hoakley December 14, 2019 Macs, Technology

Why does my Mac keep waking up?

A few Mac users have recently been complaining that their MacBooks/Pros/Airs keep waking from sleep. The end result is that when they do want to use them again, perhaps the following morning, their batteries are partially discharged – more than they should had they remained asleep.

Sleep itself can be prevented by the following:

Network activities which wake the Mac (see below).
Processes which prevent sleep. You can discover those by opening Activity Monitor, switching to its Energy tab, and clicking once on the head of the list Preventing Sleep. Processes listed as Yes at the top will prevent your Mac from sleeping, and need to be quit for that to occur.

The following events and activities can wake a Mac which is already asleep:

Network activities which wake the Mac, including various types of sharing. Check the Sharing pane doesn’t make that Mac a ‘server’ for any of these, and disable Wake on Demand (see below).
Notifications (see below).
Bluetooth activity, typically other Bluetooth devices trying to connect. To fix this, open the Bluetooth pane, click on the Advanced… button, and uncheck the last item, to Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer.
Opening the lid of a recent laptop model or connecting it to mains power, which automatically wake it.

Apple explains in detail the Wake on Demand system which allows connecting clients to wake a sleeping Mac which is sharing to them, in this article, now sadly archived. In addition to ensuring that your Mac isn’t offering a sharing service which could wake it up, open the Energy Saver pane and uncheck the item Wake for network access.

The most common problems now are notifications, which seem to come from every man and his dog, many of which don’t appear entirely under your control. The better apps are listed in the Notifications pane, but when you view their settings, there’s no control to suppress or mute them during sleep.

The best way to ensure that your Mac doesn’t get woken up by notifications is using the Do Not Disturb (DND) settings at the top of the list at the left. Tick (enable) DND to be turned on:

When the display is sleeping,
When the screen is locked (10.15 only),
When mirroring to TVs and projectors.

Ensure that the bottom two boxes are unchecked, or they will allow your Mac to wake for:

calls from anyone,
repeated calls.

dnd

Then all notifications should be suppressed when your Mac is asleep, except for those of Find My Mac, which you do still want to work.

If your Mac continues to wake when it should be asleep, then the only reliable way to establish what is happening is to browse your log, using Consolation 3 to identify the event which caused it to wake. If you don’t know exactly when that happened, that can get tedious.

12Comments

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1

Michael Bach on December 14, 2019 at 9:21 am

Dear Howard:

Small but beautiful! Yes, that has affected me occasionally and I never dug down deep enough to get rid of it completely. Now following you advice and looking forward to undisturbed sleep :).
A wee little tidbit:
Energy Saver>Wake for network access
only appears in the “Power Adapter” tab, so I’d assume it is switched off regardless when sleeping on battery.

Thanks & best, Michael

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- 2
  
  hoakley on December 14, 2019 at 9:39 am
  
  Thank you.
  Unfortunately the Energy Saver pane varies so much by model and version of macOS that I hesitate to make any general conclusions as to which controls appear where, but yes, Wake for network access should be disabled when on battery.
  I now await the first person to tell me that it’s still available on their Mac!
  Howard.
  
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3

John Gilbert on December 14, 2019 at 10:18 am

I am not confident that unchecking boxes (as in the linked Apple article) is sufficient to control waking up. I have found that I need to need to use the pmset command to control things. Otherwise the Mac quietly wakes up during the night. The purpose for this is unfathomable as I can’t understand why macOS thinks I want to check email (amongst other things) all night long whilst I (and the Mac) are supposed to be asleep.

My experience with my MacBook 2016 which consumed too much battery overnight:

To see what was going on, one of more of these Terminal commands:
pmset -g log | grep -e “Wake from” -e “Dark Wake”
pmset -g log | grep -e “due”
pmset -g log | egrep ‘\b(Sleep|Wake|Start)\s{2,}’

And then use pmset -b commands change sleep settings. The most important being:

sudo pmset -b tcpkeepalive 0

This stops the frequent wakes during the night to check mail, etc.

