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Comment by radicalbyte | Hacker News Reader

This is the literal reason I switched to OSX. I dislike the impractical design of Macbooks - horrible connectivity and no way to swap batteries.

However the combination of 15 hrs battery life + closing the lid and it not melting a hole in my bag trumps any negatives.

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Forget the overheating — the fact that Macs will save all your work when shutting down, and will refuse to shut down if this is not possible (for instance if some app that doesn’t support autosave (MS office) has unsaved work, or if there are terminal jobs running). Can’t imagine how anyone tolerates their computer just obliterating their work.

So just like Windows since... 7? Or something like that.

I can guarantee you that a Mac will still shut down when its battery is empty. Unfortunately Apple hasn't yet cracked unlimited power.

Macs sleep on low battery, then hibernate RAM contents to disk when really really empty. You never lose data.

Right, so the same as Windows.

A common theme I've noticed with the most ardent mac fans is they haven't used a windows machine since windows 95 and seem to think osx has all these magic features windows users are missing out on.

I use mac and windows daily, and they both have similar amounts of annoying niggling features.

I've used Windows in its most recent Version on a high-end Dell issued by my company and can confirm all reports here about losing data and overheating. The Macbook simply works out of box but i can't get the Windows Machine to work in a sane way without 50/50 chance of losing all battery or data after closing the lid...

I have noticed the same thing with Mac fans. Another meme from the past which needs to die is that Mac has better user interface. There are so many annoying and missing UI issues in Mac and dare I say Windows has better UI for some aspects of the OS than Mac.

Yeah mac is a mixed bag, eg. preview is awesome, finder absolutely sucks.

Unless it wakes for some weird reason, or does auto update and blows everything away which has been the general jist of this thread

Yeah I see lots of people complaining about that. Kinda weird since I've literally never had it happen to me on any of my windows machines.

Windows will routinely shut itself down to do updates and obliterate things that have not saved.

> I can guarantee you that a Mac will still shut down when its battery is empty.

Macs "safe sleep" --- when they sleep, they save a hibernation/ram state too. So if the battery is depleted, they still do not shut down.

I'm probably going back to MacOS after my current Windows 10 machine, because too many annoyances have shown up (and now ESC keys exist again).

Made me think about a system we have to enter notes in at work. It'll kick you out with 10 minutes of inactivity. But it won't tell you it's kicked you out. You just go to save your notes and it puts you to a login screen, discarding everything you've typed.

That would cause me to edit my notes in notepad and then copy past them when done.

You're kidding right? I hate that behaviour of MacOS. If I told the OS to shut down/restart, I meant it. Kill everything and get on with it, I shouldn't have to babysit.

If I told it to update, I didn't mean "oh pretty please but if it's too hard don't worry about it", I meant "I know this ii. update is going to take an hour for a point release for some reason, but I'm going for a walk now - go ahead so IT gets off my back".

Also I've had many issues with my macbook overheating/discharging in my bag because I hit sleep, it looked like it was sleeping, but it was still on/woke up. Admittedly not a huge amount because of COVID but still.

Can’t you just wait two minutes for it yo cycle through all open apps and click “don’t save”/“terminate” on all of them?

But why isn't there simply a Terminate All button?

It's the power button, just force instant power off if you don't mind an integrity check at next startup!

there is, sort of, but it's got one or two extra steps (and most folks probably don't know it exists).

1. Press Cmd+Option+Escape to bring up the Force Quit menu

2. Press Cmd+A to select all running apps

3. Click the "Force Quit" Button to force quit all apps

And then it doesn’t work, so after half an hour of staring at a grey screen, you give up and hold down the power button.

Why wait at all in that case and not just hold down the power button right away?

Just killing all apps is a very hostile default for a consumer OS. You might be able to force a restart from the terminal if you really don’t care about data integrity though.

funny

I was using an iPad Pro and I thought something in the Apple Notes app was good. Poof. Never found the file after.

Unsaved work should be a concern of the app, not the OS. The app should obey the commands of the OS, and handle auto-saving on its own to keep fulfilling its duties to the user.

Apps that let you risk losing work -- from not just shutdowns but crashes and power outages - are the ones I don't tolerate. It's one of the reason I use Sublime Text for taking notes for example.

