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Set Desktop Mac to Sleep 1 Hour after Screen is Off
- Thread starter PIX
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I'm not sure about a hot corner, but you can accomplish the other option via pmset. I'm not at my Mac right now but I think you want to set "displaysleep" to e.g. 10 minutes, and then "sleep" to 70 minutes. I appreciate that that might be a bit vague 
Edit: I just looked up the manual. I think "sudo pmset -a displaysleep 10 sleep 70" should do the trick (with the numbers adjusted as relevant, of course).
Edit: I just looked up the manual. I think "sudo pmset -a displaysleep 10 sleep 70" should do the trick (with the numbers adjusted as relevant, of course).
Maybe that is because I am using an Intel Mac and you have an M4. No I was not referring to the "Put hard disks to sleep when possible". What I have under Energy is:
Your M4 may well be different. Also you don't want to copy my settings as I keep this Mac running 24x7. Sorry if I have brought in a confusion.
That’s interesting. Low Power mode for a desktop iMac. I have the iMac M3 and haven’t updated yet, just curious why it would be an option for desktop. Usually it’s for laptops.
Exactly: modifies two power management parameters, namely displaysleep and sleep. The -a (all) says apply to all power settings (battery and mains powered and ups).
The effect is that the display turns off after 10 minutes and the system sleeps after 70 minutes. BUT that is subject to nothing blocking going to sleep.
Also, Macs have multiple sleep states. These do vary between Mac models with significant differences between a) Intel and Apples silicon architecture, and b) between laptop and desktop. This makes advice on the web somewhat tricky to use. The only area where I think I have reasonable knowledge is with Intel MacBooks. My M3 MBP I have mostly left alone.
Even when sleeping, unless you take steps to prevent it, Macs will wake (dark wake) at intervals to carry out scheduled activities. It can also be woken by network activity. The degree of sleep varies, in particular, what is powered down and when. The intention being that any future wake will be as fast as possible, but allowing deeper sleep particularly to prevent battery being depleted too much. The initial stages of sleep, most likely, don't do very much except turn the display off and (I am now guessing) turning of the P cores in an Apple silicon processor.
The command
pmset -g log will give you the history of sleep states. It is not easy to interpret and I would advise only using it on laptops where the battery seems to be running own faster than anticipated.Beyond what is in System Settings, the only documentation is that given by the
man pmset command. Notably this does NOT indicate which parameters are appropriate to each kind of Mac or even if some parameters have no effect on some Macs.That sounds like one for Apple Support (assuming you have not modified settings beyond what is in System Settings).
Yes it's new. I think I first saw it in the 15.1 betas. Maybe that's why I thought it's blue, because it wasn't there. 🙈
It's also in the menu bar if you want:
I am also not sure what it is doing. I always turn it on in the evening when I just listen to some video or audio.
Sometimes I forget to turn it off and it's on the whole day. I don't notice any difference. But I don't do really heavy stuff on my Mac.
About Power Modes on your Mac - Apple Support
Power Modes allow you to tailor your Mac's performance to your workload.
I just updated the iMac M3 and yes I see that setting now. I like that. I like to leave the iMac on all the time because of Home Sharing and ATV access. This is a great feature. Now I want to see if it affect the speed when using Topaz stuff for my projects.
Update: I turned it off. Really does slow down the iMac in low power mode.
Update 2: I turned it back on. It must do dynamic throttling? Running Topaz Video Ai and it's the same speed with it on and when off.... nice.
Eventually after weeks and weeks of messing with it. I turned it off and let the iMac run full speed. It's cool though. The Fans will never ramp up to full speed. Even when I had Topaz Video, Photo and Handbrake doing all sorts of stuff at the same time. Yeah the apps ran a bit slow back and forth but the fan never ramped up to where you can hear it. If I only ran one process hard I would keep it on, but I tend to do several things so full speed it is.
Update: I turned it off. Really does slow down the iMac in low power mode.
Update 2: I turned it back on. It must do dynamic throttling? Running Topaz Video Ai and it's the same speed with it on and when off.... nice.
Eventually after weeks and weeks of messing with it. I turned it off and let the iMac run full speed. It's cool though. The Fans will never ramp up to full speed. Even when I had Topaz Video, Photo and Handbrake doing all sorts of stuff at the same time. Yeah the apps ran a bit slow back and forth but the fan never ramped up to where you can hear it. If I only ran one process hard I would keep it on, but I tend to do several things so full speed it is.
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I had issue with "sleep" function on my M4 Mac mini. It would not remain in sleep after 15-30 min. The wired mouse lit up, the mini internal fan started spinning, and the mini case got warmer after awhile (never got warm when in normal use: very strange). After searching online, it seems this is a common issue (some believe it's the spotlight doing indexing).
I've tried lots of different settings in relation to sleep. In the end, I found the only thing worked for me was to set the "Low Power Mode" and turn all others off in the Energy settings.
The challenge now is to automatically set this "Low Power Mode" just before the Mac goes into the sleep mode, and turns LPM off after waking up. Otherwise, this is going to be too tedious to be a viable solution, unless you permanently set to the LPM, which may cause issues for running some applications, in my case, VMware (for Windows 11).
I've tried lots of different settings in relation to sleep. In the end, I found the only thing worked for me was to set the "Low Power Mode" and turn all others off in the Energy settings.
The challenge now is to automatically set this "Low Power Mode" just before the Mac goes into the sleep mode, and turns LPM off after waking up. Otherwise, this is going to be too tedious to be a viable solution, unless you permanently set to the LPM, which may cause issues for running some applications, in my case, VMware (for Windows 11).
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