Turn Your MacBook Into an Alarm Clock With Wakefy
If you rely on several different alarms to wake up in the morning – smart lights that turn on at specific times, a smart speaker far away, and your reliable smartphone alarm – the Wakefy app for macOS adds another tool to your wake-up arsenal. … It’s not perfect, but it works well enough that we can add it to our morning collection.
How Wakefy works
When you install an app – not from the Mac App Store, since the app requires more system permissions than Apple grants to apps from the App Store – you also need to download Spotify if you haven’t already installed it. Finally, you will need an active Spotify account (free).
When you load Wakefy and click on its little icon in the menu bar, you should give it two bits of information: the time and the playlist. Once you set this alarm, your MacBook will wake up at the appointed time and start playing the playlist of your choice. It is so simple. It seems, as it were, something like.
It’s hard to wake up
While we love this concept, Wakefy still has to contend with some quirks of macOS. First, you just need to put your desktop or laptop to sleep every night, rather than shutting it down completely. Wakefy can turn on your system for you, but you have to enable automatic login – fine if you know no one else will ever touch your system, but less ideal for the laptop you carry around. If it doesn’t have access to your desktop, Wakefy won’t work.
If you are using Wakefy on a laptop, you will have to keep the laptop screen open while it sleeps, even if it is slightly cracked, otherwise your system will go to sleep immediately when Wakefy wakes it up to wake you up. And you (obviously) don’t want to leave your headphones plugged into the system, unless you’re sleeping the easiest way.
While Wakefy points out that you can search for Spotify songs and playlists to use as an alarm clock, we were only able to find the latter. Additionally, Wakefy searches all over Spotify when you select a playlist as your alarm. Impossible to easily select from already created playlists.
However, since Wakefy is still under development, this is a welcome addition to your morning routine if you need some extra help getting out of bed. It’s free, pretty quick to set up, and gets the job done if simple solutions aren’t enough.