Reminders app waking mac from sleep

Are you sure you have seen this exact issue in MacOS(X) prior to Catalina? Over the years I have extensively used ALL versions of Apple's OS, since well before OSX even, on multiple Macs and since the introduction of Reminders, I have NEVER had a Reminder wake up the Mac - until Catalina. Lately, the exact same Macs have the problem in Catalina but did NOT with earlier versions of MacOS. I have also never heard of anyone else suffering from this pre Catalina either.

If true, it rather puts the problem into a different light as it then seems less likely to be a bug, more an unwanted and unreliable design feature.

I guess we need to establish if others have the same problem pre Catalina, or if, like me, the same Macs that worked correctly (NOT waking for Reminders) only started exhibiting this behaviour after the installation of Catalina.

I can’t comment on the behaviour before Catalina but the timelines certainly point to this occurring post the upgrade. One thing I will say is I’m only receiving this behaviour on one of my Macs (An iMac), my MacBook Pro and Mac Mini (both also on Catalina) do not experience this behaviour.

With that said, I have been experiencing huge issues with reminders syncing across my devices since the Reminder overhaul in September 2019 - so I’m also not ruling it out as being a ‘Reminder’ issue, not simply Catalina

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.

It's disappointing to see that this is one of the Top3 commented issues in the MacOs Catalina area of this discussion board, but Apple is ignoring it since months. Not even a statement from their side to let us know if it's a bug or not...

The usage of my Macbook became really inconvenient as I have attached an external screen, mouse, keyboard and it is always closed under my desk. As I don't want my Macbook to wake up during the night, I shut it down everyday now, which means that I have to open the lid of my Macbook every morning to start it. I know, it's definitely a first world problem, BUT it's so annoying and not what I expect from a premium hardware/software company like Apple. Everything was fine before this occurred with the release of Catalina.

APPLE: Fix this, please!

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?

Yes. But it also clears out a number of temp system, swap and other caches and repairs volumes during the boot. It often fixes a lot of problems due to old or corrupted cache files. It's worth a go.

I am on 10.15.6 - and my computer is woken up by Reminders.

Or does the problem still exist for others even after the (iOS13) Reminders update?

Yes, it does. My situation: I upgraded to iOS13 immediately, upgraded reminders (bad move), and then didn't use reminders on my Mojave machine until one month ago, when I upgraded to Catalina. Since then I have experienced this issue.

Same issue after upgrade to 10.15.2 on an iMac Retina 5K 2019.

PRAM & PMC reset do not help.

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.

Another 'me too' post: I've got an iMac and a MacBook Air. On both, standby worked perfectly until I updated them to Catalina.

Since then, the iMac doesn't go to sleep on it's own at all. I can put it to sleep manually, but it will later wake up for some reason and then stays awake forever.

The MacBook Air seems to wake up from time to time but goes to sleep again afterwards. When it's closed, I used to loose about 3% charge every 24 hours. Now it looses between 10% and 20% a day when it's closed.

This is massively annoying. How could it be that this hasn't been fixed in months?

Well there is numerous legitimate reasons for Mac to not sleep.

here I just wanted to point out that the one due to com.apple.apfsd.wbc_drain, might be legitimate but looks buggy as it never ever stops.

This particular background task does run only on Mac having Fusion drive.

zsh is the new standard shell on macOS Catalina. You paste the code from above in a Terminal session. So you start Terminal.app on your system and paste the code into that window. I didn't try the code neither validate it so follow at your own risk.

It seems to kill a process named UserEventAgent to prevent the Mac from waking up. According to https://www.howtogeek.com/338994/what-is-usereventagent-and-why-is-it-running-on-my-mac/ this process is handling several background tasks thus I don't know if it's a really good idea to kill it all the time.

Hi stéphane66

This is interesting, I have just run this looking back at the dates from last week from before I started shutting down my iMac to prevent it turning on. I have a recurring reminder every morning at 07:45 which obviously also wakes my iMac (as all reminders do). Here is what your command shows in my terminal. I'm not very familiar with Terminal nor what its results are, but can you decipher this to try and identify why it's turning on? After 10 minutes the computer appears to go back to sleep due to being idle which is inline with my power settings...

2020-04-03 07:45:00 +0100 Kernel Client Acks  Delays to Sleep notifications: [powerd is slow(5014 ms)] [AppleDeviceManagementHIDEventService driver is slow(msg: WillChangeState to 2)(361 ms)] [AppleThunderboltNHIType2 driver is slow(msg: WillChangeState to 2)(322 ms)] [BroadcomBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport driver is slow(msg: SetState to 1)(393 ms)] [AppleAHCIDiskQueueManager driver is slow(msg: SetState to 0)(821 ms)]           

2020-04-03 07:45:09 +0100 Kernel Client Acks  Delays to Wake notifications: [AppleHSBluetoothDevice driver is slow(msg: SetState to 1)(302 ms)] [AppleHSBluetoothDevice driver is slow(msg: SetState to 1)(302 ms)] [AirPort_BrcmNIC driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(382 ms)] [en0 driver is slow(msg: DidChangeState to 2)(595 ms)] [AMDFramebufferSI driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(480 ms)] [AppleHDADriver driver is slow(msg: SetState to 1)(461 ms)] [AppleSDXCSlot driver is slow(msg: SetState to 3)(5109 ms)] [AppleAHCIDiskQueueManager driver is slow(msg: SetState to 3)(8180 ms)]           

2020-04-03 07:56:14 +0100 Sleep               Entering Sleep state due to 'Idle Sleep': Using AC (Charge:0%) 20 secs   

I disagree.

I can be sitting close to my mach in an armchair reading a book and thus the Mac is asleep, however I would like the reminder to remind me that I need to get catch my daughter at airport, and need do some task or whatever.