By Glenn Fleishman

May 11, 2026 12:44 PM PT

Keeping (and losing) track of Mac sleep settings

Your Mac doesn’t have one kind of sleep—it has several. That fact is generally uninteresting until you find you can’t easily put your Mac into display sleep or system (idle) sleep automatically when you walk away from it or close a laptop’s lid. Let me help you help your Mac drift into the arms of Morpheus by digging beneath the surface.

Scattered sleep settings

Recently, I got frustrated with this recurrent problem on the Mac in my studio. Generally, I want this Mac’s displays to sleep and the system to lock, but to remain active, since I access it remotely and it handles networked Time Machine backups. I thought I’d correctly configured the various System Settings, scattered across different panes, several releases ago.

There are three settings to be aware of:

Lock Screen. In the System Settings app, select Lock Screen, note the “Turn display off… when inactive” setting or settings: “on battery” and “on power adapter” appear on a laptop; nothing on a desktop.¹ You can choose an interval here. Never is an option, and could be your problem.

Battery. On a laptop, go to the System Settings app and select Battery and click Options. There, you can enable “Wake for network access,” which is set to “Only on Power Adapter” by default, to wake your Mac as needed for certain incoming network traffic. Your Mac will wake up—and sometimes your display will, too. If set to Always, this can wake your laptop while it’s on battery power, and potentially leave its display active, which could drain your battery.

Automatic sleeping. Apple enables a setting by default that keeps your Mac active when the display goes to sleep. The location and phrasing are slightly different between laptops and desktops. On a laptop, the setting is in Battery’s Options dialog, as above, and reads “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off.” On a desktop, find it in the Energy preferences, where it’s called “Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off.” Disable this switch if you want your Mac to sleep when the display powers down.

Conversely, if you’d like a quick, manual way to put your display to sleep, you’ve got two options:

• In the System Settings app, go to Desktop & Dock, click Hot Corners (found at the bottom), and choose Sleep as an action for one corner.
• Press Control-Command-Q to activate Lock Screen, or choose Lock Screen from the Apple menu. I don’t love this keystroke, to be honest, because it’s perilously easy to type Command-Shift-Q, which logs you out of your account, shutting down all the apps.²

Unfortunately, tweaking these settings didn’t help my situation. The answer lay in Terminal, where I ran commands to reveal low-level information about what was keeping my Mac from display sleep.

Power management shows who’s keeping you awake

Apple does provide an excellent tool that shows what’s affecting power management and lets you control it: pmset.³ Even better, you can paste in the following to use that command to extract just sleep-related assertions, or activities that have an impact on sleep:

pmset -g assertions | grep -i sleep

When I typed this just now, I had a modest list, preceded by a summary:

PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep    0
PreventSystemSleep             1
PreventUserIdleSystemSleep     1
pid 507(coreaudiod): [0x00022a4d00018492] 00:36:44 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep"  
pid 507(coreaudiod): [0x0001fc3c0001a751] 03:53:17 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep"  
pid 64802(Music): [0x00022a4c00018a52] 00:36:45 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.Music.playback"  
pid 35328(QuickTime Player): [0x000200bb0001894d] 03:34:06 NoIdleSleepAssertion named: "com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX - disable system sleep"  
pid 68171(screensharingd): [0x00022c1e00078cbd] 00:28:59 PreventSystemSleep named: "Remote user is connected"  
pid 437(powerd): [0x00022b5900018bb7] 00:32:16 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "Powerd - Prevent sleep while display is on"

The first three lines tell me the off/on status as a 0 (off) or a count (1 per set of connected items) about whether any application or other process affects those categories:

• PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep: When showing 0, as it is for me, there’s nothing that will block the display from sleeping on your Lock Screen delay choice. If this is 1 or higher, the display will not go to sleep.
• PreventSystemSleep: A non-zero value, as in my case, means something is actively preventing the system from sleeping at all, even if I tried to put it to sleep manually.
• PreventUserIdleSystemSleep: With a value of 1 or more, a process prevents your Mac, when idle, from engaging system sleep. If you perform an action, like choosing Sleep from the Apple Menu or closing the lid on a laptop, it will sleep.

You can see that I have several typical items in the filtered list below. The three lines listing com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep (twice) and com.apple.Music.playback relate to my current situation: I’m listening to the Music app via my Mac’s headphone jack, which is connected to speakers.

I have no idea why QuickTime Player, shown next, would prevent idle sleep—that seems strange, as it was inactive and had no open files. Quitting it removed that assertion. (Apparently, the specific language it uses is a legacy assertion, so it isn’t properly counted in the summary.)

