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Comment by adrianmsmith | Hacker News Reader

One item on that list I cannot understand:

Ctrl-Command-Power does an immediate reboot. Loses any unsaved documents. Doesn't shut down cleanly so potentially damages the filesystem. No "are you sure?". That's great: they thought the feature of "damage your computer" was so useful they should make a keyboard shortcut for it.

It's one key away from Alt-Command-Power which I use all the time to put the computer to sleep. So the feature is not only convenient, it's very "discoverable". I certainly discovered it yesterday.

Windows laptops solve the problem by making you hold down the power button for 5 seconds, to prevent you from doing it accidentally.

WTF Apple. That’s just insane.

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I have never, in the past at least 15ish years of working daily on a mac, triggered this accidentally. But, I have needed to perform it a handful of times.

More than 23 years here. And 23 years ago I used it an awful lot more in the dark days of System 7 with no protected memory and cooperative multitasking.

It's one key away from Alt-Command-Power which I use all the time to put the computer to sleep.

(Not a Mac user.) What does (short-)pressing the power button do? On Windows, the default action for that is usually sleep, and as you noted, a long-press is a hard poweroff (that's done in hardware directly, the short-press is just an ACPI signal to the software.)

>What does (short-)pressing the power button do?

It goes to sleep.

I think a short press on the power button sleeps the machine, but usually the keyboard command I used for that is [close lid].

The originally posted link states:

> Power button: Press to turn on your Mac or wake it from sleep. Press and hold for 1.5 seconds to put your Mac to sleep. Continue holding to force your Mac to turn off.

[deleted]

Those should be illegal.

Surely hyperbole for a few chuckles, right?

It takes a lot to type "sudo reboot" by mistake. Shortcut key combinations are something you can press by mistake, especially since there are so many of them and you can be absent-mindedly thinking of a different combination!

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