You kick off a forty minute job. An agent run, an Xcode archive, a Final Cut export, a dataset pull. You step away for coffee, come back, and the Mac went to sleep at minute nine. The run stopped. The build never finished. You get to re-explain the context and watch it redo half of what it already did.
If you have searched for a fix, you found Amphetamine. It is free, it has been around since 2014, and it works. For a lot of people that is the end of the story.
It should not be. Amphetamine solves the half of the problem that was never expensive. The expensive half is everything that happens after you leave the desk, and that is the half Awake Qubit was built for.
Credit where it is due
Amphetamine is a serious tool. It can keep your Mac awake for a duration, until a time, while an app runs, or while a file downloads. Its trigger engine can start sessions from a Wi-Fi network, a connected display, a CPU threshold, a mounted drive, or a battery level. It has hot keys, AppleScript support, and a closed-display mode. If you want to build detailed rules around local conditions and never touch them again, it is hard to beat, and it costs nothing.
Nothing below argues that Amphetamine is bad at keeping a Mac awake. It is very good at it. The argument is that keeping a Mac awake is the easy part.
The three failures a keep-awake toggle cannot fix
Every keep-awake app, Awake Qubit included, does the same core thing: it holds a
power assertion through Apple’s public API, the same mechanism as the built-in
caffeinate command. If you have a terminal, you already have that half.
What a toggle cannot do is the part that actually costs you time.
You cannot see it from where you are. The Mac is where the task runs. Your phone is where you are. With Amphetamine, once you walk away, you are guessing. Did the session start? Is there time left? Did it already expire? Your options are to walk back, open a remote desktop session, or hope. Awake Qubit puts the live countdown on your iPhone, and with Pro you can start, extend, adjust, or stop the session from there.
It cannot tell you when it failed. Someone closes the lid. The power button gets bumped. macOS makes a decision you did not. Amphetamine goes quiet and you find out nine hours later when the render is at 40 percent. Awake Qubit notices, writes the interruption into Activity in red, and with Pro sends the alert to your phone while you can still do something about it.
The timer burns while you are still sitting there. You set an hour because you need an hour unattended. Then you keep working for thirty minutes before you leave, and the timer expires halfway through the part where you were actually gone. Smart Pause in Awake Qubit freezes a timed session while you are typing, on a call, on camera, or presenting fullscreen, and starts the countdown again after a short grace period you choose. An hour means an hour away.
None of these is a settings problem. You cannot configure your way out of them with a Mac-only app, because the failure happens on the other side of the building.
At a glance
Bold marks the capability that changes the outcome, not just the feature count.
| What matters | Awake Qubit | Amphetamine |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | Mac + iPhone companion | Mac only |
| Session types | Timed, until-time, indefinite, while-an-app-runs, battery threshold, display awake | Timed, until-time, indefinite, while-an-app-runs, while-downloading |
| Status away from the desk | Live countdown and Mac state on your iPhone (Free) | None |
| Control away from the desk | Start, extend, adjust, stop from iPhone (Pro) | None |
| Lock and leave | Lock the Mac’s screen from your iPhone while the session keeps running (Pro) | Lock at the keyboard, then hope |
| When something interrupts it | Interruption logged in Activity (Free); alert on your phone (Pro) | Silence |
| Timer intelligence | Smart Pause counts only the time you are away (Pro) | Timer runs down whether you are there or not |
| Guided setup | Smart Suggestions from time of day, battery, active app, and recent habits | Presets and hand-built triggers |
| Automation depth | App-based sessions and suggestions | Broad trigger engine: networks, devices, CPU, drives, power |
| Why is the Mac awake? | Assertions Inspector names every process holding a wake assertion, live | Current session details |
| Safety alerts | Overheating, low battery, full disk (Free) | Battery trigger |
| Battery protection | Stop at a battery percentage (Free) | Battery trigger |
| Price | Mac essentials free; Pro $1.99/month, $19.99/year, or $49.99 once, with a 7-day trial | Free |
| Best fit | Anyone whose work keeps running after they leave | Power users who want maximum Mac-only automation |
Where this actually shows up
These are not hypotheticals. They are the afternoons the app was built for.
The overnight agent run
You hand Claude Code, Codex, or a local model a forty task plan at 11pm and go to bed. Amphetamine keeps the Mac awake, which is the part you already knew how to do. What you do not know at 2am is whether it is still going.
