MacOS – Sleep timeout missing from the energy saver preferences

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I have two Macbook Pros running on Yosemite. The first one is a 17 incher from 4 years ago. I'm able to set the time that it sleeps. The second one is a 15 incher retina made this year. In its energy saver section, I don't see a way to set the sleep time. It only shows the display time. How do I make both slider controls show up on this new Macbook Pro?

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Best Answer

Deliberately Removed

Apple have removed the Computer slider from the Energy Saver settings. This is deliberate.

The decision is related to Apple's introduction of improved hardware, Power Nap support, and the engineers' belief that OS X is best placed to manage the computer's power state.

If you would like to see this slider return, provide feedback to Apple.

Downloads and Other Long Running Tasks

OS X will stay awake during most long running tasks.

The behaviour will depend on the software downloading the file. Safari and Transmission, for example, both ask OS X to stay awake while a download is ongoing.

Applications need to lodge power assertions with OS X that explicitly stop the computer sleeping. You can see these assertions using the following pmset command:

pmset -g assertions

For older software, you can add this behaviour using the built-in command line tool caffeinate.

Third Party Alternatives

Third party tools exist to supplement the Energy Saver settings. I created Power Manager and it can put your Mac to sleep after inactivity.

Other tools exist and you could probably create a script to also recreate this behaviour.

Related Solutions

MacBook – Does the hard disk sleep setting in Energy Saver affect drives in the optical drive bay

Yes it does. The OWC blog talks about this and shows a terminal tip to set spin-down time to a shorter delay, saving a bit more power.

When you think about it the disk is still on the SATA bus - no reason it shouldn't spin down. I don't think you can address each drive individually though.

A cumbersome solution is to eject the disk when you no longer need it. But then you can't unplug/replug it like you would for an external drive. To remount it, in terminal you would do:

diskutil list

diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk1

I experimented with my Time Machine drive to see if this works. Your optical bay drive may well be /dev/disk1, but that's why you did diskutil list - to see what its identifier is.

(Rebooting will remount the drive too, if you forget the diskutil command)

MacOS – How to not let the system sleep when putting display to sleep with Ctrl+Shift+Eject in Mountain Lion

Realised I answered a dupe of this here: How can I download something with display turned off (Ctrl+Shift+Eject)?

My answer to that question below:

I always use this combo as well, however this does not immediately sleep my machine in ML.

I believe this is a separate issue at play here. According to Siracusa's ML review, unlike in previous OS X versions, in 10.8 your system is eligible for sleep immediately upon "user inactivity" (the inactivity delay being set in your energy saver settings) unless the currently running apps make "power assertions".

In this case, that key combo is signalling to the OS that "user inactivity" should be triggered right away. In such a case, if your particular app that's downloading stuff does not make power assertions, your system will sleep.

I have come across the same issue generally (not necessarily related to triggering the screen sleep combo). See: Mountain Lion sleeps too aggressively