MacBook Air login screen randomly appears (frequently)

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MacBook Air login screen randomly appears (frequently)

Quoting the original question from bluepencil13

In the last few days my login screen has started appearing randomly (and frequently). The computer doesn't do a full logout and sign-in; once I put in my password, I'm immediately taken back to where I was, even if I was in the middle of writing a text or email or editing a document in Word. There's no warning that this is going to happen; it just does, repeatedly.

I'm not losing anything, other than time and patience. Is this Apple's way of telling me that I need a new computer? ;-)

The computer is a 2017 MacBook Air running Big Sur v. 11.6. Thanks in advance.

Note: I am quoting this here as the original question cannot be replied to due to the limited functioning of this community's organisation. Questions should be kept open, so that they don't have to be repeated, like StackExchange for example, who provide a very good model for support forums.

Posted on Apr 11, 2023 3:47 PM

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polydigm Author

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Apr 11, 2023 4:08 PM in response to polydigm

This happened to me once. I had inadvertently made two changes, most likely at different times and at random, that led to this behaviour in my system settings. One was that a very short screen sleep time had been set for when my laptop was not plugged in to the power and the other was requiring a password to unlock the screen once it had gone to sleep.

The former is set in Battery settings, where you can adjust the screen sleep time separately for battery and for power. The latter is set in Security & Privacy settings, where you can also set a time interval after sleep for when the password will be required. Mine was set to immediately.

Now, if the brightness of your screen is also set to the lowest setting before it blacks out, then you won't be able to get the dimming warning that your screen is about to sleep and with immediate lock set you have to type your password in to unlock it again, which kind of looks like you've been forcibly logged out if you don't know why.

Since then, I have adjusted my screen sleep times to suit me and set the screen lock to come on a couple of minutes after screen sleep, so that if my screen is already on the lowest brightness level, I only have to tap the track pad once to wake my screen back up again, if it happens when I don't want it to.

I hope this helps bluepencil13 if they find it and anyone else with the same problem. I noticed on the original post there were two Me Toos.

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MacBook Air login screen randomly appears (frequently)

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