Zombie-MacBook Wakes Itself up from Sleep
For the longest time, I was sending my laptop to “hibernation” mode every night. Why? Not because I particularly mind the minute power consumption it might have while sleeping, but because it would randomly wake up during the course of the night. My “zombie laptop” would particularly annoy me because it’d log back into my messaging service in my absence (thus prompting people to think I am awake at 3 a.m.), get unnecessarily warm (due to its being closed), and when I opened it back up, it’d not switch its monitor back on (due to a feature that OS X calls “clamshell mode”).
Today, I had enough, and after a little more googling, I stumbled across a comment in a macosxhints article mentioning Bluetooth settings: Apparently, there’s a setting for letting bluetooth devices power your Mac up from sleep. As I have a bluetooth-based wireless Mac keyboard, I tried out switching that setting off — and long story short, it seems to have worked.
If you have the same problem, uncheck the following box in System Settings / Bluetooth / Advanced Settings to give it a shot:
Happy zombie-Mac killing!
Interesting to know, but this seems to not be the reason why my Macbook is a zombie…
That’s too bad. Make sure to check the other suggestions in the macosxhints article I linked to. Both a USB device and something ethernet-related are interesting options as well.
We’ve struggled with this a lot with my wife’s iMac. I have read so many different accounts of how to fix it, and none of them work for very long. We too have a wireless mouse and keyboard, and we’ve tried turning them off, or removing them from range, etc. to see if they were to blame. What I’ve found most frustrating about this is that it happens randomly. I check the system logs and can see the computer wake, but not easily tie it to anything. I have noticed that it happens more when there are updates pending. But I’m not sure that’s it either.
It’s frustrating, and I feel for you.
It would indeed be helpful if at least the system log indicated what the wake-up trigger was. Just saying “system woke up” isn’t exactly helpful for diagnosing the problem
I had the same problem – and turning off my bluetooth mouse when I shut the Macbook fixed it. I’d been wondering about the screen staying off though, clamshell mode makes perfect sense.
Thanks for the info. I’ll have to give this a try when I’m in the presence of my macbook again. The zombie macbook thing is pretty obnoxious.
Thanks for the info, my mac kept doing the same thing, waking up every hour.