MacOS – How to stop the 2013 Macbook Air from putting the computer to sleep

macbook promacossleep-wake

I've been fiddling with my new Haswell macbook air (with Mountain Lion), and there's a difference between the "energy saver" settings on my macbook vs my 2011 iMac. On my iMac, there's a "Computer Sleep" as well as a "Display Sleep" setting, but the macbook air only has "Display sleep":

Macbook Air energy saver settings

When I don't use the computer for an hour or so, I want the display to go to sleep, but the computer should still be on, and shouldn't e.g. disconnect me from my chat sessions. How can I do this?

Thanks for your help.

Best Answer

knodi was close, but pmset sleep 180 does not mean "180 x display sleep time" it simply means 180 minutes.

Before you change any of your pmset settings, I would take note of your current settings. If you enter this line in Terminal.app:

sudo pmset -g live | tee -a ~/Desktop/original-pmset.txt

it will show you the current pmset settings and it will also save a copy to ~/Desktop/original-pmset.txt so you can keep it as a reference.

Manipulating computer sleep time with pmset

If I want my MacBook Air to go to skeep after 60 minutes of idle time when it is plugged into wall/AC power, I can set that using:

sudo pmset -c sleep 60

Similarly,

sudo pmset -c sleep 0

tells my MacBook Air not to put the computer to sleep, even if the display goes to sleep.

If I wanted that same setting for when the MacBook is on battery power (not AC/wall power), then I would use

sudo pmset -b sleep 0

I can also set different sleep times for disksleep and displaysleep

(You can read more about pmset at https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1.html or man pmset in Terminal.)

I would be very interested to know if sudo pmset -c sleep 60 (or whatever value you choose) actually works for a Haswell-based MacBook Air.

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