If there’s one thing that MacBook owners always want more of, without doubt, it’s battery life. Even though the latest MacBooks can give you up to 11 or 12 hours of web browsing or video playback, the more you use your Mac the more your battery capacity will gradually decrease, until you’ll eventually have to keep it plugged in practically all the time.
Sep 16, 2021 Will a download continue in sleep mode? The fact of the matter is that no, a download will not continue whilst your laptop is in sleep mode. This is because whilst it’s in sleep mode, your laptop is trying to conserve energy, so it won’t continue with any active downloads. On your Mac, choose Apple menu System Preferences, then click Energy Saver. Open Energy Saver preferences for me. Do any of the following: Set your Mac to go to sleep and wake up at a specific time: Click Schedule in the bottom-right corner, then select the options you want to use. See Schedule your Mac desktop computer to turn on or off. Set the amount of time your computer or display.
The good thing is there are quite a few third-party tools that let you extend your battery life and, by default, your Mac comes with some great solutions for preserving your battery for as long as possible too. One of them is Sleep Mode.
Let’s explore what Sleep Mode on Mac is, how to use it, and how to prevent Mac from sleeping when you need it to be turned on at all times.
What’s Sleep Mode On Mac?
You’ve probably noticed that when you don’t use your Mac for a minute or two, the display would become slightly dimmed. Your screensaver will then be activated shortly and probably stay on for another 10 minutes. Finally, the screen will go completely black. That’s Sleep Mode.
Sleep Mode essentially stops all your visible Mac activity but keeps the vital processes going. That’s how it differs from a complete shut down. In Sleep Mode, your Mac is still able to check your Mail app in the background, for example. And once you click on the screen or hit any key, the computer will wake up instantly, without any loading process.
Generally, Sleep Mode works perfectly for what it’s intended to do: saving battery while you’re away from your MacBook. Sometimes, however, it could interfere with what you’re doing. For example, you could be comparing a spreadsheet with a physical report or try to draw something from your MacBook screen. Using your keyboard to wake your Mac up could be annoying, especially if your screen auto-locks as well.
So how to keep Mac from sleeping? There are a few ways.
How to stop Mac from sleeping with Energy Saver
Will Downloads Continue In Sleep Mode Mac
Since Sleep Mode is one of the built-in features on your Mac, you can control how it’s activated as well. To do so, there’s an option in your System Preferences called Energy Saver.
Energy Saver separates similar functions in two categories: Battery and Power Adapter. There’s a slider for inactivity time after which the screen will be turned off and a few checkboxes:
- Put hard disks to sleep when possible
- Slightly dim the display while on battery power
- Enable Power Nap while on battery power
- Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off (Power Adapter only)
The options are pretty self-explanatory. Power Nap means allowing your Mac to back up to Time Machine and check email, calendar, and iCloud while asleep. It’s recommended that you keep all the boxes checked to preserve your battery.
But if you’re wondering, “Why does my Mac keep going to sleep?” It’s only because the “Turn display off after” slider is set to some specific time. The easiest way for how to stop your Mac from sleeping is to move that slider all the way to the right (in Battery and Power Adapter tabs) to Never and click OK when asked to confirm.
How to seamlessly control Mac sleep
While you now know how to stop Mac from sleeping by using Energy Saver, it’s not the best option when you only want your Mac not to sleep for the next hour, for example, but act in normal, battery-friendly mode the rest of the time. Coming back to the Energy Saver menu and tweaking the slider every time is just too burdensome.
Lungo is like a shot (or a few) of espresso for your Mac. This simple utility lives in your menu bar and is the perfect answer for how to change sleep time on Mac. Just click on its icon and choose the time for which you wish to keep your Mac awake, whether it’s 10 minutes, four hours, or indefinitely. You can stop the app at any time as well by clicking on its icon again and selecting Deactivate. Now you don’t need to launch Energy Saver at all.
How to prevent Mac from sleeping with Terminal
Another default way to fine-tune when your Mac goes to sleep and when it doesn’t is by using Terminal:
- Open Terminal from your Applications folder
- Type caffeinate -d to prevent your Mac from sleeping
- Press Enter to activate
Here are some other commands you can run instead:
- caffeinate -i will cancel idle sleeping
- caffeinate -m will stop the disk from going idle
- caffeinate -s will keep your Mac awake while it’s plugged in
- caffeinate will prevent your Mac from going to sleep while Terminal is running or until you press Control + C
- caffeinate -t 1800 (or any number) will make sure your Mac is awake for the number of seconds you specified
All commands will stay active for as long as the Terminal session is running.
How to schedule sleep on your Mac
If you’re using your Mac as a data dashboard or other real-time monitoring solution daily, you also have an option of setting your MacBook sleep and active times using a predefined schedule.
Here’s how to turn off sleep mode on Mac at certain times:
- Launch Energy Saver from System Preferences
- At the bottom, click Schedule…
- Check the box for “Start up or wake”
- Select Sleep, Restart, or Shut Down from the dropdown
- Pick the frequency and set the exact times as needed
- Click OK
Now you won’t have to remember to manually adjust your Mac’s sleep and awake settings. But since your Mac is going to be using its battery more actively now, you’ll also benefit from a solution that will extend the length of its cycles.
Endurance is an automatic MacBook battery enhancer. With no input from your side, it magically grants your MacBook up to 20% longer life on every battery cycle. Endurance does so by tweaking some energy-intensive but non-vital aspects of your Mac, such as dimming the display slightly, turning off Turbo Boost, hiding background apps, pausing certain services, and so on. You can simply set Endurance to turn on as soon as your battery level drops below a certain percentage and then just forget about it.
