One of the things that the lockdown caused by the Coronavirus makes me appreciate is the advantages of a large monitor on your home office desk. That and it’s actually a laptop with an HDMI port for it. If you’re a Mac user like me and you’re stuck at home trying to work with your laptop on an external monitor, you may not want your laptop screen to shine in your field of view. This is very distracting. So you probably want to close your laptop lid and use the external display as the main monitor, right? You also always want to do this without connecting a power adapter. Here’s how you can use a MacBook in clamshell mode without a power adapter.
Use MacBook Without Power Adapter in Clamshell Mode
Why Don’t MacBooks Support This By Default?
Why do we need an entire article on how to do this? It looks like Apple won’t let you do this unless you have a power adapter connected to your MacBook. Take a look at the status of the company official aid document about this. Now, when I started this whole setup, I kept Apple’s promise and kept using my MacBook with the charger connected all the time, knowing full well that it would ruin my battery’s health. It just did that and my battery won’t charge anymore. I now use my laptop as a glorified desktop and with an impossibly constrained CPU to boot.
Luckily this got me looking for ways to use the MacBook in clamshell mode without keeping the charger connected all the time and I found the solution.
MacBooks handle power in not-so-obvious ways. You know, if you don’t do what I do and get lost in forum discussions talking about the ‘hibernate’ command and the various power states of a MacBook. I’ll give you the long and the short.
Basically, your MacBook sleeps when you close the lid. This means it stops powering external displays, drivers, and even the ethernet port (if any). Now a user would normally expect the laptop to be smart enough to know that an external display is connected to it. This obviously means I want to use it as the primary display. However, overlord Apple knows better than we do what we want and won’t let this particular setup work.
There are a number of terminal commands you can use to disable sleep, and we’ll discuss them in a later section, but you probably don’t want to mess with terminal commands and it’s really a simple one-click solution. call.
Save Mac Battery by Using Clamshell Mode Without a Power Adapter
Now that we know the problem is that even if we have an external display connected to the MacBook it goes to sleep when you close the lid, the solution is simple. We need to prevent this sleep from happening. But you can’t use a simple Caffeine type app to solve this problem. This is because the hall sensor on your MacBook detects when the lid is closed and puts it to sleep regardless of everything else.
Using a Third-Party Application
You must have heard of ‘Amphetamine’, a very popular Mac application for Mac that controls sleep states according to triggers. While the app was not initially capable of solving our problem, it has since been updated and can actually help us get rid of this annoyance.
- For starters, go to the Mac App Store and download Amphetamine (Free).
- Launch the app and you will be greeted with a screen like this. Click ‘Next‘ and follow the instructions.
- Now click on the Amphetamine icon in the menu bar.
- get over your head Select ‘Quick Preferences’ and uncheck the box next to ‘Allow system to sleep when screen is off’..
- You will see a warning popup suggesting you install Amphetamine Enhancer. This is optional, but recommended. Simply click the button that says ‘Get Amphetamine Enhancer’ to go to the website and download the companion app. Alternatively, just click here for download.
- Install and launch the helper. choose ‘Off Screen Mode Fail Safe’ from the sidebar and Click ‘Install’.
- Click on the Amphetamine icon in the menu bar once again. Make sure you uncheck the box next to ‘.Allow system to sleep when screen is off‘.
That’s it, you can now use your MacBook in clamshell mode without having to connect your AC power adapter.
Using Terminal Commands
If you don’t want to use a third-party app to do this, or just want to play around with Terminal commands and figure things out on your own, there are some commands that can achieve similar results.
note: I haven’t tested these commands because Apple does not recommend toggling hibernation using the pmset command, and these commands do just that. However, these commands disable sleep mode on your laptop’s lid-close trigger, so they should also fix the issue of not being able to use your laptop in clam-mode without a power adapter. That said, use them at your own risk.
Once this warning goes away, here’s what you need to do.
- First, launch the terminal and run the command below to see your default ‘hibernate’ setting. Be sure to note this down.
pmset -g | grep hibernatemode
- Now run the following commands in terminal.
sudo pmset -a sleep 0 sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0 sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1
These commands will disable sleep on your MacBook and you should You can use your Mac in clamshell mode without the AC adapter connected.
You can undo the changes at any time by running the following commands in the terminal.
sudo pmset -a sleep 1 sudo pmset -a hibernatemode <original hibernatemode value | usually 3 on a MacBook> sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0
Use MacBook in Clamshell Mode without AC Adapter and Save Your Battery Health
I may have deliberately caused my MacBook Pro’s battery to become so completely unusable that it won’t even charge anymore, but you don’t need to follow my steps. Now that you know how to use an external display with your MacBook and you don’t need to keep an adapter connected to it all the time, go ahead and set up your business from your home desk with your brand new monitor and enjoy working on a bigger screen. with more real estate. Oh, and whatever you do, don’t take Apple’s word for things like this. In the meantime, I’ll go and try to decide whether I should get the M1 MacBook Air or the M1 MacBook Pro.
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