A new bug introduced with Apple’s recent macOS 10.15.4 seems to be causing random restarts for some 16-inch MacBook Pro owners. Apple hasn’t rolled out an official fix yet, but there is a workaround you can use for now.
Here’s a great little shortcut that uses the new Set Reminder action in the newest v2.1 of Apple’s Shortcuts app. Tell Siri that you want to take a nap, and it will ask you for how long. It’ll then set a timer, and schedule Do Not Disturb for the duration. Get ready to clock some serious ZZZs with our power nap shortcut.
I haven’t really paid much attention to Mountain Lion’s new Power Nap feature, until I learned that it will keep my Mac safer, as Power Nap allows Find My Mac to run while it’s sleeping. A stolen Macbook can be run on battery power, so if you want to make it so that it’s more likely to continue running Power Nap, even when the Mac is unplugged, you have to enable it.
Power Nap also lets Time Machine back up hourly while asleep and runs Software Updates once per day. It will also keep all the iCloud stuff we all use synced up and ready to go, including email, calendars, notes, contacts, and reminders.
In case you don’t have this little gem running on your Mac, here’s how to check if it is, and enable it if it isn’t.
On the eve of its big iPhone 5 event, Apple has seeded a new version of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 to registered developers in the Mac Dev Center. This marks the fourth beta update of 10.8.2 to be released in less than a month, indicating that a public release is imminent.
Unlike the last couple minor version of the 10.8.2 beta, today’s 12C50 update packs several new additions and improvements. Namely, Facebook integration has been fully baked into OS X itself, meaning that everyone should have access to Facebook in Mountain Lion when 10.8.2 drops.
One of the new features in OS X Mountain Lion is called Power Nap. Touted as a tool that get things done while your Mac is sleeping, Power Nap enables a Mac running Mountain Lion to download email, sync with iCloud, check for system updates, etc. while in sleep mode. There is a big caveat, however. Power Nap will only run on Macs with an internal solid-state hard drive (SSD).
During the developer beta phase of Mountain Lion and continuing into its public release stage, it was noticed that certain compatible Macs didn’t have Power Nap installed by default on the final release of Mountain Lion. Apple has since issued a firmware update to bring Power Nap to the MacBook Air, and now a new update today has been issued for the new MacBook Pro with Retina display.
We showed you how to switch on Power Nap on your Mountain Lion-running, SSD-equipped Mac, but just what does this new feature do?
We know that you Mac enters a kind of robotic REM sleep, where it’s brain activity spikes and the network connections power up to download various bits of data, just like Newsstand on iOS. But a new Apple Knowledge Base article outlines the surprising number of tasks which are going on under the sleepy-lidded hood.
Can’t find Mountain Lion’s Power Nap feature anywhere on your MacBook Air? Apple has issued a new firmware update to bring the feature to 2011-2012 models. In case you didn’t know, Power Nap is a system management feature in Mountain Lion that silently fetches your emails, iCloud data, software updates, etc. while your Mac sleeps. For Power Nap to work, your Mac must be connected to a power source. The Mountain Lion feature works only on Macs with an internal SSD drive, like the MacBook Air and mid-2012 MacBook Pro models.
Power Nap doesn’t seem to be included on all Macs running the newly-released Mountain Lion OS, but this new firmware update should restore any issues for MacBook Air users.