VSCode has excellent work preservation. I’ve had multiple Windows in VSCode open for months, with many “unsaved” documents open, and it always reloads everything after reboots and shutdowns.

MS Windows does the same thing with Hibernate.

Until it decides you must have this new update and reboots your machine at 2am for you

Same, I was in university and kept showing up to class with my Dell Inspiron having killed it's own battery in my bag regardless how carefully I put it into sleep/hibernate.

Or I'd find it nearly dead and burning hot, fans spun up wildly, in the process of cooking it's own motherboard.

It heat suicided itself through 2 motherboards during the 1 year warranty.

I have my complaints about MacBooks, but at least I had a laptop I could count on being reliable and ready to work when I showed up to class every day.

I couldn't trust the Dell, making it absolutely worthless.

The best thing with Dell is when you've shut it down properly, but it somehow finds a way to turn itself back on in your bag. Then when you get home your bag is 50c and battery dead.

Be careful. My Macbook Pro cooked it's display twice. Some program made it not go to sleep when I closed the lid, I put it in my backpack, and it overheated the display so much that I had yellow-brownish spots (which followed gravity over time). No way to check if it's sleeping when the lid is closed, because reasons...

We have a few users that leave clamshell mode while working at home and the past year never opened their laptops. Same thing. Permanent heat stain on the display in the form of the keyboard. Granted that's more than just sleeping issues, but it's definitely something that happens.

I once had told Caffeine not to sleep my 2014 MBPr when the lid was shut and later put it in my backpack.

Why the frak doesn’t the laptop have an over temp shutdown feature? iPhones so, trying leaving one in the sun for a bit.

Caffeine shouldn't prevent it from sleeping anymore anymore unless you have an HDMI plugged in it.

Yes and Macs have worked like that since the PPC days. Display closed + no external display connected = sleep. Removing said display will also make it sleep.

I guess it's a bug or some monitoring service that crashed.

Perhaps it was Amphetamine with the relevant setting to prevent sleep with built-in display closed.

Any fullscreen apps using the GPU will prevent a MacBook from sleeping when the lid is closed. Games, YouTube, even some GPU-heavy apps can prevent it from sleeping.

I always assumed those were the result of my cycling backpack putting too much pressure on the screen. It's basically bow-like structure to keep the bag off my back.

I do have my MacBooks cooking themselves in my backpack every so often too.

Basically, every MacBook's I had in the past > 10 years ended with that issue.

Mystery solved!

What’s the name of the backpack btw? Been looking for something like this

I can confirm that this is the issue. I have little white spots on the display, and they appear during my motorcycle trips, when my luggage is pushing against the display. I got a fresh one from the latest trip. Armoured cases are not nearly as armoured as they should be.

I really miss the "snoring" light that Macbooks used to have, though more to tell if the computer is actually waking up.

I really don't get why they left the light off them. It's not something that takes any space at all and they can even make it invisible when off with their micro holes like they did with the old Bluetooth keyboard.

Sometimes it seems Apple is just minimalist for the sake of it. Because this is really a useful feature.

I doubt lasering those holes is particularly cheap, i.e. likely much (much) more than the cost of a big hole with an LED.

But I do very much like them, and would happily pay a bit to get it back.

They could manage it in a $80 keyboard when that tech was new and probably more expensive, I'd think they could do it in a $1500 laptop :)

And a hole with a plastic insert would be fine for me too. It wouldn't be as minimalist but not doing it at all is much worse IMO.

Membrane keyboards are so incredibly common and simple to make that I'd be willing to bet they make dramatically more profit on that keyboard than on a $1500 laptop (proportional to price). Even after accounting for all the wasted R&D and refunds and repairs spent denying problems with their butterfly mechanism.

So kinda yes... but also kinda no, I don't think that really supports a claim that it's cheap enough to do everywhere.

But yeah, I'd totally be fine with an LED glued into a hole. The indicator is the important part, and it's a shame that it's gone.

I wouldn't be surprised if they feel like macbooks are so reliable that sort of feedback isn't even necessary

This happened to my iPhone 1 too. Caused a really ugly burn in the display :'(

Of course iOS wasn't as stable as it is now.. I don't think this will still happen.

