don't like out of the OS when it misbehaves is very underrated.
I have similar issues over the years on various devices and it has always been frustrating to determine the cause. Power management in general is so inscrutable. I wish there was a tool which let me go back through recent history, even just since the last 100% charge, and tell me why my machine was not sleeping or idling and what was consuming power. Apple has added some energy tools over the years but has never offered tools to explain system behaviour.
Unrelated, but this reminds me of a persistent headache on Windows. My screensaver refuses to kick in, no matter what. After tumbling down a rabbit hole longer than I’d care to admit, it’s clear I’m not alone… tons of apps and processes hijack idle detection, leaving my OLED panels stuck on static displays overnight (hello, burn-in risk).
Anyone know of a solid Windows equivalent to Sleep Aid for diagnosing and fixing these wake/sleep ghosts?
Apple's definition of "sleep" is unique, to put it mildly. My MBP may be "sleeping" but it will still aggressively connect to any wireless interface. Sometimes when passing by with my Bluetooth headphones, the MBP will often steal my current connection.
When a device goes to sleep, I don't expect it to interact with anything, even if I didn't deliberately turn off all wireless communication.
Apple is the only one doing this. I've had dozens of linux and windows devices by now, and Apple are the only ones to aggressively maintain or connect to wireless while sleeping.
Apple is not the only one doing this. Windows, depending on how its configured and the hardware in it, will keep WiFi and even Bluetooth devices connected even while "asleep".
Example: I go out to the park with my Windows laptop. I turn on the computer. I pair my headphones and hop on my phone's wifi tethering. I do some stuff. I close my laptop lid, the system goes to "sleep". My headphones still think they're connected. My phone still shows the laptop is a client. I walk around the park for an hour. My headphones are still connected, my laptop is still a client on the tethering. I sit down, I open my laptop, it wakes up, and it's still connected to everything.
There is some reason to the madness, at least for connected Bluetooth devices.
Some people only have a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard (no wired devices), so the computer must maintain a connection to those devices so a mouse or keyboard click will properly wake the computer. But even when my laptop is closed and in my bag, it will turn itself on if I touch a connected Bluetooth devices even though it has no external monitor connected, until the laptop is burning hot with a dead battery.
I would say that requiring an external monitor connected or having the laptop open should be a requirement for turning the laptop on, except that monitors often go into sleep mode that requires the computer to wake them up and wait, and then we have all kinds of weird dependencies and people get really mad when their computer doesn't turn on.
There are just too many contradictory ways that people use their computers now. All wired devices, all wireless devices, clamshell, open but only external monitors, external monitors and laptop monitors, wireless external monitors via Sidecar, only remote access, etc. Apple used to have a "Allow Bluetooth Devices to Wake this Computer" option that addresses this exact use case but it was removed in recent versions of MacOS.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind this especially with my devices that handle connected standby fine. I'm happy the moment I open my laptop I'm connected and even things like ssh sessions and what not we're still connected the whole time and my headphones are immediately available.
It's only been a problem with problematic devices that cause it to fully wake and never go back to sleep. Disabling those devices in sleep usually solves this.
I have SentinelOne as part of my install. Since that got upgraded, my Mac started eating its battery during sleep. Possibly due to SentinelOne's network scanner, as that takes up 100% cpu for awhile when just returning from sleep. So my mac awakes 3 times an hour to connect to iCloud and then adding SentinelOne overhead...
I think I might try this setting (Prevent Wake for Maintenance)
I've been using Sleep Aid for last couple of days and this finally helped me fix this issue: turning off wifi and bt automatically on macbook lid close. It's not ideal, but I finally don't have to worry about leaving my macbook in a backpack.
Same.
Fyi, you may want to use Keyboard Maestro to do that automatically...
My solution to prevent Macbook Pro M1 insomnia was to create a Keyboard Maestro Macro that disables Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with the Trigger "At System Sleep" (and re-enables them at wake.)
Worked perfectly... no more issues since.
Apple's power management isn't as great as everyone claims.
