Reminders app waking mac from sleep

Please everyone, report this bug here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

We need to generate awareness of the issue if Apple is going to solve it. I know this is a very very common problem tons of people are having.

I have the very same problem as so many others here.

What did work for me, setting an immutable flag to `/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist`:

$ sudo pmset sched cancelall
$ sudo chflags schg /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist

$ /bin/ls -lO com.apple.AutoWake.plist

This prevents the system from updating the file and my MacBook no longer wakes to reminder events. Needles to mention that it prevents all scheduled system events like sleep, power-on and such.

I recommend removing the flag before a system update:

$ sudo chflags noschg /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist

Hope this helps at least some of you!

I'm having the same issue on macOS Catalina 10.15.3. Scheduled reminders from the Reminders app (synced between MacBook, iPhone and Watch via iCloud) cause my MacBook to wake up and activate the external monitor.

These are the things I have tried so far and which have not worked:

• Reset NVRAM
• Turn off Power Nap
• Turn on Do Not Disturb settings for "when the display is sleeping", "when display is locked" and "when mirroring to TVs/projectors"
• Turn Do Not Disturb on (master switch)
• Turn off notifications for Reminders altogether

The bug can be replicated easily on a clean install of Catalina:

1. Create a reminder in the Reminders app with a date and time (e.g. 10 minutes into the future)
2. Put your Mac to sleep
3. Your Mac will wake up at the designated time (even though you already got the notification through your iPhone or Apple Watch)

It doesn't respect any Do Not Disturb setting and it doesn't respect any notifications setting. Even turning notifications off completely on the Mac does not help.

I guess most people use their MacBooks without an external monitor and therefore never notice this bug. However, if you have an external monitor connected, it's easily noticeable and quite annoying as the monitor always gets turned on.

By the way, if you open a terminal window and enter pmset -g sched, you can see that these scheduled wakes are created by com.apple.alarm.user-visible-com.apple.remindd.time-alarm.

Hello FUNK1196,

Thanks for posting about the issue you're experiencing on your Mac. I understand that it appears to be waking from sleep unexpectedly.

I recommend checking out some of the suggestions from this link to make sure you've covered them all: If your Mac doesn't sleep or wake when expected

"If your Mac wakes unexpectedly

Your Mac might wake for these activities:

• Network activity that uses the Wake on Demand feature. Examples of network activity include iTunes sharing, photo sharing, printer sharing, file sharing, and using Back to My Mac.*
• Enhanced notifications from FaceTime, Messages, and other apps and services.
• Bluetooth activity. To prevent Bluetooth devices from waking your Mac, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Bluetooth. Click the Advanced Button, then deselect "Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer."

This may help as well:

"If the previous steps don't work

These additional steps may help identify or resolve the issue: 

• Reset the SMC.
• Reset NVRAM.
• Disconnect external devices other than your Apple keyboard, mouse, and display. If that resolves the issue, gradually reconnect your devices, testing each time, until you find the device that is interfering with sleep. Then check the documentation that came with the device, or contact the device manufacturer.
• Start up in Safe Mode to see if the issue is related to non-Apple startup items, login items, or kernel extensions. 
• Try to isolate the issue by using another user account."

If none of the above seems to help in getting to the bottom of the issue, I recommend that you Contact Apple Support next.

Best wishes.

If you are saying that any set reminder should wake the Mac at that time, then I have to disagree with you. First of all it would be stupid to wake the Mac for every reminder that triggered while sleeping and second, Apple have apparently agreed with that until Catalina as no previous version of OSX/MacOS did any such thing.

There's no question that the Mac should NOT wake up from sleep just due to a reminder - the user is after all unlikely to be there to see the reminder, that's why the Mac is asleep. Most likely explanation is that this is simply poor coding in Catalina, but it would be good to know that Apple are aware of the issue.

Hi guys,

Nice work pursuing this so far.

First of all, after some contention around whether or not this issue is a bug or intentional, I have some thoughts and I welcome anyone who considers this NOT to be a bug to please provide a clear, logical argument to each of the following facts.

1) Reminders are silent on iOS when in Do not Disturb mode, and always have been.

2) MacOS provides check-box options in System Preferences to prevent an array of events from waking the computer from sleep, therefore:

i) Checking all of these, logically, should prevent the computer from waking in any situation. If a user wants the computer not to wake for any reason, surely they should have the option for it not to wake for all reasons.

ii) IF it is not a bug, the lack of an option for reminders (or any other event which triggers waking) not to wake the computer when sleeping is an oversight and should be added.

