Bluesnooze is a free, open-source Mac menu bar utility that automatically cuts Bluetooth power when your Mac goes to sleep, restoring it the moment you wake the machine back up.
What is Bluesnooze?
Bluesnooze is a tiny background app that solves one of macOS's most quietly annoying quirks: Bluetooth stays active while your Mac sleeps, which lets wireless accessories — headphones, keyboards, mice — latch onto a dormant machine and either drain their batteries or hijack a connection your iPhone or iPad was happily using. Install Bluesnooze once, grant it login-item access, and you never think about it again.
The project lives on GitHub, is actively maintained, and ships as a native Mac app. There is no configuration screen, no subscription nag, and no telemetry. It does exactly one thing.
What does Bluesnooze do best?
Bluesnooze excels at keeping your wireless peripherals available to other devices the moment your Mac's lid closes. I noticed the problem first with my AirPods: closing the MacBook Pro lid at night would silently steal the connection from my iPhone, so the next morning's commute started with audio routed to a sleeping laptop rather than my phone. Bluesnooze eliminated that entirely.
- Zero-configuration design — the only decision you make is enabling it at login.
- Instant restore on wake — Bluetooth comes back before your first keypress lands.
- Battery courtesy — headphones and mice no longer churn trying to maintain a connection to a machine that isn't listening.
- Menu bar icon — a single click to toggle it off temporarily; long-press to quit.
The trade-off is intentional minimalism. There is no per-device allowlist, no schedule, and no way to keep Bluetooth on for just one accessory while killing it for others. If you need that granularity, you're looking at a scripting solution rather than a one-click utility.
Is Bluesnooze free?
Yes — Bluesnooze is completely free to download and use. It is open-source software distributed under the MIT licence, meaning you can inspect every line of code that runs on your machine, fork it, or contribute. There is no paid tier, no in-app purchase, and no feature gating. The author accepts sponsorship on GitHub, but it is strictly optional.
Who should use Bluesnooze?
Bluesnooze is purpose-built for anyone who owns wireless peripherals that should belong to multiple devices. If your workflow involves a MacBook that sleeps on a desk alongside an iPhone, iPad, or a second Mac, and you have ever arrived somewhere to find your AirPods or Magic Keyboard unresponsive because a sleeping machine claimed them, this app is for you.
It is equally useful in shared-desk environments where a Mac mini sits in a closet connected to a docking station — headphones reconnect to your phone the second you lock the screen, rather than dangling in a Bluetooth limbo attached to idle hardware.
Power users who already automate Bluetooth with Hammerspoon or shell scripts may find Bluesnooze redundant, but for everyone else it replaces a fragile cron job with a reliable, maintained binary.
What are the best Bluesnooze alternatives?
Bluesnooze occupies a fairly unique niche, but there are adjacent tools worth knowing. ToothFairy is the closest paid alternative — it focuses on one-click device switching and can be scripted, though it approaches the problem from a connection-management angle rather than sleep-state automation. Bluetooth Screen Lock takes the inverse approach, cutting Bluetooth when you walk away from your Mac. For power users, Hammerspoon can replicate Bluesnooze's behaviour in roughly ten lines of Lua if you already run it for other automation. None of these are direct replacements: Bluesnooze's specific sleep-triggered automation is its defining feature, and nothing else delivers it this effortlessly out of the box.
How do I install Bluesnooze?
The fastest route is Homebrew Cask — one terminal command and it is installed. Alternatively, download the latest release directly from the GitHub releases page, drag the app to your Applications folder, and launch it. On first launch, confirm you want it to run at login (the only prompt you will ever see). The menu bar icon appears, and that is the entire setup.
Bluesnooze runs natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. Because it interacts with a low-level system preference, macOS may ask for confirmation the first time it toggles Bluetooth on an Apple Silicon machine — grant it and the permission is remembered permanently.