Screen Sharing (screensharingd) is also an odd duck. Normally, if you have a Screen Sharing session connected to your Mac, its display can go to sleep, but the system stays active. In this case, this is a transient state: I use Bartender, which has to use Screen & System Audio Recording, which appears as a form of screen sharing when active, to determine which system menu items are currently visible.

The final item, powerd, is the setting noted earlier: “Prevent sleep while display is on.”

When previously looking through this list, I came across an online reference to a Mac utility called caffeinate. Folks, I’ve said before I have to keep humble despite being a technology writer for what is now nearly 30 years: I had never seen this command-line tool before, to my knowledge, and, according to Google, I have never mentioned it in my archived writing.

caffeinate was introduced 13 years ago by Apple as a cutely named option you can use to keep the display awake. For instance, to keep the display forced awake for an hour, overriding other settings, enter:

caffeinate -d -t 3600

Now, I was aware of Amphetamine (free from the Mac App Store). But I didn’t quite understand—or, let me be honest, maybe have forgotten—that it performed the same function, relying on the same system hooks caffeinate employs, and putting a friendly menu bar wrapper around it.

Finding the caffeinate reference led me to look for Amphetamine, which in turn revealed the problem. Perhaps due to some errant menu bar clicking, I had activated Amphetamine, thus locking my display on. My confusion might stem from three factors. First, I forgot I had it installed. Second, I used Bartender to put the icon in its Hidden list, so it wasn’t displayed in the active bar. Third, I used the icon selection option to change the menu bar picture from a pill to a tea kettle—you know, drinking tea might keep you awake? I regret my decision, as I didn’t recognize what it was when I made that decision, seemingly years ago.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t just turn it off in the app—I had to quit the app, then toggle the active state to turn it off. Sadly, we humans can’t turn off our caffeinated mode to go to sleep.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Glenn Fleishman

May 4, 2026 12:27 PM PT

Don’t let your Mac’s storage fill up!

Macs don’t do well when they start to approach full storage. The operating system doesn’t provide enough safeguards and backoff options to help you cope with what can become a disaster, requiring a full drive restore! I wrote about this happening with my younger child’s MacBook two years ago. That article was about the abject failure of attempts to get a Mac working after it had reached maximum Mr. Creosote levels. What about avoiding this altogether?

Six Colors reader John wrote in with this particular problem, which has been plaguing him across multiple Mac laptops but doesn’t occur on his Mac mini. John pays Apple for 6 TB of storage and is using nearly 4 TB. Logging in and out of iCloud seems to resolve his full-storage issue, but it comes with a lot of wasted time and some syncing problems.

I suspect one or more things in his case:

• iCloud eviction delays: iCloud isn’t properly evicting data (deleting the local copy, as there’s a cloud copy), or doing so rapidly enough, as the drive starts to fill. The nature of iCloud Drive and iCloud storage for apps and the system is that only as much is cached locally as needed, and the oldest, least-used data is evicted with no user involvement. See below for help on that.
• Aggressive Photos iCloud syncing: Photos is aggressively retrieving data in such a way that, even with Photos: Settings > iCloud > Optimize Mac Storage enabled, it’s filling up the drive. (John has over 100,000 items in Photos, so it’s a likely suspect.)
• Local temporary backup caches: Some form of locally cached backup might be filling his drive before it uploads or transfers the files. Both Time Machine and Backblaze use local caching as a technique, and if you have slow Internet service or haven’t backed up to Time Machine in a while (more common with a laptop, if you attach a drive for this purpose), it can get out of hand.
• APFS snapshots: You can also wind up with what are called “APFS snapshots” that correspond to Time Machine backups that take up space on a drive. These are managed by Time Machine, and the oldest should be deleted automatically over time, but I found in 2021 that some people were having issues with these snapshots growing to occupy an ever-larger portion of their storage. (See “How to manage Time Machine snapshots using Disk Utility in macOS Monterey” at Macworld. And see the DaisyDisk discussion, next.)

After reviewing the above, if none of that explains the problem or helps, I’ve got more advice ahead.

Diagnose what you’re storing

You can use System Settings: General: Storage to get a look at what’s using storage across your drive, but I find it both unreliable—it crashed while testing—and frustrating, as the granularity isn’t high enough.

Instead, I turn to one of my all-time favorite utilities: DaisyDisk ($10, lifetime license), an app that scans your drives and reveals the kinds of data stored by category, including the important “hidden space” section. I don’t need it often, but when I do, it’s usually the only tool that can diagnose unsolvable problems.

