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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!"
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/
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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'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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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 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 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
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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 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!
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.
Awesome. Has anyone solved the issue where google websites (google search, gmail, google calendar, and so on) start running incredibly slow using Safari?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!!!"
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.
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> 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?
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Computer connected to a dock with monitor is a common use case for a close lid for me.
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I see a lot of people plug their macs into an external monitor and keyboard and work with them shut. fwiw.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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)
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 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?
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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.
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.
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.
“ 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.
didn't know about the "Preventing sleep" column. thanks! useful stuff
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 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.
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.
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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.
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Woah just found out my router (mikrotik) defaults to 10 minute lease durations.
Mine defaults to 24h on RouterOS 7.16.x.
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.
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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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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Exactly what the author meant to say.
I'm confused too. Does enabling a setting that explicitly wakes up the computer cause fewer wakeups?
Counter-intuitive statements deserve either expansion or, at the least, identification as such.
Editing after composing is tricky, to catch such issues.
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’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!
Can you explain what this does?
From `man pmset`:
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.
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
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/
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
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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…
In my case the culprit is always all the security spyware/crapware that my employer has installed on the macbook.
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...
100% my experience too. The crapware also slows down the machine considerably.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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 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'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'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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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 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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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...
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:
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.
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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 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.
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The Apple Community moderators would have you believe you're using the built-in pizza stone function wrong.
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!
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.
Awesome. Has anyone solved the issue where google websites (google search, gmail, google calendar, and so on) start running incredibly slow using Safari?
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.
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 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?
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
this is a problem that affects me almost every day, I'm downloading the app hoping it will solve the problem for me too
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.
in this thread, people will blame themselves for an apple bug that punishes people who disable Apple's night update feature.
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
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.
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!!!"
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