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Modern MacBooks generally don’t suffer from battery life woes, but when you do face unexpectedly high drain, it can be hard to diagnose the issue. Sleep Aid is a Mac app that helps you figure out exactly why your Mac’s battery is draining, and it’s geared toward idle battery drain. That is, when you put your MacBook to sleep, it shouldn’t be losing a large chunk of charge. If you lose more than a few percentage points of battery life when you’ve closed the Mac’s lid overnight, Sleep Aid can spot the issue.
The utility shows a graph that marks various wake events on your MacBook and labels these events for you. That way, you can tell if your MacBook woke up due to some dust on the trackpad, an errant app, or interaction with Bluetooth accessories. Its graphs label potential issues in orange or red colors, making it easy to figure out when your Mac’s battery drain began and what caused it. For added battery support, the app automatically disables a few system services when your MacBook is in sleep mode, and resumes these processes when your Mac wakes up.
Sleep Aid allows you to control various sleep-related system settings as well. You can use the app to disable Bluetooth, wifi, and other network connections automatically when your Mac is in sleep mode. These settings prevent waking up your Mac in situations where you accidentally pressed a key on a Bluetooth keyboard or moved your mouse when your Mac is asleep. Similarly, some apps might wake the Mac to check for updates, and Sleep Aid can put a stop to it.
Sleep Aid also lets you set up different options when your MacBook is connected to power as opposed to when it’s running on its battery. This is great if you like to charge your MacBook overnight, because the app then allows your Mac to wake for Time Machine backups and other updates.
Sleep Aid has a 14-day free trial, so you can run some initial tests on your Mac without needing to pay. If you find it useful, it costs $25 for a license. While the app is yours forever, you should know that a single license only gets you one year of updates. That shouldn’t be a problem in most cases, but if the developers choose to lock support for newer versions of macOS behind an update, you may have to purchase the license again to use the app.
