14 DAY TRIAL // An exclusive feature included by Apple in OS X 10.8 aka Mountain Lion, Power Nap gets a lot of things done for you silently, when your computer is in “Sleep” mode. This exclusive feature in Mountain Lion is now accessible to owners of a late-2010 MacBook Air.
Requiring SSD-enabled laptops (as opposed to those based on hard disk drives), Power Nap fetches new email, updates your contacts, calendar and reminders, syncs documents with the cloud, reels in images from Photo Stream, and does a lot more without having you worry about a thing.
In fact, Power Nap does even more when your Mac is plugged in to an AC outlet.
“When your portable Mac is connected to a power source, it also downloads software updates, makes backups with Time Machine, performs Spotlight indexing, and can continue Mac App Store downloads,” says Apple. “It also updates Help Center.”
And, so far, it was only supported on these systems: MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid 2011), MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid 2012), MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2011), MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2012), MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012), OS X Mountain Lion.
With the release of OS X 10.8.2 this month, Apple will be adding Late 2010 MacBook Airs to the mix.
That’s according to the changelog accompanying the latest developer build, which says that the second maintenance update to Mountain Lion brings “Power Nap support for MacBook Air (Late 2010).”
According to a Support document on Apple’s website, “An SMC update is required to gain all the functionality of Power Nap.”
The knowledge base article includes a list of the supported Macs and the SMC update that is required to support Power Nap on each one of them. MacBook Air (Late 2010) is not included at the time of writing.