DaisyDisk lets you peer into the innards of your drive with color-coding to help you visualize how your usage is distributed among file types. One extremely useful feature is that you can drag and drop at any level of the navigable directory hierarchy to a “collector” spot in the lower-left corner to target items for deletion. Then click Delete and confirm, and it’s gone. This is particularly helpful with the APFS snapshots discussed above.

Manually evict files from iCloud

Apple does offer a manual tool to dump files from local storage without deleting them from iCloud. In the Finder, Control/right-click any item in iCloud Drive, and choose Remove Download. This only works for files that are currently downloaded.¹ You can use it on folders, too, but every item in a folder must be downloaded to evict the folder and its contents.

Monitor storage levels

If you, like reader John, see this filling-up issue regularly, installing an app that warns in advance can be critical. The easiest and cheapest way I’ve found for this kind of monitoring is via iStat Menus ($12). While its primary purpose is to provide a live visual display of the state of various hardware (CPUs, drives, sensors) and other information (time, weather), it can also notify you when any of several conditions are met.

One of these is whether a chosen volume has less than a specified amount of storage remaining or has exceeded an entered percentage of storage used. But this isn’t integrated with email or text, so you need to be in front of your device to know the drive is about to start bulging.

I felt, however, that there was a gap for an on-device monitoring app that could email or text you when something is on the verge of going wrong.² So I wrote one! Welcome to Mister Plimsoll, a simple, free Mac monitoring app currently in beta that lets you set which internal or external volumes to monitor, the percentage above which you should be notified, and choose to get a Mac alert, an email, an iMessage—or all three. You can set the refresh rate for checking and the number of notifications you get each day when the percentage is exceeded. (Please send your feedback.)

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Dan Moren

May 1, 2026 1:18 PM PT

My tech travel experience, 2026 edition

Once again, I have ventured out of my home country and winged my way overseas.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about my travel experiences. I detailed some wins and losses from my last international trip in 2024 and even wrote a post way back in 2015, in which I was considering not traveling with my Apple Watch out of fears it would get lost or stolen. Oh, how times have changed.

That said, we were attempting to travel light this time: just two carry on bags and two backpacks for two adults and one small child. And part of that was minimizing the number of devices that we needed to carry and all their attendant cables.

Overall, I think we did pretty well.

Power to the people

One of the things that I get most annoyed about when traveling is charging. I have a couple of super basic plug adapters for Europe and the UK that are fine, if bulky. But I’d been on the lookout for a nice universal power adapter—preferably one that would fit nicely in my go-bag of chargers and cables.

This time around, I found it in the form of the Anker Nano Travel Adapter (affiliate link). What I like about the Nano is first, that it’s not a giant box: it’s only about an inch thick, two inches wide, and a little over three inches long. In that, it’s not too far off from my Anker MagSafe power battery, which means it fits perfectly into the aforementioned bag.

While it doesn’t have every single power port known to humanity, it does at least cover some of the most common: Type A (US / Canada / Japan / China), Type C (Europe), Type G (UK / Singapore) and Type I (Australia). It also packs two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports, so you can charge your USB devices directly, as well offering a plug passthrough if you need to use a Type A or Type C plug.

It’s not the beefiest of charges: just 20W max, or 15W for the USB ports when sharing them, but it was plenty to charge a phone and Apple Watch overnight. (I did run into one or two instances where it seems like something didn’t charge correctly, though I wasn’t able to figure out exactly why).

I still ended up needing those extra power adapters for some additional electronics we brought for my kid, like his white noise machine and a baby monitor for our Airbnb. (We also lucked out, with the apartment we stayed at in Paris having a power strip that could accept US plugs.)

One thing I ended up surprisingly not needing on this trip very much: backup batteries. I brought three: the Anker MagSafe model, an older Jackery one with Lightning and micro-USB connectors, and the beefy one included in my Away luggage. Of those, I think the MagSafe model got used once or twice, but only by my wife. The iPhone 17 Pro’s battery held out just fine for all-day usage, including plenty of wayfinding and picture taking.

Make sure you’re connected

As I mentioned in my 2024 piece, eSIMs have made it super easy to stay connected while you’re traveling internationally. Apple’s continued to try and smooth the experience: when I activated my Airalo-provided EU & UK eSIM—unlimited data for a week for about $20—after arriving in France, I was prompted to use it as a Travel SIM, which would allow me to still get FaceTime and iMessages via my U.S. phone number.

