13 Ways To Put Your Mac To Sleep

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you thirteen different ways that you can put your Mac to sleep. 

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Now when it comes to putting your Mac to sleep it really depends on which model you have. Much older Macs are going to have two different sleep modes. Display Sleep and  Full Computer Sleep. But more recent Macs, especially if they are from the last few years and running macOS Big Sur, just have one type of sleep. That's usually called Display Sleep. There's really no difference between Display Sleep and actual computer sleep. In some cases they both happen at the same time and in other cases your computer goes to sleep a few seconds after the display goes to sleep. It really doesn't matter for all practical purposes. You could just think of it as putting your Mac to sleep. 

So let's start with some of the most obvious methods for doing this. Of course at any time you could go to the Apple Menu and there's a command for sleep. Also, if you're on a MacBook you can, of course, close the lid on your MacBook. That puts it to sleep. Now how about a keyboard shortcut for doing this. Well, there are actually two but they don't work on the newest Macs. The two keyboard shortcuts are either Command Option and then the Eject Key. On some keyboards it's a power key. Now this doesn't work on Macs that have Touch ID. With Touch ID the Touch ID sensor acts as the power button and the shortcut won't work with that particular type of power button. But if you have an older Mac or a Mac with an external keyboard and you've got either an Eject Key or a Power Button kind of in the upper right hand corner and it's not Touch ID, then Command Option and that Eject Button will put your Mac to sleep.

Also, you can use Control and Shift and the Eject Button to put your Mac to sleep. In the old days Option Command and Eject would put your computer to sleep and Control Shift Eject would be Display Sleep. But since they are the same thing now either one of those keyboard commands works.

So if you have a MacBook Pro if you have Touch ID that means you also have the TouchBar. You could actually add a button for sleep to the TouchBar. So to do that go to System Preferences and then Keyboard and then look for Customize Control Strip in the Keyboard section. Now you have all these extra buttons that you could add to the Control Strip in the TouchBar. One of them right here is Sleep. So you could add that one to the TouchBar and then you've got a button that's conveniently there to put your Mac to sleep. 

But what if you have a Mac that has Touch ID but doesn't have the TouchBar like the MacBook Air or one of the new iMacs. It doesn't seem like there's a way to put your Mac to sleep using just the keyboard. But there are actually two different solutions. One is to lock the screen first. If you go to the Apple Menu you'll see Lock Screen is Control Command Q. You could also press the Touch ID power button with a finger that isn't one of the ones you've registered with Touch ID. Doing that, just a quick press on it, will go to the Lock Screen. Then when you're on the Lock Screen, no matter what method you use to get there, even if you use, say, Fast User Switching and then Login Window. To get to the Login Window quickly tapping the Escape Key on your keyboard will put your Mac to sleep.

You could also set your own keyboard shortcut and I'll show you that in a few minutes. Now a method that works on a lot of Macs, like iMacs, iMacPro, maybe some older MacBooks that have a traditional power button is you can press and hold a power button for 1.5 seconds. Do it for too much longer and you're actually going to force your Mac to shutdown. But just 1.5 seconds will actually put your Mac to sleep. You have to press and hold for 1.5 seconds and then release and then your Mac should go to sleep. 

Now one method, of course, we need to mention is the Automatic Sleep. You go into System Preferences and then you go to either Energy Saver if you've got a Mac that's plugged in like an iMac, or if you have a Mac that's using a battery this will not be energy saver but Battery instead. You go in there and you have Turn Display Off After and this is basically sleep. So you set this to whatever time it is and that's pretty much an automatic sleep when the display goes off. 

Now another thing you could do is set a Hot Corner to go to sleep. To get to Hot Corners go to System Preferences and then go to Mission Control. Then look for the Hot Corners button here. Now you've got four corners on your screen so you could choose one of them, say the bottom right corner, to put Display to sleep. If you select that and then move your cursor down to the bottom right hand corner your Mac will go to sleep. Since the bottom right hand corner is sort of like an absolute destination you can basically just swipe on your trackpad to the bottom right hand corner or quickly move your mouse there. It's a Quick Action. It's impossible to miss the bottom right hand corner so it's really easy to put your display to sleep. If you want to put that with a modifier key you can do that. Simply go to select it but hold the modifier key, like Command down, and you'll see it puts Command there put display to sleep. So now I have to hold the Command key down to use the hot corner.

Now another thing you can do is  have Siri put your Mac to sleep. So just activate Siri the way you normally would, in the case I'm going to use the Menu Bar here but you can use a keyboard shortcut or you could voice activate Siri, and then just ask Siri to go to sleep. Go To Sleep, Okay going to sleep.

Another way to do it with your voice is if you're the accessibility voice control functions. So in System Preferences you could go to Accessibility and then go to Voice Control. You may already be using this for dictation or other things. If you have it enabled one of the commands here is Sleep. You could see it asks your Mac to go to sleep or say Go to Sleep Mac and it will put your Mac to sleep with voice control. 

Now whenever I do a video like this people always seem to ask me is there a way to do it in Terminal and there is. You can use the Shutdown Command to actually put your Mac to sleep. Shutdown can also shutdown your Mac of course. Now you're going to need the Superuser Access so you're going to have to start with sudo and then use  shutdown. Now you don't want to shutdown so you want to do dash s for sleep. Then you have to provide a time. So now would do it right now but you could do plus one to do it in one minute for plus five to do it in five minutes. Things like that. If I do that it's going to prompt me for a password and this of course is real useful if you're writing Shell Scripts and you want to have your Mac go to sleep when the Shell Script is done running. You might be using sudo to activate the entire Shell Script anyway so then you don't need to add it.  sudo shutdown command and you can have a sleep command at the end of your Shell Script. 

Well, if you can do it in Terminal what about in Automator. So there isn't a built-in action for doing this in Automator but you can do it using AppleScript. So I'm going to create a new application here and I'm going to use AppleScript as the only action. All you need to do is to tell application and I'm going to use Finder here to sleep. Now that's all you need to do here. I could Save this as an app. So for instance I could put this in my Application's folder in my User Folder not the System Applications Folder, and I could call it Sleep and then I could use the Application here to simply put the Mac to sleep. But also drag and drop to add that to the Dock. So now I have an Icon in the Dock that will put my Mac to sleep. 

Of course you can also use that to extend any Automator workflow you want. So if you have an Automator workflow that takes several minutes to run you could add this to the end of it to automatically put your Mac to sleep when its done.  

Now I mentioned that there is a way to set your own keyboard shortcut for sleep very handy if you've got a Touch ID Mac and you're really want a straight forward keyboard shortcut for this. So notice in the Apple Menu it's just a Command Sleep here with no keyboard shortcut. Well, you can set a shortcut for any menu command. So let's do exactly that. Let's go to System Preferences and then Keyboard and then Shortcuts and then go to App Shortcuts and I'm going to hit the Plus button here. Keep all applications. Set the menu title to Sleep and the keyboard shortcut to something that won't be used by anything else. I'm going to use Command Control and then the Down Arrow. Then Add that. Now when I look at the Apple Menu notice Sleep has a keyboard shortcut that I could easily use to put my Mac to sleep.

So there's a whole bunch of different methods for putting your Mac to sleep. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.