It seems like sleep mode on modern macOS is just broken. It used to be the one feature that always worked more reliable than on other platforms.

For the past years I’ve constantly had issues with my old Intel Mac Mini randomly waking up at night, causing attached hard disks to start spinning and getting very hot in the process. After switching to a M4 Mac Mini I expected my Mac to not suffer from that any more. I only installed a limited number of software after a clean install to not carry over old issues.

After the first night I already noticed that once again the brand new Mac felt quite warm, I immediately installed Sleep Aid and saw once again that it was randomly waking up for events like keepalive-push.apple.com-NonCellular or filesystem.image, then getting too hot and shutting down. This is different from the short maintenance wake-up events that the Mac does a few times per hour.

Would be slightly more convenient if the power off button of the new Minis wouldn’t be on the bottom wehre you always have to tilt them up to turn them on.