I’ve had this issue with my work Mac not sleeping: I’ve always hypothesized it’s something to do with the provisioning of the machine, because it’s the only Mac I’ve ever had this problem with.

Is there a way to find out what app is guilty?

Same sentiment, and that's how I found Linux. I've now made it a solemn vow to convert every daily driver I have to dual-boot Win/Linux when it's a >100GB HD.

My XPS 13 on Ubuntu while sleping randomly turns on in my backpack and tries to melt a hole/burns the battery to 0. So I think at least SOME of it might be hardware related.

The takeaway from this thread is that there is no platform safe from this issue.

The probability of the issue happening seems to be meaningfully far less on certain operating systems than others.

I don't see how you can possibly make any meaningful conclusions about relative probability from this thread.

It is not from this thread, but my experience over the last 15 to 20 years. I have seen lots and lots of people, including myself, close MacBook lids, toss it in a bag, and start walking. But I do not see that with non MacBooks. It was so notable to me that it led me to decide to look into switching to MacBook Airs.

And you believe your experience is statistically significant.

n=1, but we still weight it x20 because we have the most data on it.

I'm really exhausted by this trend of people adding the word "probability" to their argument because they think it makes it stronger. Just no.

*except Macs. I daily drive my desktop with Linux and occasionally game with Windows (it’s set up to be my driver as well with WSL2, but that happens rarely). I’ll only use Mac laptops. I’ve screwed around with others, but for about 18 years they have been the only ones that have been reliable, with good build quality, and no molten backpacks yet.

There are some people reporting problems with Macs on this thread...

What is bad, because if there were one platform that would avoid this problem it would be Macs. But anyway, my phone does that once in a while too... Phones also shouldn't do it.

It's not even a hard problem to solve. There is a single piece of code that wakes a device up, you just have to not call it everywhere. If you don't control all the code, just require some kind of permission, and don't go granting it to the team that writes the system updater.

I've had nothing but problems with Apple's "Power Nap" functionality. I remember three discrete issues with my 2014 MBP (Quartz would randomly crash out of naps when connected to external displays, the topcase frequently felt mysteriously warm and my media controls would freak out forcing me to close spotify/firefox before closing it) Ironically, the only time I've seen it behaving as-intended was when I had my T460p running MacOS with photo analysis disabled. I'm guessing it's an ACPI issue, since Apple's track record with the technology is shaky.

I've had the opposite experience with Macbooks. WiFi randomly dropping out, battery dying overnight while the laptop is closed, external display settings not being persisted, randomly switching from my external microphone to the built-in one halfway through a call... Sometimes reading through these threads I feel like the only person in the world who has somehow had three faulty Macbooks in a row.

I've now had three generations of XPS 13 with Ubuntu. They're not perfect (the battery drains over 3 or 4 days instead of overnight) but overall my experience has been much better.

Should airplanes forbid PC laptops?

It’s more serious than laptops committing suicide in bags. It’s, anything with a high-energy battery can short itself and cause a fire. Worse, it could be malware or hardware. At this point I am surprised the vulnerability hasn’t been used by anyone.

Airplanes have bags/boxes to throw li-ion batteries into and extinguish any particular fire.

The law is that you can only bring aboard Li-ion batteries of size 100 watt-hrs or smaller on any airplane (https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...).

I think the airline crews are confident they can handle 100 watt-hours worth of burning, but no more than that!

You can't extinguish a lithium ion battery fire by smothering it. The fire creates its own oxygen. You can contain the fire, and you can immerse it in enough water that it cools below the burning temperature and shorts out through the water.

https://youtu.be/oa_yao1DC1U

https://youtu.be/LCFsmHLDuyg

I'm not sure if they are smothering the fire. The strategy seems like it's just a safe place to keep the fire until later.

You won't have buckets and buckets of water on an airplane. You need a solution to safely contain the fire and keep the passengers safe.

but very easily fixed as written above :)

Same here on an XPS 15, damn thing was so hot I was worried about it catching fire.

As I understood it, it's an ACPI configuration, more or less 'forced' by Microsoft, to ensure this cool new S0 is the default. See [0] [1] and [2]. The fix/work-around is to tell the kernel to not do that, and just use traditional S3 sleep.

Adding `mem_sleep_default=deep` to your kernel cmdline should fix it. Been doing this on my XPS13 for 3 years now and it's fine.