I have also tweaked standbydelayhigh and standbydelaylow, but these are less important.

I apologise that I didn’t use Consolation3 to discover this. 🙂

References I have found useful, though now :
https://appletoolbox.com/how-to-fix-macos-mojave-battery-draining-issue though I did not modify hibernate mode as it suggests – I have left it at 3. It has had a few updates since I first read it.
https://www.dssw.co.uk/reference/pmset.html as reference for pmset and easier to read than man pmset.

The tcpkeepalive fix has worked for me under both Mojave and Catalina.

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- 4
  
  hoakley on December 14, 2019 at 10:56 am
  
  Thank you.
  pmset is a very powerful and incredibly complex command, which suffers from woefully inadequate documentation. Power management and sleep behaviour vary considerably between different models, and discovering what works is largely a matter of trial and error. Apple knows full well what its SMCs do, and it is disgraceful that it fails to inform developers or users of how to solve problems such as these.
  Unfortunately, I hesitate now to recommend the use of pmset to regular Mac users, as every time that I mention it I get comments which reveal how few understand it, and how easy it is to get badly wrong.
  Recently, there has been a spate of problems resulting not from network activity but from notifications, particularly Reminders. I don’t think that pmset has anything to offer there, which is the main direction of this article.
  But yes, if they aren’t notifications which are causing waking, pmset can be invaluable if you know what you’re doing with it. If you don’t, then it’s better left well alone.
  Howard.
  
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- 5
  
  oarratia on April 26, 2020 at 4:12 pm
  
  Please make sure you use straight single and double quotes. This article displays them as smart quotes and that won’t work if you do copy and paste.
  
  These commands (although they yield to the same result at least in my case) do show why the computer has been woken up and at what time.
  
  Great resource, thank you!
  
  LikeLiked by 1 person
6

Valdo on December 14, 2019 at 11:23 am

Shut dow?

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- 7
  
  hoakley on December 14, 2019 at 11:03 pm
  
  Yes, you can shut your Mac down instead of letting it sleep. That doesn’t fix the problem, and most laptop users prefer sleep to shutting down so that starting up again is so much quicker and simpler.
  Howard,
  
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8

David Charlap on December 16, 2019 at 7:07 pm

Another culprit is USB devices that don’t play nice with macOS. For instance, I’ve got an old (OK, very old) Macally “imedia” USB keyboard. When it is attached to a laptop, that laptop won’t stay asleep. Every time it is put to sleep (whether via timeout, menu command or closing the lid) it will wake up a few seconds later.

I’ve also got a few external USB hard drives that create this problem. Interestingly, when connected via these drives’ FireWire ports, there is no problem.

So, when trying to diagnose a “keeps waking up” problem, you may want to start by disconnecting all external devices. If that works, add them back one at a time to see which is causing the problem. Once you’ve found it, go look for firmware or driver updates for the device – no guarantees, but if you’re lucky, that will fix the problem. Otherwise, you might have to swap that device for something else.

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- 9
  
  hoakley on December 16, 2019 at 10:04 pm
  
  Thanks – yes, a good point, although in most cases of users putting laptops to sleep, it is most critical when they don’t wake if they are running on battery power alone, which is less likely when hooked up to peripherals. The most common scenario is the user shutting the case, putting it away, then the following morning discovering the battery is already running low.
  Howard.
  
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10

Chris on December 18, 2019 at 6:27 pm

Thank you so much for the tip about notifications! For years I have been plagued with our various Macs not staying asleep, especially overnight. I had never considered that notifications might be the cause (nor had I seen it suggested anywhere else). Since setting Do Not Disturb all our Macs now sleep soundly every night. Fantastic!

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- 11
  
  hoakley on December 18, 2019 at 8:30 pm
  
  Thank you for letting me know. A few people have had this issue, the inspiration for this article.
  Howard.
  
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12

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