I used to run caffeinate -i & in a terminal before anything long — a big download,
a render, a backup. It worked. Until I forgot to kill it, closed the terminal, or
had three different processes quietly holding my Mac awake for no reason while I
wondered why the fan was spinning at 2 AM.
The frustrating part wasn’t the lost sleep. It was that macOS already knows why it’s awake. Every process that wants to prevent sleep files a Power Assertion with the kernel. The OS tracks them all. But nothing surfaced that information in a useful way.
The Assertions Inspector
I started with a single question: what is actually keeping my Mac awake right now?
macOS has a command for this — pmset -g assertions — but it dumps a wall of text
with cryptic identifiers. I wanted to see it in plain language, in real time, with
the app name attached. So I built the Assertions Inspector: a live view of every
active wake lock, what type it is, and which app created it.
Once I could see the assertions, patterns were obvious. Video players were the biggest source of orphaned locks — start a video, pause it, close the window without stopping playback, and the assertion stayed live. Zombie wake locks. macOS had no mechanism to clean them up.
Why not just use caffeinate?
caffeinate is a blunt instrument. It keeps your Mac awake regardless of what’s
actually happening. AwakeQubit takes the opposite approach: let the Mac sleep when
it has nothing to do, and keep it awake when it does — based on real assertions,
not a timer you set and forgot.
The overrides in AwakeQubit work the same way. Set one for 2 hours or until 3 PM, and it clears itself. No zombie overrides. The popover shows you exactly what’s happening so there’s never any mystery.
The bigger idea
When I started working on the Pro companion for iPhone, I kept coming back to one framing: the phone is the response surface, not a remote control panel. You don’t want to open a remote desktop to tell your Mac to sleep. You want a notification that says “download finished, Mac will sleep in 60 seconds” — and a single button to let it happen or extend the session.
That’s what AwakeQubit Pro does. Your Mac is smart enough to manage itself. You just need to be in the loop.
Where things stand
The Mac app is free and available now on the Mac App Store. The iPhone companion is in development, launching with Pro.
If you’ve ever had a zombie wake lock or a Mac that wouldn’t sleep for no apparent reason, give AwakeQubit a try. It’s one of those tools that makes you wonder how you lived without it once it clicks.