How to completely optimize your Mac
While knowing how to keep Mac from sleeping and extend its battery life using Endurance is great, you can also make your Mac more energy-efficient by getting rid of everything that clogs its systems and overloads its CPU. Think of all the cache files, user logs, launch agents, mail attachments, and uninstalled applications that drag your Mac performance down. Good news is you can get your Mac back in shape in just one click.
CleanMyMac X is the world’s leading optimization software for your Mac. It not only scans your system and optimizes the use of your Mac’s resources but also identifies any malware, updates your software, and suggests which files you might want to delete based on the last time you’ve used them. In other words, it’s a complete and user-friendly optimization solution at your fingertips.
As you can see, learning how to change sleep time on Mac isn’t difficult. You can do so manually with Energy Saver or Terminal or you can use Lungo as an automated solution. Just don’t forget to get Endurance to extend your battery life and optimize your system with CleanMyMac X.
Best of all, Lungo, Endurance, and CleanMyMac X are available to you absolutely free for seven days via a trial of Setapp, a platform with more than 190 outstanding Mac apps for every daily task on your mind. Try them all at no cost and see how much more productive you can be!
You might have noticed that your Mac falls asleep quite fast as soon you stop actively interacting with it. Even if you didn’t mean to finish working on your computer, your Mac can fall asleep on you if it detects that you’re not using it. It gets even worse when you’re running it on battery power only.
That happens because your Mac is using every chance it has to preserve energy and save battery life. While that sounds like a good thing, it can be rather annoying, like when your Mac decides to go into sleep mode while you’re downloading something and you have to start all over again.
Luckily, there are a couple of ways to block the sleep mode on your computer and prevent your Mac from sleeping.
Why Block Sleep Mode on Your Mac
One obvious reason why you might want to block your Mac’s power saving mode is if it starts interrupting active tasks. For example, you start a download and go to sleep expecting to wake up to a finished download. Instead, your Mac falls asleep at the same time as you do and the download’s cancelled.
Another occasion could be when you leave your computer for just a few minutes, expecting to come back and continue working straight away. Instead, you come back to your Mac in sleep mode and have to interrupt your schedule to bring it back to life.
Whatever your reason may be, it’s always useful to know a few tricks to stop your computer from sleeping.
How to Prevent Your Mac From Sleeping
There are a few different methods you can use to temporarily stop your Mac from sleeping. If you’re looking for more functionality, download a utility or a third-party app that will allow you to control your Mac’s sleep mode better. If you don’t want to bother installing new software, try one of the following built-in methods.
Use Mac’s Energy Saver
Energy Saver is a built-in tool on your Mac that you can use to customize your computer’s sleep mode.
Using Energy Saver, you can set the exact time when your computer goes to sleep after you stop using it, both on battery and when using a power adapter. You can set the time for as soon as 1min, to 3hrs, to Never. The latter means disabling your computer’s automatic sleep mode completely.
The best part of Energy Saver is a function called Power Nap. When Power Nap is enabled, your Mac can automatically backup using Time Machine, as well as check for new email and calendar alerts while sleeping. If you’re connected to a power adapter, your Mac can also turn off the screen without activating sleep mode.
To access Energy Saver, go to your System Preferences > Energy Saver.
You’ll also find it in the drop-down menu under the battery icon in the upper-right corner of your screen.
If you just want to set your Mac to sleep and wake up at a certain hour, select Schedule in the bottom of the Energy Saver window and set the times.
Use the Terminal Command
If you don’t find Mac’s Energy Saver efficient, you can use Terminal as an alarm clock for your computer to solve the sleep mode problem.
To open Terminal, go to Applications >Utilities folder. Alternatively, use the keyboard shortcutCmd (Command) + Space and search for Terminal in Spotlight.
Once you open the Terminal window, type caffeinate into it and press Enter. This will keep your Mac awake as long as you have that Terminal window open. You can minimize or hide it, and that won’t affect your Mac’s blocked sleep mode.
To turn sleep mode back on, either Quit Terminal or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+ C to terminate the command.
Use the Amphetamine Keep-Awake Utility
If you’re looking for more control over your Mac’s sleep mode, try a Mac app called Amphetamine. You can download it for free from the App Store. It will then appear as a little pill icon in the upper-right corner of your screen.
You can later customize the icon to look like an owl, anything coffee-related, sun and moon, emoji, and even your own custom image.
Do Downloads Continue In Sleep Mode Mac Computer
The app’s menu is pretty straightforward and easy to navigate. On top of the standard keep-awake functionality, Amphetamine offers you to control your Mac’s sleep mode using various triggers.
For example, your computer won’t go to sleep while an app is running or a file is downloading. You can set up a whole panel of custom Triggers to take full control over your Mac’s sleep mode.
Use the Caffeine App
The Caffeine app is truly “old but gold”. It’s a free, simple anti-sleep app that’s been around for years.
To activate Caffeine on your Mac, download it and move it to your Applications.
Next, the app will ask you to give permission to control your computer.
After you do that, all you need is to press the coffee cup icon that will appear in your Mac’s ribbon menu on top of the screen. Press the cup icon again to disable it. The beauty of this app is its simplicity.
Additionally, you can set Caffeine to automatically activate at lunch or at login. The duration also varies from as little as 5min to Indefinitely.
Learn to Control Your Mac’s Sleep Mode
When experimenting with your Mac’s sleep mode, make sure to pay attention to which settings you’re changing and which utilities you’re using. Otherwise, you might find yourself searching for a way to put your Mac to sleep the next time.
Have you ever had to prevent your Mac from sleeping? Which method did you use? Share your Mac lifehacks with us in the comments below.