How to wake a Mac remotely, and why a Mac on Wi-Fi will not

What a Mac will and will not do

Four facts decide everything below. A Mac wakes by packet over Ethernet only, from sleep only, and never from full power-off: the hardware does not keep the network port armed once the machine is shut down, and no product changes that. Over Wi-Fi, a sleeping Mac is reachable only through Apple's own sleep proxy — an Apple TV or HomePod on the same network answering for it — which is Apple's mechanism, not a magic packet, and nothing on this page sends it. An Apple-silicon desktop Mac — a Mac mini, an iMac, a Mac Studio — starts when power is applied, a route from off that a PC has to be configured for. And a MacBook has a battery, so it neither starts when power is applied nor wakes by packet on Wi-Fi.

Which of those we can vouch for is worth stating. The free agent's installer package, the keep-awake hold on Plus and Pro, the goodbye a Mac says before it sleeps, and the sleep when the timer ends are proven on Apple hardware in our own tests. Waking a Mac by packet over Ethernet is standard macOS behaviour — Wake for network access, as macOS documents — and not something we have measured on a Mac of our own — nor, yet, is the agent's switching it on; every sender on this page sends the packet a Mac listens for, and the compatibility check walks the Mac case step by step.

Turn on Wake for network access, and use the cable

One setting, one cable, one habit. The setting is Wake for network access, and the free agent on the Mac offers to turn it on: while it is off the Mac's row shows wakes may fail, and Prepare for wake in the row's Wake readiness section switches it on at once and reports Wake for network access switched on. The section then reads Ready to wake ✓. A Mac on Wi-Fi it will not arm, and says why. By hand: on a desktop Mac, System Settings, Energy (older versions say Energy Saver); on a MacBook, System Settings, Battery, Options, set to Only on power adapter or Always.

Plug the Mac into Ethernet — the built-in port on a Mac mini, an iMac or a Mac Studio, or a dock's port for a MacBook on mains — and take the address of that port, not the Wi-Fi one: System Settings, Network, Ethernet, Details, Hardware, or networksetup -listallhardwareports in Terminal. Then sleep the Mac when you leave rather than shutting it down — Apple menu, Sleep, or leave it to the idle timer. Asleep, a Mac draws a watt or two and comes back in a second or two with everything where you left it; shut down, nothing on this page reaches it except the plug.

Test it at the desk first: sleep the Mac, send the wake from the same network, and if the screen lights the route is open. If it does not, the seven causes at the foot of this page are the checklist.

Choose what sends the wake

The packet has to leave from inside the Mac's own network, so the choice is which always-on thing there does the sending. Four things can, the first two you may already own, and any one is enough — and none of them is the Mac itself. How to wake a PC remotely walks each one; the plug row is the Mac's route from off.

• The Echo. Enable the skill, link your Rooster Wake account, and give it the Mac's name and its Ethernet port's address; your own Echo then puts the packet on your own network, which is why it is free on every plan.
• The free agent on a box that stays on. Install it on a NAS, a Raspberry Pi, a Home Assistant box or a second machine — or as a container on the NAS — and that box sends for every other machine on the network. It cannot wake the machine it is installed on.
• A certified smart plug. For the desktop Mac that is shut down, or frozen: it cuts and restores the mains, and an Apple-silicon desktop Mac boots from cold when power returns, on the paid plans.
• A dongle you build. A Raspberry Pi Pico W in a printed case, for the network where nothing stays on: half a watt, and everything the agent carries.

Wake it from anywhere, and know it woke

With a sender in place the Mac is a row on your dashboard with a green Wake button. Press it from any browser or the phone app and the packet goes out on the Mac's network a second or two later; a desktop Mac off at its plug is offered the plug's wake instead. Wake-on-LAN has no acknowledgement, so two things tell you it landed. With the free agent on the Mac, the row turns green — up now — agent connected — the moment it is up, on every plan. On Plus and Pro, wake confirmation watches the Mac's own network for it answering and tells you it came up, or that it did not and why, pushed to your phone.

Then connect with what you already use: Screen Sharing, SSH, or a remote-desktop tool that dials out. Store the link against the machine — vnc:// for Screen Sharing, ssh:// for a terminal — and the row carries a Remote Desktop button that opens it; pressed while the Mac is asleep it sends the wake, waits for the agent to say the Mac is up, and opens the link as one press, and on Plus and Pro holds the Mac for ten minutes while you sign in. The same hold for an SSH shell or a file transfer — in use — SSH on the row, and sleep ten minutes after it goes quiet — is the subject of sleep your Linux box and still SSH in, and the rule is the same on a Mac.

Install the agent from the package, and the dashboard reads the sleep

Waking needs nothing on the Mac. Everything else on this page is the free agent, and on a Mac it comes as an installer package rather than a paste. Your dashboard offers the package: it is signed and notarised by Apple, so it opens without a warning to click past, and it puts the agent in place along with the background service that starts it with the machine and the helper that lets the Mac say goodbye before it sleeps. One line in Terminal afterwards, which your dashboard writes with your credential in it, joins that Mac to your account.