3) The Apple Community Specialist replied and DID NOT argue that this is not a bug, and offered a post containing SOLUTIONS to try.

4) Since this post was created, NO Apple Representative have replied that it is not a bug.

5) I personally have experimented with turning the various options on and off, and I have noticed as I am sure others can replicate, that when Do Not Disturb is turned off, reminders wake the computer and produce a banner notification. When it is turned ON, a reminder will wake the computer, turn on the screen / external display, and yet the banner notification is suppressed. In System Preferences > Notifications > Do Not Disturb, the advice is that "Banners and alerts will be hidden and notification sounds will be silenced". A reminder is a Banner / Alert, therefore, it is CLEAR that the alert is supposed to be suppressed, and that the screen turning on is a bug and an oversight that it should be suppressed.

Ultimately, Do Not Disturb, should ensure the computer remains asleep when it is asleep no matter what alert is occurring. There may well be a perfectly desirable use case for reminders or any other types of alerts to wake the computer, but that should be a selectable option, and it is not.

For now, I switch off my external display at the wall, but I really shouldn't have to just to ensure that my monitor won't be burning itself out all night long. Please offer a clear argument to ALL of the above if you think this is not a bug.

Otherwise, Apple, please fix this issue.

Same issue here -- battery drain overnight. It went from 60% to 3% two nights ago and happening last night too. After doing some digging I noticed that com.apple.alarm.user-visible-com.apple.remindd.time-alarm seems to be waking up the Mac every few secs. I've attached a snippet of the pmset log below. Basically these set of lines repeat all night, even when the lid is shut. Can someone please help?

I also noticed that one scheduled task persists in the System Information > Power > Next Scheduled Events even if I remove it from the reminders app so I'm wondering if this is the issue?

Boot into Safe Mode (How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support) by booting with the Shift key held down and check there to see if the problem persists.  Reboot normally and test again.

NOTE: Safe Mode boot can take up to 10 minutes as it's doing some system cache cleaning, volume verifying and directory repairing. 

Hey all, sorry for the troubles, I’ve had similar issues in the past, according to many posts here, this may coincide with “upgraded reminders”. A fact is that when upgrading reminders, it isn’t specific to one device, yet specific to your Apple ID/iCloud Account, once upgraded, you will need the newer software on ALL your devices for them to sync correctly, this is one of the related articles:

https://support.apple.com/guide/reminders/about-upgraded-reminders-remneacab208/mac

I don’t know if this is even related at all, but reading some replies, it might.

Just curious, for everyone experiencing this:

Of course your Mac is on Mac OS Catalina, but, for the other devices using your Apple ID, e.g. iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, etc., are any one of those devices running an older operating system, or even an older version of the current OS for that device?

If even one of them is not, just wondering if the devices trying to access “upgraded reminders” from devices that can’t access “upgraded reminders” is causing a conflict with that particular device that is, or is not up to date.

I’d say if a clean install has the same result, that may be a factor. Although I haven’t read all the posts, (long one). Has anyone attempted to sign into a different Apple ID to see if it makes any difference? Thanks.

No offense intended. I've not observed any change in Reminders in 13.6.1, nor is any documented. I would suggest that perhaps the update kick-started the iOS/iPadOS 13 alert to "upgrade" your reminders. Perhaps you have a list (or shared list) that wasn't upgraded previously when you installed 13.

My point was that a recent change isn't the cause of problems reported back to October 2019, and in my case, back to May 2020, which is what you seemed to suggest.

What exactly Safe Mode does isn't well documented, however it mainly stops certain software from loading at boot, in addition to cleaning up certain cache files. In practice it tends to not load 3rd party software. Apparently "Reminders/Notifications" are "required" from the reference below...

Safe mode prevents your Mac from loading certain software as it starts up, including login items, system extensions not required by macOS, and fonts not installed by macOS.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262

This is a much deeper dive into Safe Mode:

https://eclecticlight.co/2019/11/08/safe-booting-in-catalina-has-changed/

This morning i verified that the Wake/Unlock problem continues for me. I have no idea why it didn't occur yesterday. I've packed up my log files and uploaded them to Apple. Hopefully this will help get some attention on this.

