Password failure first time, every time

I have never been one to leave my Mac on overnight. When I go to sleep, I put my Macs to sleep. Some people will say that shutting down for the night and powering back up in the morning is not necessary (and with this new mini M4 Pro I have, I might even agree with them, thanks to the stupid placement of the power button... but I digress).


Still, when I power back up in the morning and come to the login screen, my password never works the first time I type it in. I get the "jiggle", and I have to retype it a second time for it to work and log me in. Even if I take extra special care to get the password just right, and I see the bullet characters for each keypress going into the password field, the first time through fails.


I have a Magic Keyboard, and I do usually have to wait a few seconds after the login screen comes up for the bluetooth connection to take hold and the keypresses I make actually do translate to characters typed on the screen. But it's only after I see that the keyboard is functioning and the Mac is accepting input from it do I start with an empty field and try my password.


For the life of me, I cannot figure out why the first attempt is never correct. It's bugging the heck out of me! Somebody, please give me some suggestions. Is it something that I need to change?

Mac mini, macOS 15.3

Posted on Mar 12, 2025 09:16 AM

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Mar 12, 2025 01:41 PM in response to ChristopherW

First, do not put the Macs to sleep. Please turn off Sleep in System Settings!


  1. Then while in System Settings click Lock Screen in Sidebar
  2. Then set "Turn Display Off When Inactive" for the amount of time you want.


This will make the computer much more stable than using the sleep function. Below is a screenshot of what I use on my machine, I've used this for well over 10 years and my Macs have ALWAYS been very stable and trouble free.


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Password failure first time, every time

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