The helper is the part that matters on a Mac. When macOS is about to sleep — the idle timer, the Apple menu, the lid — the agent says goodbye on the way down, so the row reads asleep as of a moment ago rather than a green line that stopped being true, and offers Wake. The bare macOS binary is still served for anyone who would rather fetch it by name, but it carries no sleep detection: a Mac on it reports its sleep only when the dashboard notices the silence. The package is the supported route, and the one the rest of this page assumes.

Sleeping it from your phone, and the timer that does it for you

With the agent on the Mac the row carries Sleep: press it from the dashboard, the phone app or a Claude chat and the Mac suspends in seconds. The free plan includes ten sleeps a calendar month; Plus and Pro are unmetered and add Restart… and Shut down… beside it — the second worth a pause on a Mac, which comes back from shut down only by the plug.

Keep awake…, on Plus and Pro, is the other half: hold the Mac up for a window you choose, and the row shows the deadline. When the timer ends the machine goes back to sleep by itself unless somebody is using it, on Windows, macOS and Linux. A Mac on Wi-Fi with a certified plug shuts down cleanly instead — sleep would strand it, a cold boot brings it back — and the switch stays on for the next Wake; a Mac on Wi-Fi with no plug is left to its own settings, because nothing could wake it again.

The agent on the Mac cannot wake the machine it runs on — asleep, it is asleep along with it — so it does not replace the sender above.

Switching a desktop Mac on from off: the plug route

Nothing brings a shut-down Mac back by packet. What brings an Apple-silicon Mac mini, iMac or Mac Studio back is power: apply it and the machine starts, with no setting to find. A certified smart plug on the paid plans cuts and restores the mains from the dashboard, through an agent or dongle on the same network, with the same green Wake — the row reads the machine as off at its switch while it is down, and it comes back by cold boot rather than resume, with nothing open. The same plug power-cycles a Mac that has frozen.

The plug is never a MacBook's route — a battery makes cutting the mains meaningless, and a MacBook does not start when power returns — and the switch is never turned off: when a keep-awake timer on the paid plans ends on a plug-powered Mac, the agent shuts it down cleanly and the switch stays on for the next Wake.

MacBooks, and the Claude Code case

A MacBook on Wi-Fi cannot be woken by packet at all. On a dock with an Ethernet port, on mains, with Wake for network access set to Only on power adapter or Always, it is a desktop for these purposes — as macOS documents — and asleep on the dock is the state to leave it in. Off the dock, or on battery, nothing on this page reaches it, and the plug does not either.

The reason many people arrive at this page is Claude Code: a session started on the Mac with claude remote-control that dies when the Mac sleeps. On a Mac as on Windows and Linux, the free agent notices a running claude remote-control process and holds the Mac awake for as long as it runs, then lets it go ten minutes after the session ends; the row reads in use — Claude Code while it does. Starting the session from the dashboard is on the Windows agent today — on a Mac, start it at the keyboard and the hold follows. Running Claude Code remotely on a PC that sleeps has the whole loop; other shapes of the problem are mapped in who uses Wake-on-LAN.

When the wake does nothing

Nearly every "it does not wake" is one of these seven, each with a check at the desk. The first six are the PC causes from the plain how-to — the network ones apply to a Mac as they stand, the Windows ones to the PC on the same desk — and the seventh is the Mac's own.

1. The adapter setting is off. Check Device Manager, the Ethernet adapter: Allow this device to wake the computer ticked under Power Management, Wake on Magic Packet Enabled under Advanced. A driver update can silently reset both; with the free agent on the machine, the dashboard's Wake readiness section catches it and offers the fix.
2. Fast startup is on, and you shut down. The machine is hibernated, not off, and the card is parked un-armed. Check Choose what the power buttons do: Turn on fast startup unticked. Or sleep the machine instead — sleep is the state the packet is best at.
3. The machine was off, not asleep. From full power-off a PC listens only if the BIOS keeps the card fed and the driver's after-shutdown wake is on; a Mac never listens. Check: sleep it, send the wake, and if that works the missing setting is the BIOS one.
4. It is on Wi-Fi. Check whether the cable is in. Waking over Wi-Fi works from sleep only when it works at all, and never on a laptop.
5. Wrong network. A broadcast does not cross a VLAN, a guest Wi-Fi, a client-isolated network or, on some mesh systems, a different node. Check that the sender and the machine share a segment — same switch, off the guest network.
6. A BIOS power setting. ErP Ready, EuP 2013, deep sleep, or a mode that cuts the standby rail. Check the BIOS's power page with all of those off and Wake on LAN on — and take the right address: getmac /v, the Ethernet row, never a virtual adapter's.
7. Wake for network access is off, the Mac is on battery, or it was shut down rather than slept. Check System Settings, Energy on a desktop Mac, or Battery, Options on a MacBook, for Wake for network access on — Only on power adapter counts only while the adapter is in; with the agent on the Mac the row says wakes may fail and Prepare for wake fixes it. Check the Mac is on mains and on the cable, and that the address you gave the sender is the Ethernet port's, from networksetup -listallhardwareports, not the Wi-Fi one. And check how it was left: a shut-down Mac listens for nothing, so sleep it instead — or, for a desktop Mac, take the plug route above, on the paid plans.