MacBook Pro Insomnia

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?

Computer connected to a dock with monitor is a common use case for a close lid for me.

I see a lot of people plug their macs into an external monitor and keyboard and work with them shut. fwiw.

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.

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.

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?

Can't you effectively check that through the background activity time in the battery usage overview?

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.

Mine defaults to 24h on RouterOS 7.16.x.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Exactly what the author meant to say.

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.

From `man pmset`:

    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.

Thanks! I hope it helps folks as much as it has helped me.

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.

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

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.

This is all far from ideal.

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.

how do you work without iCloud?

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

yes, search for battery