Know More About the Sleep Mode on MacBook Air/Pro/iMac(Ventura&Monterey)

You may have noticed that the Mac display is turned off after a period of inactivity, which means the Mac goes to sleep. After reading this post, you will know more about Mac sleep mode, let's dive into the details.

Mac sleep mode explained

Mac sleep mode is designed to save energy and prevent wear. It usually activates after a certain period(ranging from 1 munites to 3 hours) of inactivity. You can change when Mac goes to sleep based on your case and customize other sleep settings on your notebook/desktop Mac.

Up to now, there are three sleep modes in macOS, sleep, hibernation, and safe sleep. They work in different ways and are applied to different Mac models by default. Here are introductions to different types of sleep modes on MacBook Air/Pro/iMac.

You can find out the sleep mode set to use on your Mac via Terminal, open Terminal from Finder > Applications > Utilities, then type the command below and press the Enter key to run it, then it returns the sleep mode on your Mac such as hibernatemode 3. 

pmset -g | grep hibernatemode

How to put your Mac to sleep or wake it

Instead of being triggered after a period of inactivity, you can also let Mac go to sleep with the following methods and wake up it with ease. Here is how:

Put your Mac to sleep:

Wake your Mac from sleep:

What happens when Mac goes to sleep

The most noticeable sign of sleep mode is that it turns off the display, besides, it switches the processor to energy-saving mode, and halts background operations and hard disk operations. Compared with shutting down and starting up Mac, putting Mac into sleep mode enables you to resume tasks instantly.

When Mac goes to sleep, it deactivates video output, spins down Apple-supplied and third-party hard disks, and turns off or idles linked displays while putting the processor into low-power mode on both desktop and notebook Macs. While, on laptops, it needs to achieve more states for saving energy as much as possible to protect the battery, like:

And if you have enabled power nap on Mac, a feature available on selective Intel Macs with SSD, it also receives Mail, Messages, updates events in Calendar, updates iCloud events, etc, what's more, it further carries out tasks like Time Machine backups and software update downloads when the Mac is charging.

How to customize sleep settings on Mac

You can change when Mac goes to sleep such as setting the Mac to turn off the display when inactive for 20 minutes or so. And if you want to make your Mac always on so that it won't incorrupt some tasks, you can even stop Mac from sleeping. What's more, you can schedule your Mac to sleep or wake up.

All these settings can be changed easily in System Preferences > Battery/Energy Saver on macOS Monterey and earlier. However, with the advent of macOS Ventura, there comes the redesigned System Settings, which brings significant changes. No matter whether the OS on your Mac is Ventura or earlier, you are covered in this post:

Common issue with sleep mode on Mac

You may encounter some problems when you put the Mac to sleep or wake it from sleep, there are some helpful guides that explain the issue and provides effective fixes.