How to Stop Enhanced Notifications Waking a Mac from Sleep

How to Stop Enhanced Notifications Waking a Mac from Sleep

If you regularly sleep your Mac, you may have noticed that sometimes the Mac will wake itself up and show a notification on the screen, even if the screen is locked and otherwise password protected with the login screen. These notifications that wake a Mac from sleep are called Enhanced Notifications and they can originate from Messages, FaceTime, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Game Center, Back to My Mac, and Find My Mac. Enhanced Notifications may be great for some Mac users, but others might want their Mac to sleep and stay asleep when they put their Mac to sleep, at least until they decide to wake the computer themselves. The Mac should now sleep as usual, except it will no longer wake up when a message arrives, or any other alert or notification from Messages, FaceTime, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Game Center, etc. * Optionally, you can also if youre annoyed by alerts and notifications in general (welcome to the club), which basically disables Notification Center and alerts from showing up or pestering you entirely. The Enhanced Notifications feature requires a 2015 or newer model year Mac, and it requires a minimum operating system of macOS Sierra (10.12.x) or newer. For MacBook and MacBook Pro, the Enhanced Notifications will only wake up a Mac when the screen lid is open, whereas for desktop Macs or when theyre hooked up to one external display, the enhanced notifications will wake the Mac regardless, unless it is turned off as we showed in this article. This notifications feature is little known and many Mac users may not even realize it exists. Often the first time someone discovers the feature is when theyre trying to discover why a Mac appears to not actually go to sleep, or when trying to seemingly at random or is otherwise awakened with certain alerts and notifications. I You can learn more about Enhanced Notifications and why they wake up your Mac at an official Apple article, which for some reason does not mention how stop the feature.