How to wake your Mac when power is connected

If you plug in your Mac at a desk each morning and want it to wake automatically — no button press needed — macOS has a setting for exactly that. One change and your machine is ready the moment you reach for the cable.

The quick way in System Settings

The option lives in the battery or energy settings, but its exact label varies by Mac model and macOS version:

• Open System Settings → Battery.
• Click Options (bottom right of the Battery pane on macOS 14 Sonoma and 15 Sequoia).
• Look for "Start up automatically after a power failure" and enable it.

On Intel Macs running macOS 13 Ventura you may see this under System Settings → Energy Saver → Options instead. The underlying behavior is the same: when AC power is restored after being interrupted — or connected fresh — the Mac wakes or boots without you pressing the power button.

On Apple silicon Macs (M1 through M4) the wake-on-AC behavior is handled by the same acwake pmset key described below. The System Settings label focuses on "power failure" recovery, but enabling it also covers the everyday "plug in the charger" scenario.

The Terminal way

For precise control — or to script it — pmset is the tool. Open Terminal (Applications → Utilities) and run:

# wake when AC power is connected
sudo pmset -a acwake 1

To turn it back off:

# disable wake on AC
sudo pmset -a acwake 0

acwake tells macOS to wake the machine whenever it detects that AC power has been connected. The -a flag applies it to all power profiles. You can scope it to AC-only with -c if you like, though for this particular setting it rarely matters.

Check your current power settings

To see all active power management settings at once:

# print all pmset settings
pmset -g

Look for acwake in the output. A value of 1 means wake-on-power is active; 0 means it's off. This command doesn't require sudo — it's read-only.

Troubleshooting

If your Mac still doesn't wake when you plug in the charger, a few things to check:

• Sleep vs. shut down — acwake wakes from sleep. If your Mac was fully shut down (not sleeping), this setting won't help; you'd need the "Start up automatically after a power failure" option in System Settings instead.
• Power Nap — this is a separate setting (System Settings → Battery → Options → "Enable Power Nap") that lets the Mac perform background tasks while asleep. It's related but different from wake-on-power.
• Display sleep vs. system sleep — make sure your Mac is actually sleeping, not just turning off the display. If "Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off" is enabled, your Mac may never reach the sleep state that acwake wakes from.
• Clamshell mode — if you're using a MacBook with the lid closed and an external display, wake-on-power behavior can differ. The machine needs a display, keyboard, or mouse connected for clamshell wake to work reliably.

To verify that your change took effect after modifying System Settings, run pmset -g and confirm acwake 1 appears in the output.