Hacker News Reader

Comment by rco8786 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine the user experience of closing the lid on your laptop and reopening it a few hours or a few days later, without using any battery life in between.

You can also imagine it being useful in extremely low power solutions where battery life is critical. Space craft, etc

View on HN

> Imagine the user experience of closing the lid on your laptop and reopening it a few hours or a few days later, without using any battery life in between.

MacBooks and probably other laptops (?) already do this. You might lose a couple percent over a few days.

Surprisingly, while my Intel-based MBP does that (and can remain sleeping unplugged for several months), my M1-based one doesn't (after a few weeks, there's barely any battery left).

Interesting. Maybe there is something in M1 that draws power anyway.

Funnily enough I have the opposite experience! My M1 can stay closed for weeks without losing more than a few percent, while my Intel-based tends to drain about 10%-20% a day.

Lenovo S3 sleep state already does this. I have been using this for like 5 years atlesst. systemctl hibernate

With what OS? My T14s running Windows 10 is unable to survive commanded sleep, much less just putting the lid down.

> systemctl hibernate

Linux most likely

I'm a bit confused. Thhe hibernate function has been available in Windows (and also Linux) for years. In Windows 10 you might need to enable it in Power Options in the Control Panel. I'm using it all the time. It's very useful for long travels for example.

Yep, and sometimes it even works. Now imagine hibernate not even being a feature to fiddle with. It just, is. Close the lid, 0 power draw, open the lid, instant resumption of where you were previously. No wake on sleep (and the quirks that come with it), etc.

Classic example of “but you can already do this by configuring X in this settings menu and then making sure to enable it before you leave and there’s just this other one trade off and yea it can be slow and clunky sometimes” vs a solution so native to the platform that it’s not even a thought in the user’s mind.

Aka the “Dropbox is just rsync” argument.

Fiddle with? Simply select what action closing the lid performs. It works every time. I have gone months without shutting down and just relying on this.

To be clear: hibernate works without any fiddling, but in Windows 10 this setting is not enabled default, you need to explicitly turn it on in the Central Panel, and then it works.

I don't know why Microsoft decided not to enable it by default. Maybe they thought the difference between sleep and hibernate is too much to grasp for common users. And sleep works a bit faster (although with modern NVME drivers I don't see as much difference as in the past when you had to write 8 or 16 GB of memory to HDD).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com