[0] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199689

[1] https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-13-9370-battery-drain...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/8b6eci/xp_13_9370_bat...

Dell has "fixed" that problem by disabling S3 sleep on certain laptops. Not even kidding, the ACPI tables don't have S3 sleep as an option and it's not even some matter of OSI string trickery either.

S3 is no longer available on newer XPS notebooks (e.g. 9310). S0ix works fine with Linux but I've found it typically requires tweaking and testing.

dmesg | grep ACPI | grep supports [ 0.193967] ACPI: (supports S0 S4 S5)

sudo cat /sys/power/mem_sleep [s2idle]

https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-li...

https://01.org/blogs/rzhang/2015/best-practice-debug-linux-s...

I used to disable all ACPI signals (keys and lid) for exactly this reason on my Macbook 2015 running linux.

Not the most comfortable, as you have to manage sleep manually, but definitely the safest.

Ah right, Linux, the platform where suspend and resume doesn't even work and hibernation is a mess.

AMD https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-S2id...

s2idle is broken and I have an AMD thinkpad with deep sleep and even that doesn't suspend 80% of the time.

Intel (search for 'deep' and 's2idle') https://community.frame.work/t/ubuntu-21-04-on-the-framework...

I already know the replies I might get but just wanted to get this out there. My laptop is now on 24x7 because I don't know if it will suspend or completely freeze.

This has been my experience as well, with a fairly wide variety of nixes/bsds/etc and a half a dozen different machines.

Now I just disable it completely and tell it to shut down when I close the lid, and wait like 15s. If the fans and lights don't stop "soon", I know it's having problems turning off. It's much better than the random freezes, or boiling alive in a backpack before draining all battery power.

I never understood why I should be hibernating instead of suspending so I can't talk about that - but I haven't seen a laptop unable to suspend for years. That could be luck and not buying laptops with terrible linux support but I wouldn't paint the situation as this tragic.

The experience out of the box is still crap because the ACPI signals from the hardware are often a complete mess - but disabling most of them generally works.

> and not buying laptops with terrible linux support but I wouldn't paint the situation as this tragic.

Please tell me the name of a laptop which has excellent support for Linux. At this point, I'm ready to go out of my way to spend more money than I can afford if that gets me excellent Linux compatibility.

I know, for a fact, that AMD based ThinkPads don't qualify. The Intel based FrameWork laptop has issues with suspend resume as well.

I have a Thinkpad X270, it has an Intel CPU. Never had any problems with suspend/resume on Linux.

I obviously won't buy a 5 year old laptop. I guess I should change my question to "Are there any laptops released within the past year that have excellent Linux compatibility?" Because from what I've read on forums, suspend resume doesn't work for a lot of people and the scenario keeps changing from one Linux version to the other.

I can't confirm my experience is excellent but my partner's 2021 Acer Spin Pro 5 is on par with various Lenovo laptops (I was surprised when it mostly just worked) and better than Asus mobo desktops that I have used.

Dell XPS 9360

Not usable for me because it needs fractional scaling.

Linux has reliable sleep on many more laptop models than mac os. But the rule is that you need to buy known good hardware that supports Linux to have a frictionless experience. (Yes this means you often have to buy something that's been on the market for a bit of time already.) Anecdotally I've had less sleep problems than mac-using coworkers, over a long time and many laptops.

> you need to buy known good hardware

What is this "known good hardware"?

I was thinking of somehow getting my hands on the FrameWork laptop since everyone and their mother keep singing praises about it but going through its forums makes it clear that it also doesn't do suspend and resume reliably.

I've already seen plenty of people reporting that their AMD laptops don't do suspend resume and break with every new kernel release. I assumed Intel would be better but reading about the same issue on FrameWork forums isn't encouraging at all.

One way to know is reports on the web like you are already reading. Business ThinkPads with integrated GPUs tend to have many good models, for one concrete direction if you haven't found a starting point yet. Asking your sales rep, certifications, trying a live USB stick of your preferred distro at a friend/coworker/shop/it-dept owned machine can work too.

In my experience, "known good hardware" is ">2-year-old hardware" when it comes to Linux.

But, I'm a bit cheap, and I treat optimizing older tech as a challenge, so I think I've just declared myself both an outlier in general and a stereotypical Linux user.

