I’d like to prevent my laptop from sleeping while on battery. I used to be able to do this in Energy Saver in previous macOS versions, but Big Sur’s switch to the Battery preferences seems to have also gotten rid of the option to disable sleep while on battery. Is there any way to do this anymore?
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 11.2
Hi Jason,
You can prevent your Mac from sleeping temporarily by giving it some coffe- oops, I mean, by running the caffeinate command in Terminal. To see how caffeinate works, open Terminal, click the Help button at the top of the screen, and search for caffeinate. Choose the man page entry that appears.
To truly prevent your Mac from sleeping while on battery, you'll need to use the pmset command in Terminal. I recommend looking up the pmset man page as described above.
Also, back up your Mac with Time Machine before you try any of this stuff.
Please let me know if you have any questions on how to use pmset or Terminal.
Hi Jason,
You can prevent your Mac from sleeping temporarily by giving it some coffe- oops, I mean, by running the caffeinate command in Terminal. To see how caffeinate works, open Terminal, click the Help button at the top of the screen, and search for caffeinate. Choose the man page entry that appears.
To truly prevent your Mac from sleeping while on battery, you'll need to use the pmset command in Terminal. I recommend looking up the pmset man page as described above.
Also, back up your Mac with Time Machine before you try any of this stuff.
Please let me know if you have any questions on how to use pmset or Terminal.
Hey Jason Lixfeld,
We see you're wanting to prevent your Mac from sleeping when using the battery only. Is Turn display off after: set to "Never" in Apple menu > System Preferences > Battery? If not, change it to never and see if that helps.
Set sleep and wake settings for your Mac
Take care.
Thanks! pmset for the win!
How to prevent MBPR sleeping with macOS11?
