Ways To Put Your MacBook To Sleep

Putting your MacBook to sleep it critical when you are not using it, even for a few minutes. There are many ways to quickly and easily put it to sleep, from keyboard shortcuts to gestures to physical actions. Find one that works for you to get the most from your MacBook's battery.

Video Transcript: Understanding Sleep is very important if you're using a MacBook in particular because Sleep mode is going to save battery power. So when you're not plugged in having your Mac Sleep as much as possible when you're not using it is very important. 
So let's start by looking at System Preferences here. Under Energy Saver you've got your Settings. You have two different sets here: Battery and Power Adapter. The one you want to be most concerned about is when you're on Battery. You can see there is not set time to go to sleep. You don't even see the word here in this slider. It used to be you would see a sleep time here or maybe two. Like one for display and one for putting the entire computer to sleep. 
Sleep has several different stages in Mac OS Sierra. The main one is to turn the display off. That uses a lot of battery power. It has to light that whole thing up. So having it set to turn off the display after a certain amount of time, maybe just a few minutes with not using your computer, is very important. It's going to save a lot of battery power. 
With the display off all you need to do is tap the space bar and it comes back on instantly. It's very easy to continue working even if you're writing and you're pausing to think it is very easy to have your screen just go off, save some battery power while you're thinking, hit the space bar and continue typing. 
You also have this check box here, Put Hard Disk to Sleep When Possible. This makes sense for it not to send power to the hard drive if you aren't using it then. So it will kind of do it in a smart way. It doesn't take long for a hard drive to start up again. Just a fraction of a second. So you won't even notice this if you keep it on but it will save a lot of power. Also have the screen dim here. A lot of power saving options here. But basically having the screen go off after two minutes of nonuse is not going to actually put your Mac completely to sleep. But it will save a lot of battery power. 
There are other ways that you can do this. One way is to tap the power button on your MacBook and just by pressing it you should be putting your Mac to sleep by default. You can also go to the Apple menu here and go to Sleep and that puts it to sleep very quickly.
You can also set a hotspot. This is what I do. So I'm going to go to the main System Preference area. I'm going to go into Mission Control and use Hot Corners. At Hot Corners I can set the bottom right corner to put the display to sleep. So that means that any time I move my cursor all the way down to the bottom right it goes to sleep right away. I love this because if I'm getting up from my Mac or I'm thinking about something I don't have to find a keyboard shortcut by looking at the keyboard or anything. I just swipe diagonally down to the right on my trackpad and the display will go to sleep. It's very useful. 
So what about if you have a new Touch Bar Mac. Well if you have a Touch Bar Mac you can customize the Touch Bar, the control strip, by going to System Preferences, Keyboard, Customize Control Strip. We can drag a Sleep button down into the Touch Bar. So I'm going to replace this one here with a Sleep button. I'm going to hit Done. Now my Touch Bar has got the Sleep button in it. So I put my Mac to sleep instantly by just touching that button right there. 
Of course there's a standard keyboard shortcut if you use Control, not Command but Control, shift and either the Power button on your MacBook or the Eject button if you have an older MacBook that has an eject button instead of a power button. That will instantly put your Mac to sleep. 
The easiest way, the simplest way, the most straightforward way to put your MacBook to sleep, of course, is simply to close the lid.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Ways To Put Your MacBook To Sleep”

Wayne Lux

7 years ago

When should you 'power off' versus 'sleep'?

Gary Rosenzweig

Wayne: Really, almost never. I never power off my Macs, either the desktops or MacBooks. I let them sleep. See my video on this: http://macmost.com/shut-down-or-sleep.html

Gregory

You can put the Siri button on your Mac touch bar, then tap and say "Computer, sleep"

Gregory: Nice. Seems like too many steps, though, when you can just have the button there next to the Siri button. But I guess if you don't want to give up that space on the Touch Bar it is a good option.

Jasper

I thought that a sleeping mac (even with FileVault enabled) was vulnerable to physical security problems and that shutting down was the only really safe way to go. Is this true? Thanks

Jasper: Source? I think you may be referring to an issue long-ago fixed.

Comments Closed.

Ways To Put Your MacBook To Sleep

Comments: 6 Responses to “Ways To Put Your MacBook To Sleep”

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