How to Prevent Mac from Sleeping When Display is Off (MacOS Ventura)
The Mac defaults to going to sleep after a while when the display is off, but if you wish to change this behavior you can prevent the Mac from sleeping when the display is off. How this is accomplished in MacOS Ventura is a little different than before, however, so if you’re running MacOS Ventura 13.0 or newer you’ll want to take note.
There are various reasons why users may want to prevent the Mac from sleeping when the display is off, but we’ll those aside and show you how to make the change on your MacOS computer.
How to Prevent Mac Sleeping When Display is Off
If you want your Mac display to be able to turn off without the entire computer going to sleep, here’s where to make the appropriate settings adjustment:
- Pull down the Apple menu and go to “System Settings”
- Go to “Displays”
- Click on “Advanced…”
- Toggle the switch for “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off”
Now the Mac display can turn off, while keeping the Mac itself from going to sleep.
This is likely mostly relevant to Mac laptop users, but it’s possible that even those without MacBooks could find the feature useful.
If this seems like an unusual location for this setting, it may be because this is another one of those preferences that got moved around in MacOS Ventura with the new System Settings experience, and it ended up in an unlikely place. Rather than be in an Energy Saver preference panel, which was removed entirely, this setting is now tucked in with Displays.
For what it’s worth, the same settings panel is also where all the Mac-side settings for Universal Control now reside.
I’m trying to lock my screen without the Mac going to sleep. Agreed that nothing works with solutions here nor elsewhere: Ventura will put the Mac to sleep no matter what you do.
But this works for me:
(1) Apple Menu ==> System Settings… ==> Displays… ==> Advanced
(2) Toggle to on: “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off”.
(3) Apple Menu ==> Lock Screen
(4) Three seconds later my Mac goes blank, but it shouldn’t.
(5) Jiggle the mouse. Screen wakes up and stays on.
You can lock the screen without the Mac sleeping by using a screen saver and requiring a password upon waking the screen saver. It works in MacOS Ventura as well.
You can also do the following:
open terminal
run “caffeinate”
lock screen
…
come back and kill caffeinate by ctrl^C
Also:
open terminal
run “caffeinate”
lock screen
come back and kill caffeinate by ctrl^C
cheers
This is not true. Been down this rabbit hole the toggle does nothing. Test it out install plex media server and then use this feature when you close the laptop movies will stop working. Apple needs to fix this or bring back the wold way Monterey worked perfectly