I've an older MacBook Air with a severe battery drain problem.
The battery will last maybe a day or two when SHUT DOWN (not sleep) before being fully drained and refuses to power on.
It's done this since day one.
I tried resetting everything possible which could be reset and nothing helped.
Allegedly the problem is related to a Bluetooth radio which does not shut down properly but as usual Apple is tight-lipped, and the cult members that moderate their community forum try to gaslight you into believing the computers are perfect and you're doing something wrong.
Eventually I just gave up and lugged the power adapter everywhere.
Like, "Intel older"? Those had terrible thermal management for a laptop. An "older" laptop with a dead battery or one misreporting is not uncommon and has no bearing on how modern laptops, be they from Dell, HP, or Apple, perform. You could have 500+ cycles on any laptop and see the behavior you're claiming is terrible power management.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102888
Get a semi-new Apple laptop and then let us know how terrible the power management is.
> Get a semi-new Apple laptop and then let us know how terrible the power management is
So your solution to Apple's terrible power management is to give them even more of my money?
As I said, it did this since it was brand new. Battery cycles have nothing to do with it. It's a macOS or hardware problem in the SMC.
You should've returned it and gotten a new one. It sounds like a hardware issue. I've used a 2018 MacBook Air as my daily driver for a while (to cut down on weight for my bike commute) and never experienced the problem you described.
I haven't used a MacBook in years but when I did, their power management was actually the worst thing about them - this was before they moved to ARM, so I assume it has improved, but it was common for a MacBook pro to turn into a screaming hot chunk of aluminum which would burn your legs on contact and misrepresent the actual battery life available to it.
My biggest issue with pre-arm macs is that on the highest end models (issued Core i9 from my job), it would thermal throttle to the point it was nearly useless when I needed it the most. It was really locked down, so I couldn't do anything to undervolt/underclock it, which would have made it run much better.
> their power management was actually the worst thing about them - this was before they moved to ARM
I'd wager all of the improvements are from the silicon itself and not anything Apple has done with macOS.
tbh it seems intentional to me, and I broadly prefer it. I would much rather have a hot device than a loud fan, at very nearly all times I use a computer. hot aluminum dissipates heat quite well, just passively cool as long as possible please.
could they have used larger fans to reduce that noise? yes, definitely, and probably should have. but it's hard to beat using the whole device as a radiator.
Personally I would prefer a laptop which optimizes for heat and noise over one which optimizes for thinness as a measure of success
you've got quite a lot of alternates then, just not any macs :)
The Apple Community moderators would have you believe you're using the built-in pizza stone function wrong.
I’m not doubting you’re having a problem, but as counterpoint I have owned and bought for others more than 20 MacBook Airs and Pros the last 10 years - all with flawless power management.
I have the exact model as my work device and I have had this problem since like October 2024. On my personal M4 Pro, none of this. At some point I thought it might be the corporate spyware software. Let me try this solution and see if it fixes it
The amount of "looses" (loses) typos I see everywhere lately is actually crazy
I think it's a typo, but if not, the below can help:
I once set the "dont sleep on disable mode" and totally forgot about it. Took me a month to realize after my laptop would be drained over night. That tool definitely would've been helpful in this case!
One thing to note is that FindMyMac works as the Mac wakes up when asleep and so updates it's location.
If you lose your Mac and power settings are too stringent, location may not show up.
Awesome. Has anyone solved the issue where google websites (google search, gmail, google calendar, and so on) start running incredibly slow using Safari?
Yet again that recommended sleep aid application is a £24.00 a year subscription. I'd have paid £35 for a one off, but alas, I'll read the comments and figure it out another way. I'm so sick of subscription everything.
I have been experiencing this issue, I think it's related to bluetooth, which does appear to be flaky
I have the same issue and it's driving me crazy. One bluetooth device is waking up a MBP M4 regularly during the night, lighting up an external screen. Even without any connected devices.
Conversely, I have a joystick that prevents my Windows desktop from sleeping; thankfully it won't wake it up if I manually sleep it.
