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MacBook Pro Insomnia

manuel.bernhardt.io

31–40 of 238 posts

Re: MacBook Pro Insomnia

#31
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.

Re: MacBook Pro Insomnia

#32

> 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?

[deleted]

Re: MacBook Pro Insomnia

#33

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. Changi…

> 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?

Re: MacBook Pro Insomnia

#34
post #22

Imagine people who are not technical buying a new mac because of this...

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!

Re: MacBook Pro Insomnia

#35
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.

Re: MacBook Pro Insomnia

#36

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…

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.

Re: MacBook Pro Insomnia

#37

https://support.apple.com/en-mn/guide/mac-help/mh40774/mac This seems to be available as a first party config option

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.

Re: MacBook Pro Insomnia

#38

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. Changi…

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…

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.

Re: MacBook Pro Insomnia

#39
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.

Re: MacBook Pro Insomnia

#40

> 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'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
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