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Comment by voodootrucker | Hacker News Reader

It's just insane that you need Amphetamine, homebrew, iStat menus, and a dozen other 3rd party tools to do what should be part of an operating system's job anyway.

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It is part of the operating system. You can either disable various power-saving measures. Or use the built-in shell command caffeinate. Or run a muted video looping in the background.

I’ve been confused about why this app even exists, for this very reason. I use the built-in facilities to keep my Mac awake.

I’m guessing that doing command-line contortions is a hassle for some people, and this app removes that.

clicking one thing to get a functionality and having a visual status icon

Thank you, I wasn't aware of these options.

As a teacher, I was often in situations where a lesson would go on for a while with no computer interaction, and another teacher recommended Amphetamine. It worked well and I never discovered the shell command. I actually tried for a bit and never discovered a GUI option. Do you have a link handy?

System Preferences -> Battery

Select either Battery or Power Adapter to make changes to how the system will go to sleep/turn the display off after a certain amount of time.

As opposed to KDE, where you click the battery icon and check off "keep my computer awake".

Sometimes Apple's design is so stuck in the 90s that I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.

You’re being downvoted for oversimplifying what this app does as well as the combative tone. As GP said, on Mac you can turn off sleep timer permanently in the OS settings. The app in question let’s you keep awake for the next N minutes/hours so the “keep awake” setting change isn’t permanent. It makes sleep-settings workflow much easier. It’s simple but worthwhile.

IDK. Take Amphetamine for example. I've been using Macs for decades and have no use for it.

I don't doubt it has its uses, but is it really OS functionality?

I suspect the defaults cover 90% of cases and System Prefs/caffinate cover maybe 90% of what's left.

> I don't doubt it has its uses, but is it really OS functionality?

Example: Closed-lid Macbooks with external display will go to sleep without this tool.

As someone that's used a close lid macbook as my work machine for 5+ years - I've never had an issue with this.

Apparently the Macbook will only experience this issue while running on battery.

A closed lid MacBook will sleep unless an external monitor is connected. Amphetamine/KeepingYouAwake/Caffeinate does not change that.

    Closed-lid + External Monitor + Power Supply = awake
    Closed-lid + External Monitor + Battery = sleep
    Closed-lid + External Monitor + Battery + Amphetamine = awake

Mine sleeps with the lid closed unless it’s plugged into power.

In what context are you using an external monitor without plugging your laptop into power?

You could forget to bring your power adapter home and have some short tasks to do at home which benefit from large screens.

Mine doesn't.

My current necessity: Jettison, to flush and auto-unmount removable drives (including my PCIe SSD) on sleep and remount on wake.

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