My AMD Thinkpad was released a little over 2 years ago and it still has serious flaws. And if the AMD gitlab bug tracker and bug reports on forums are anything to go by, I'm not optimistic about those flaws going away in the future.

I have no idea if the situation is just as bad on Intel.

> What is this "known good hardware"?

Any hardware that ships with Linux, for a start. For another, anything whose quirks are documented on a popular community site (e.g., the Arch Linux Wiki).

It's important to choose a distro release a little bit newer than the hardware.

The Framework is brand new and doesn't ship with Linux, so I wouldn't expect it to be a trouble-free experience.

FWIW I had a similar behavior on my (work) MacBook pro for a while. I'd unplug it from my screen for the weekend and find it overheated with a dead battery.

Turns out I kept bumping the Bluetooth mouse which kept waking it up, and it would stay awake for a while, even with the screen closed. Disabling the permission for Bluetooth devices to wake it fixed it, but I had a couple of Mondays where I couldn't do anything for a half hour while the machine charged up enough to boot.

One interesting tidbit is that Macbooks will (don't know since when) start booting up if you press any key after having shut the laptop down.

That's a bummer when you want to go clean your keyboard and don't want the laptop running at the same time.

I believe this is just if it's sleeping with the lid open. If you go to Apple > Shut down... and let it complete, it will not turn back on unless you press the power button.

Nope, not anymore. This used to work for my 2013 MBP, but even if I completely shut down my M1, it will start booting upon any interaction. Opening the lid => starts booting. Pressing any key => starts booting. Clicking the trackpad => starts booting. Which is funny, because the trackpad doesn't physically click anymore, it just reacts to pressure, and only if it's a finger pressing on it (you can't click it with any object), and all that it still working when the computer is "shut down", i.e. you can't click the trackpad with a pen, but you can with your finger and it will turn the MacBook on.

Same issue here. 2020 Intel MBP, and when fully shutdown, pressing any key will turn it on. I would far prefer have a single, explicit power button. They even have one that seems as if it should be the power button (the touch ID sensor/key).

I have had multiple Mac laptops that were burning hot when I pulled them out of my bag. My iPhone also occasionally tries to melt my pocket. These are not issues that Apple is immune to.

I never really experienced this kind of issue until I was given a corporate macbook by my current employer. I suspect this is due to all the "security" software that comes pre-installed by IT. The software is constantly a source of performance related issues, IO seems to be a big one as if it's constantly checking / scanning.

Doesn't Macos also do this? I think it's called "Power Nap" Difference is you can just turn it off... whereas in Windows it seems like it's a complete mess.

I've been using Linux for the last 15 years. Had my fair share of issues with suspend. But at least once a laptop was in a state, it tended to stay there. Whether it would resume was another story :P

Well my MBP 16 and before that my original 13" rMBP both did unscheduled wake ups and ending up super hot when being transported in my backpack. With the MBP 16, it took me a few days to detect the unscheduled wake ups, setup logging to now show private and then debug and fix the issue.

"Not melting a hole"

Ha! While not related to the bag issue, I had a 15" MBP literally catch fire in my bed while I was asleep.

I fell asleep wat hing Netflix or some such and the macbook caught fire and woke me up.

It was in the recall batch for batteries at that time.

I took it to apple flagship SF store.

They had the FN machine for two months then came back and said that at some point the moisture sensor went off and due to this reason they would not honor the battery recall or address the fact it caught on fire and the "apologized" for the potential "safety hazaard"

They told me my option was to buy a new one, or take it to a 3ed party repair place and have it repaired for more than the machine was worth.

I haven't bought another mac since, and I have switched from iPhones entirely, even though I have had an iPhone since day one.

Were you binge watching "Halt and Catch Fire"?

Ironically, that was about the same time it came out...

Did you say that water was the reason the fire didn’t spread? If so, I’d love to hear how they “proved” it got wet before the fire started.

Just make sure you close Outlook before you close your lid. Not that Outlook is a good choice for mail, but corporations seem to like it, but at least in my experience, it somehow signals Mac OS to drain the battery.

MacOS continues to connect with Wifi even when the lid is closed and it is suppose to be sleeping. Both Windows and MacOS does not honour the contract with the users.

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