I ran into the "display set to Never but the Mac locks anyway" problem myself on a MacBook Pro (M3 Max) right after updating to macOS 26.5.2. After testing this across several of my own Macs and reproducing it under different conditions, it became clear this isn't one bug — it's at least two different behaviors that get lumped together because the symptom looks the same. Which one applies to you depends on whether you're on a laptop or a desktop Mac driving external displays.
If you're on a MacBook: the screen saver, not the display timer, is locking you out
"Turn display off when inactive" only controls when the backlight physically switches off. It has nothing to do with when the screen saver starts, and it's the screen saver — combined with your password requirement — that actually triggers the lock.
Since macOS Sonoma, and reorganized again in Tahoe (26), Apple split these into two separate panes:
- Lock Screen → display sleep timers only (the setting most people check first)
- Wallpaper → Screen Saver button → the real "Start after" timer
On Tahoe, this second timer isn't listed under Lock Screen at all anymore. When I first hit this myself, I assumed it had been removed rather than moved — it's easy to miss because nothing in the Lock Screen pane hints that a second, independent timer even exists.
So the actual sequence on a laptop that's "locking despite Never" is:
- Display sleep timer: Never (does nothing to stop the screen saver)
- Screen saver "Start after": still at its old value — 5, 10, or 20 minutes
- "Require password after screen saver begins": Immediately
Step 2 fires, step 3 locks you out a second later. The display never actually turns off — you're looking at a lock screen instead of a screen saver.
Fix: System Settings → Wallpaper → Screen Saver → set "Start after" to Never here, not in Lock Screen. If you still want a screen saver but don't want the password prompt to feel abrupt, set "Require password" to a short delay (5–15 seconds) instead of Immediately.
If you're on a Mac mini, Mac Studio, or iMac with external displays: it's a different mechanism
This is where it gets interesting, because the symptom on a desktop Mac is different in practice: on a Mac mini I run with two displays over USB-C, the external screen goes black roughly 30 seconds after locking — regardless of what the Lock Screen or display-sleep settings say.
Working through it methodically, the most consistent explanation is that this isn't sleep at all: the Mac deliberately kills the video signal to the external display shortly after lock to prevent burn-in and reduce power draw, since nobody's expected to be staring at a static lock screen for an extended period. The machine itself hasn't gone to sleep — only the signal to the panel has been cut, and moving the mouse or pressing a key brings it back instantly.
That said, when I isolated variables one at a time, a few other things turned out to change the timing or make the behavior worse, and they're worth ruling out before you conclude it's just the burn-in protection doing its job:
- Third-party USB-C multiport adapters. Swapping a passive/basic USB-C-to-HDMI cable in for a multiport hub changed the timing noticeably on one setup — hubs that also run warm to the touch under load are worth testing in isolation, since a cable that's marginal on bandwidth or power can make display wake behave inconsistently.
- Bluetooth peripherals. With Bluetooth keyboard and mouse connected, wake-from-signal-cut was less reliable than with the same peripherals wired in over USB. Toggling Bluetooth off and back on is a five-minute test that isolates whether this is a factor for you.
- Corrupted power-management state. Running
sudo pmset restoredefaultsin Terminal (you'll be prompted for your admin password, which won't display any characters as you type) resets all sleep/wake/display settings to Apple's defaults, and is worth doing once after any major macOS upgrade before troubleshooting further. On Intel Macs, an SMC reset is the equivalent fallback. - A second, clean user account. Creating a new admin account (System Settings → Users & Groups) and testing there isolates whether the cause is system-wide or tied to your specific login profile, launch agents, or menu-bar utilities.
If none of that changes the behavior and the display always cuts out at a suspiciously exact interval (30 seconds is what I consistently measured), you're very likely looking at the intentional burn-in-prevention behavior above rather than a bug — in which case there's currently no user-facing toggle to disable it, since it isn't tied to the Lock Screen display-sleep sliders at all.
The workaround I ended up using instead of fighting it
Rather than trying to prevent the screen saver or signal cut entirely, I set the screen saver to start after 1 minute and set "Require password" to Immediately. That way the transition to lock is intentional and immediate rather than an unpredictable half-locked state, and it sidesteps a separate annoyance I hit on the desktop setup — windows getting shuffled around after the display comes back from being fully powered off.
Quick reference
| Setting / Cause | Where to check | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Turn display off when inactive | System Settings → Lock Screen | All Macs — backlight only |
| Start Screen Saver after | System Settings → Wallpaper → Screen Saver | Laptops mainly — this is the real lock trigger |
| Require password delay | System Settings → Lock Screen | All Macs |
| Signal cut to prevent burn-in | Not user-configurable | Desktop Macs with external displays, ~30s after lock |
| Third-party USB-C adapter/hub | Physical hardware, swap to test | Desktop Macs, external displays |
| Bluetooth peripherals | System Settings → Bluetooth (toggle off to test) | Desktop Macs, especially Mac mini/Studio |
| Corrupted power state | Terminal: sudo pmset restoredefaults |
Any Mac after a major macOS upgrade |
| Configuration profiles | System Settings → General → Device Management | Managed/work Macs, overrides everything above |
Is any of this an actual bug?
For laptops: partly. The relocation of the Screen Saver timer out of the Lock Screen pane is a real UI change in Tahoe, and in my testing it's the direct cause of "display set to Never but still locks" on MacBooks specifically. There's also a smaller, separate glitch I ran into on 26.0.1: waking from a screen saver that hadn't run long enough briefly showed the lock screen without asking for a password, requiring a second wake to actually unlock — an interaction bug between the two timers, not the display-sleep setting itself.
For desktops with external monitors: mostly not, once you rule out adapters and Bluetooth. The signal-cut-for-burn-in behavior held up consistently across every test I ran and behaves like intentional design, even though it feels like a bug the first time you see it.
If you've checked the table above end to end and the behavior still doesn't match any of these causes, that's the point where filing feedback through Apple's Feedback Assistant is more useful than continuing to adjust settings that were never the actual trigger.