That largely worked this time, though I did still run into a couple of weird glitches. For one thing, some contacts weren’t showing up in various places in iOS (Messages, Find My) with their names, but just their phone numbers. I eventually concluded it was because their U.S. phone numbers were not formatted correctly in Contacts for some reason.¹

And despite having my AT&T data roaming off, I did notice that my phone would download a kilobyte of data every once in a while—maybe 4KB total over my entire trip. This kind of “data leakage” is not unheard of, but I haven’t yet been able to find out whether the carrier is going to try to charge me their international rate—I suppose I’ll see when I get my next bill.

But between my eSIM and plentiful Wi-Fi, I never lacked for connectivity. And, thanks to my Tailscale network, I was even able to access the U.S. version of streaming services so that I could download videos for my trip home.

Tripping the light fantastic

I remarked on it during my last overseas trip in 2024, but Apple Pay has truly changed the experience of going to other countries. Before I left this time around, I popped a few leftover UK pounds and some Euros into my wallet, just in case.

I ended up never using them.

In fact, I think I only took my credit card out once, when I thought Apple Pay had failed, though in retrospect, I think it was just because the terminal wasn’t ready yet. Otherwise, I used my phone and watch to pay for everything on the entire trip, from cafés to transit. The experience was just completely seamless—a far cry from days of yore where I used to worry about exchange rates or how to get cash in country.

Tap-and-go transit remains the best experience; I was a little disappointed with Paris’s system, which still requires you buy tickets on its transit card, rather than just using a contactless payment. It meant I had to make sure to buy a ticket every time I was about to use the Metro—not especially onerous, as the Transit Card is supported by the Wallet app and you can buy tickets right from there with Apple Pay, but another point of friction. Especially compared to my trips on the London transit system, where I never had to do anything but tap my phone or watch on a gate or while boarding a bus and go.

(My thanks, by the way, to my pal Jeremy Burge, whose excellent compendium, Express Transit, prepared me for what I would experience in both Paris and London.)

And while we didn’t get to take total advantage of Wallet’s latest boarding pass features, I had an easy enough time on both our flights and our one long train journey storing all of our boarding passes digitally. Honestly, the only real challenge was physically juggling my phone and passport—hopefully some day those Digital IDs will be acceptable for international travel.

Left to my devices

I of course brought my iPhone 17 Pro and AirPods Pro 2—I rarely leave home without the two of those. I also packed my Apple Watch Series 7—no worries about it getting lost or stolen, 2015-era me—and the Apple Watch Series 10 I use for sleep tracking.²

I also packed my M1 iPad Pro because an iPad is a great device for watching video on the plane. And I was very glad that my kid had his own iPad (an old 10.5-inch iPad Pro that will, at least, run iOS 17 and, therefore, many—but not all—of the modern streaming apps and games).³

But beyond pulling out my iPad for the plane and train trips, I didn’t end up using it at all. I got far more mileage from my Kobo Libra 2 and even from—gasp—paper books. Though the iPad itself is not particularly heavy or bulky, I did find myself wondering what if I didn’t have to bring it. I mostly got by just fine with my phone—all I would miss is having a larger screen for watching videos.

You probably see where I’m going with this. What if I could just unfold my iPhone into a larger screen for those few occasions, but the rest of the time just have a phone? Hmm. It’s a compelling idea. I especially like the idea of reducing the number of devices I carry that require charging. Maybe one day I can truly get away with one device to rule them all.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

May 1, 2026 10:37 AM PT

Apple in the Enterprise: The complete 2026 commentary

Every year we ask the Apple IT/Mac admin community for their opinions about how Apple fared in past 12 months. You can read our 2026 Enterprise Report Card for the average scores and some juicy quotes. But if you want to read all the comments from the panelists who were willing to share in public—all 27,000 words of it—who are we to stand in your way? They wrote it, you read it. That’s how this works.

(The text below has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.)

Continue reading “Apple in the Enterprise: The complete 2026 commentary”…

By Jason Snell

May 1, 2026 10:36 AM PT

Apple in the Enterprise: A 2026 report card

In 2021, device-management startup Kandji (now Iru) approached Six Colors to commission a new entry in our Report Card series focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise. Then we approached people we knew in the community of Apple device administrators and asked them to participate in the survey. We are especially grateful to the members of the Mac Admins Slack for their participation.

This is our sixth year doing the survey. Over the last few weeks, we took the temperature of about a hundred admins, half of whom report that they manage more than a thousand devices. They rated Apple’s performance in the context of enterprise IT on a scale from 1 to 5 in nine broad areas.

Below, you’ll see the survey results, plus choice comments from survey participants. Not all participants are represented; we gave everyone the option to remain anonymous and not be quoted. Though Iru commissioned this survey—and we thank everyone there for doing so again—it had no control over the survey results or the contents of this story.

Continue reading “Apple in the Enterprise: A 2026 report card”…