With Awake Qubit, you tie the session to the terminal or IDE the work lives in, so it ends when the app quits instead of on a guess. You check the countdown from bed on your iPhone. If the run needs another two hours, you extend it from the phone (Pro). If the Mac slept anyway, your phone tells you at 2am, not at 8am.
The export on battery
A Final Cut export or Blender render on a MacBook, unplugged, in a hotel room. Amphetamine will happily keep the machine awake until the battery is flat.
Awake Qubit stops the session at a battery percentage you set, so the Mac survives the night even if the export runs long. The low-battery and overheating alerts are free. Pro adds the read on it: battery drain trends and thermal context in the notification, so you know whether to plug in or let it finish.
The presentation Mac
A classroom display, a conference room, a demo booth, a livestream control Mac. The presenter should not be jiggling the trackpad every few minutes, and the machine should not go dark because nobody touched it.
Start an until-time session that ends when the event does. Anyone with the paired iPhone can see the countdown and, with Pro, extend it from the back of the room without walking to the podium. When the day is over, the Mac sleeps on its own.
Lock the screen, leave the build running
You are done at the desk but the Mac is not. You want the screen private without interrupting the archive, the test suite, or the Docker job.
Locking is not sleeping. With Pro, one tap on your iPhone locks the Mac’s screen while the keep-awake session keeps running behind it. Every lock lands in Activity with the device it came from, so you can see it worked.
The remote support session
An IT admin keeps a user’s Mac awake for a migration, an update, or a diagnostic session that has to finish. The admin is in another building. Amphetamine gives no way to confirm the session is still alive without a remote desktop session or a phone call.
Awake Qubit confirms command delivery, shows connection diagnostics when a phone and Mac cannot see each other, and logs every session, interruption, and stop. The receipts are the point.
Figuring out why the Mac will not sleep
Sometimes the problem is the opposite: the Mac stays awake and you do not know why.
The Assertions Inspector, free in Awake Qubit, is a live list of every process
holding a power assertion, with its name, bundle identifier, the reason it supplied,
and how long it has held it. It is pmset -g assertions with the names resolved, in a
window you can leave open. That includes Awake Qubit itself.
What you pay, and what you never pay for
Everything the Mac does on its own is free, forever: timed, until-time, indefinite, app-based, battery-threshold, and display-awake sessions; Smart Suggestions and Recent sessions; session notifications, Activity, and history; the Assertions Inspector; critical safety alerts; the keep-active cursor nudge; the menu bar; and the iPhone state mirror so you can see your Mac from anywhere.
Pro is the part that reaches back across the building: iPhone remote control (start, extend, adjust, stop), remote screen lock, sleep alerts on your phone when a session ends or the Mac sleeps unexpectedly, Smart Pause for timed sessions, and advanced notifications with battery trends and thermal context.
Pro is $1.99 a month, $19.99 a year, or $49.99 once, and every plan starts with a 7-day free trial. One lost overnight render or one re-run agent plan costs more than the year.
What it will not do
Honesty sells better than a feature list, so here are the limits plainly.
- The lid still wins. With no external display attached, macOS forces sleep when you close the lid, and no App Store app can override that. Amphetamine’s closed-display mode is a non-sandboxed workaround; Awake Qubit shows a standing caution instead.
- It cannot wake a sleeping Mac. Remote control adjusts a session on a Mac that is awake. It is not Find My and it is not device management.
- It does not watch your task. Awake Qubit keeps the Mac awake and tells you when the session changes. It cannot detect that your export finished.
- It is not a trigger engine. If your workflow depends on automatically starting sessions from a Wi-Fi network, a peripheral, a CPU threshold, or a mounted drive, Amphetamine does that and Awake Qubit does not.
- Remote lock needs a one-time approval. A single Automation and Accessibility grant the app walks you through.
Who should stay on Amphetamine
If you build rules around networks, devices, and drives, you need AppleScript or hot keys, you never leave the Mac while it works, and you want every feature free, Amphetamine is the right tool and you should keep it.
Who should switch today
If you have ever come back to a finished-early timer, found out about a failed run hours late, extended a session by walking back to your desk, or left a MacBook to drain flat overnight, you have already paid for Awake Qubit several times over in lost work.
The Mac app is free, so the risk is one download. Start a session, walk away, and watch the countdown on your phone. That is the moment the difference stops being theoretical.
See every situation, and which parts are free or compare Free and Pro line by line.