This zsh lines are just to stop wbc_drain task. I search thru process that match some criteria and force stop them.

if the following command does not display anything, you do not have the wbc_drain issue and what maintain you iMac awake is something else.

pmset -g assertions | grep wbc_drain

one easy way to see if you iMac slept is to use this command

% pmset -g log | grep 'Total Sleep/Wakes since boot'
Total Sleep/Wakes since boot at 2020-04-05 19:01:41 +0200 :35

here this computer sleep/wakes 35 times since its last boot.

annoter interesting diagnostic to do is

% pmset -g log | grep -w --color -e 'Entering Sleep' -e 'Wake Requests' -e 'Client Acks'

This display the sleep/wake sequences.

the sequence is

• Entering Sleep
• Wake Requests, this list all the future wake and who request it and when
• PM Client Acks, got do sleep
• Kernel Client Acks, kernel wake the computer due to the earliest wake Request

e.g.

pmset -g log | grep -w --color -e 'Entering Sleep' -e 'Wake Requests' -e 'Client Acks'
…
2020-04-06 11:42:42 +0200 Sleep               	Entering Sleep state due to 'Maintenance Sleep': Using AC (Charge:0%) 3205 secs 
2020-04-06 11:42:47 +0200 Wake Requests       	[*process=mDNSResponder request=Maintenance deltaSecs=3187 wakeAt=2020-04-06 12:35:54] [process=dasd request=SleepService deltaSecs=112052 wakeAt=2020-04-07 18:50:19 info="com.apple.dasd:0:com.apple.apsd.apprefresh,501:com.apple.mail.ApplicationRefresh"] [process=dasd request=TimerPlugin deltaSecs=19261 wakeAt=2020-04-06 17:03:48 info="com.apple.dasd:0:com.apple.coreduetd.people"] [process=powerd request=UserWake deltaSecs=11833 wakeAt=2020-04-06 15:00:00 info="com.apple.alarm.user-visible-com.apple.remindd.time-alarm,533"]           
2020-04-06 11:42:47 +0200 PM Client Acks      	Delays to Sleep notifications: [com.apple.apsd is slow(1003 ms)] [mDNSResponder is slow(5003 ms)]           
2020-04-06 12:35:55 +0200 Kernel Client Acks  	Delays to Sleep notifications: [powerd is slow(5006 ms)] [AppleDeviceManagementHIDEventService driver is slow(msg: WillChangeState to 2)(439 ms)] [en0 driver is slow(msg: WillChangeState to 0)(419 ms)] [AppleAHCIDiskQueueManager driver is slow(msg: SetState to 0)(904 ms)] [RP01 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 0)(1002 ms)]           
…

Here sleep was requested for 3205 secs @ 11:42:42

5 seconds later the Wake Request was made with earliest Wake at 12:35:54 for some maintenance task.

PM Client did enter in sleep

@12:35:55 Kernel did wake up the computer.

OK, so here is a quick update after a week dealing with Apple Support trying to get to the bottom of this...

1. A Senior Advisor at Apple escalated my issue to their engineers who came back yesterday saying there is currently a sync issue with reminders, this may explain why various reminders do not complete or sync correctly across all of my devices.
2. One of my suggestions as to why I'm having so many problems with reminders I pointed out could be because I'm a heavy user and the shear number of reminders having to be synced may be causing an issue, especially as I have been using Reminders for years pretty much since it was released, and they've been ported from OS to OS including the most recent. significant upgrade at the end of 2019. When I looked, I had almost 20,000 completed reminders.
3. Apple's engineers said they didn't have the power to wipe my reminders remotely and that I was have to painful delete all 20,000 manually, a task I've been doing over the past week. I now have 0 reminders scheduled or completed in my iCloud.
4. Creating a new reminder with an alert time *no longer* wakes my iMac up from sleep (hurrah), however I am still experiencing significant syncing issues. Any new reminder I set on any of my devices (iMac, MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad or iCloud) fail to sync across any of my reminder apps, something is seriously wrong.
5. I have also noticed that despite my notifications being turned on on my iMac, none of them are working across any of my apps, which leads me to believe there is something fundamentally wrong with the notifications on my iMac and maybe it's not just a reminders issue.

To sum up, I'm none the wiser after 2 weeks of testing - without Apple or myself able to get my Reminders and notifications working I find myself seriously considering moving everything to the 'Microsoft To Do' app (formerly Wunderlist) which has raving reviews and seems to be working like a dream over the past week...

They said they already have that checked and still have the issue. I do as well. I’m the OP of the stack exchange post here:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/372375/notifications-from-reminders-wake-screen-in-catalina

Excellent bug report, having the same issue. Sooo... how do we get this fixed by Apple? Currently, I don't see any other way than always shutting down my iMac. I have a lot of Reminders and sleeping my iMac doesn't make sense anymore.