Badly behaving peripherals suck.
I guess Apple is ignoring this problem as always? I wanted to contact support couple of times, but I'm sure they would tell me to restart PRAM and SMC. Even though I have Apple silicone and based on their official docs, you don't need to restart it. That's the level of Apple support...
I have an issue where if I’m using iPhone tethering and close the lid it stays awake.
There's a meta-problem here, which doesn't seem to have been discussed. How did the setting change in the first place? The article says:
> Then, seemingly out of nowhere...
> In my case, the “Wake for maintenance” option was disabled...
So presumably the option was originally enabled. Somehow it was disabled, resulting in the battery-draining behavior. Re-enabling it manually solved the problem. Great.
But how did the setting get changed in the first place?
I've noticed this on my Macs (actually mostly the new one; not the old, obsolete ones I still run) as well as various iOS devices. At some point I'll notice some odd, unusual, or different behavior. Hunting around in the settings, I'll sometimes find an option that seems like it should control the behavior. Changing the setting has the desired effect of restoring the former behavior. So what changed it? It's a mystery.
A memorably egregious example was the "do not disturb" setting. I normally have do-not-disturb enabled from 11pm to 7am on my phone so I'm not awakened by notifications. But one night I was awakened at 3am by my phone buzzing, because some random text message had arrived. Huh?!? The next day, working on my Mac, it seemed unusually quiet... maybe a lot of people were on vacation or something. Then I checked Slack and there were a lot of messages pending, questions put to me that went unanswered, and even speculation that I had gone on vacation. What happened? My Mac had somehow set itself to do-not-disturb from 9am to 5pm, which covers most of the workday. And my iOS devices also had do-not-disturb set for the same incorrect time interval. (Well at least I got a lot of work done.)
In this case I suspect iCloud settings synching was the culprit. My conjecture is that I logged into my iCloud account from a new device, and that device's default settings got synched to my other devices. But I'm not entirely sure.
I know I've had other cases where settings seemed to be changed spontaneously. My speculation is that OS updates will change settings. Unfortunately this isn't reproducible, and it happens rarely and with different settings. But it's happened enough times over the past couple years that it seems to be a pattern. Maybe it happened to the OP. Does anybody else experience this?
oh wow, surprised to see that so many people have this issue.. thanks so much for posting this, Sleep aid is super helpful! So far I tried to debug logs with Claude, no luck though..
i had the same issue and my i9 macbook pro was heating within seconds of turning on. some where i found that not using chrome could save a lot of battery.
in this thread, people will blame themselves for an apple bug that punishes people who disable Apple's night update feature.
this is a problem that affects me almost every day, I'm downloading the app hoping it will solve the problem for me too
is this just powernap?
as in `sudo pmset -a powernap 0`?
I'd rather not install an entire desktop app if that's all he's doing
Imagine people who are not technical buying a new mac because of this...
Non technical people would just leave it plugged in and forget the problem existed
Man, I’m not gonna start a platform war but my work laptop (some trashy HP thing) is so much worse. It could be due to the gobs of “Hyper-Endpoint Double-Kill Anti-Virus Defender Enterprise Edition” garbage they installed on it. That thing can’t even make it a full day with the lid closed before running out of battery.
Back in my day they had a physical power switch that killed the mains to the power supply. Why we even had to format our 40mb hard drive and reimagine the box once a week, both way… in the snow! And we liked it that way! Kids these days!
As long as we're reminiscing...
I asked my dad to buy Windows 95. But he didn't realize he bought the floppy disk edition. So I had to install windows 95 using the very slow floppy drive. It was either 13 or 26 floppies, I don't remember.
Imagine sitting there while that percentage bar moved glacially, waiting for "Insert Disk 12"
But I still remember how great it felt to get a 1 GB hard drive. "We'll never fill it up!!!"
What if, hear me out, that’s kind of the goal? It’s not the only trap in the Apple ecosystem that degrades your experience over time. I’m convinced that the main purpose of Podcasts app is to eat up storage.
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