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.

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.

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 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.

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.

   pmset -g assertions

(`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)

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?

Running ripgrep on / would use 1 core, with the remaining 11 at 100% from the probe service...

> 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

Editing after composing is tricky, to catch such issues.

Mine's set to "Only on Power Adapter", which makes sense.

Edit: On an M4 MacBook Air running macOS 26 DB

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.

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.

Fyi, you may want to use Keyboard Maestro to do that automatically...

   To lose by a nose.

   The noose is loose.

Removing Yubikey before (or after) closing the lid completely prevents total battery drain for me.

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.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102888

Get a semi-new Apple laptop and then let us know how terrible the power management is.

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.

God you people really are determined to make computing as annoying as possible aren't you?

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.

What were you hoping to achieve by doing that?

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?

Closed source OSes are such a bane.

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...

> ioreg -r -k AppleClamshellState -d 4 | grep AppleClamshellState | head -1

“Power Nap” was an Intel-specific setting and isn’t shown on Apple Silicon Macs.

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.

That would make it much clearer that enabling it = fewer wakes.

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.

BTW, Amphetamine isn't open source, just freeware.

That’s built in, “man caffeinate”.

If that works you can try to isolate it further.

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.

> 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

`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.

I have no idea what this means. Could you say more about it?

What does this mean?

Badly behaving peripherals suck.

I'd wager all of the improvements are from the silicon itself and not anything Apple has done with macOS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is all far from ideal.

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.

    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.

Yes, I realize alternatives exist, but this works so smoothly on Apple devices.

    sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1

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.).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Another option might be another section for apps preventing sleep, like power hungry applications.

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.

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.

I mean, switching to Airplane mode is another thing worth trying.

As is rebooting the phone.

If logging out of iCloud does NOT fix the problem, you eliminated a bunch of potential issues at once.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Extremes of any sort generally aren't good. You fucked around and you found that out.

An indicator and selective overrides is the way, IMHO. Invisible if you don't look, but it's there when you need it.

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.

now we essentially have sleep++ and no option to set it back to vanilla sleep.

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).

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

I thought this was a solved issue. How are all OSs suddenly so bad at this? I only really trust on and off anymore.

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.

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.