Is Your Mac Slow to Wake from Sleep?

If your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air feels slow to wake from sleep after it’s been sleeping for a while, there may be a fairly simple cause: standby mode. Standby mode allows a Mac to potentially have up to 30 days of ‘standby’ time, meaning it can sit in a prolonged sleep state for that long before draining the battery.

A workaround of sorts is available for newer MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models, and that is to change the standby delay from the default setting of 70 minutes to a higher setting, preventing standby mode from being used so soon.

Read the Default Delay for Standby Mode

First, find out what the default length is by running the pmset command(open a terminal and type the command below) with the -g flag:

pmset -g |grep standbydelay

You will see something like this (4200 seems to be the default for MacBook Air, but your number may be different):

standbydelay 4200

Set Standby Mode to Wait Longer

You may want to calculate a time that works better for your needs, but for the purposes of this article we’re going to go with 12 hours, because if your Mac has been asleep for 12 hours already the assumption is it’s either nighttime, a weekend, or you’re in a period of longterm travel or storage. Accordingly, 12 hours is 43200 seconds, thus the pmset command would be as follows:

sudo pmset -a standbydelay 43200

This hack has saved lots of time for me. Try out and let me know if it was helpful to you too.