It’s weird, whether I’m plugged in or not, my MacBook Air seems to keep running and checking email even when it’s supposed to be asleep. How can I stop this and disable this [ed: “Power Nap”] feature?
Some while back in the evolution of Mac OS X Apple’s development team decided to subtly change what it meant to “sleep” your computer and that went from being basically a power down feature that had the benefit of a very fast wake-from-sleep time to one where things were still happening even though you thought your computer was asleep.
Well, perhaps that’s not entirely how it happened, because just about every modern Mac OS X system has included “Wake from sleep for network access” for a long time, and the computer had to be listening to know when that request had happened in the first place, right?
However it evolved, Mac OS X now has what’s called Power Nap, a feature where even though your MacBook Air, iMac or other Apple computer is ostensibly asleep, it still wakes up sporadically to run administrative tasks including, yes, checking for new email. Can be very weird if you’re not used to it, but it’s easy to disable if you want.
To start, go to System Preferences… off the Apple menu. On the main System Preferences window you’ll see this row of icons:
Choose Energy Saver to proceed and it’ll show you how things are configured when you’re running on battery power:
I would definitely recommend that you leave “Power Nap” disabled when you’re running on battery power, in case you otherwise forget and your computer consumes all the battery while you think it’s safely in sleep mode.
The option is at the bottom of the window, labeled “Enable Power Nap while on battery power” and the description supplied by Apple for this feature is:
While sleeping, your Mac can periodically check for new email, calendar, and other iCloud updates
So on battery power, uncheck it.
Then click on the Power Adapter option near the middle of the window to see what your settings are for when you’ve got your computer plugged in. On an iMac or similar desktop system, you probably won’t have a “Battery” setting, of course.
On Power Adapter, I enable Power Nap personally, because I find it useful to have my computer continue to run low-energy administrative tasks while it’s otherwise closed and asleep. I also tend to adjust my Computer Sleep and Display Sleep times to be longer, as you can see. Your settings may vary.
In any case, that’ll disable Power Nap if you so choose. Now choose wisely, Neo. 🙂
Even without Power Nap, my computer still checks mail.
Mine too, and it keeps eating battery. My old mac could go for days with the lid closed. This one depletes the battery when on sleep mode in a day.
Me too. I can’t figure out how to get it to really sleep. It even auto-pairs with bluetooth when its supposed to be asleep. Power Nap and wake for admin access are both off. So annoying.