Amphetamine review: Chill your Mac’s desire to sleep

Apple and macOS have long been known to reduce Mac power consumption by putting hard drives to sleep, dimming the screen, or going to sleep or hibernation. After the best app - scanner to pdf, it is possible to wait so productive app. The main reasons were practical: avoiding the exhaustion of the CRT, reducing the wear and tear of the hard disk, generating less heat or simply reducing the power consumption for reasons of economy and cost.

We live in a post-CRT world where Macs are mostly powered by powerful SSDs, and Apple's silicon keeps the heat profile and idle power consumption of computers surprisingly low. However, Apple is constantly trying to use less juice. They are probably right. But what if you need your Mac to be awake for a certain amount of time or for certain reasons?

Open your eyes with Amphetamine, William Gustafson's free tool that lets you click, schedule, or trigger a Mac alarm from the menu bar. From a concept as simple as "don't let parts of your Mac, or your entire Mac, go to sleep," Amphetamine has refined many options and lets you ignore them all.

In the simplest case, you can choose an item from the menu: Keeps Mac awake until canceled, but you can also choose how long a specific application will last or until a file is downloaded. (This last one is a nice treat: choose a search interval after which amphetamine checks to see if the file size has changed, so it can predict if the file has finished downloading.)

You can also make things much more complicated. Let's say you regularly connect an external drive to your laptop to perform Time Machine backups or disk clones, but you don't want to back up when the battery dies. In the app's settings under Triggers, you can specify that it won't sleep until a specific drive is mounted and the battery is above 50 percent or the laptop is plugged in.

Amphetamine has many additional sleep-related properties. The Drive Alive setting allows you to select drives that you never want to disconnect - this only applies to hard drives that have spin time. Or you can let the program move the cursor occasionally to simulate the action. There's a lot to investigate and determine if you need anything other than the default behavior.

This name seems pretty wired, but many other ranger names debuted back in 2014 after Caffeine that didn't make it. If you don't like the abstract image, you can choose from several other types; I chose a kettle. (Apple briefly blocked the app from the App Store in December 2020 for allegedly "promoting the inappropriate use of controlled substances," but it was reinstated a few days later.)

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