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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand this complaint in detail?

If a Macbook is asleep, it will just wake up, you'll see the keyboard light, there is no need to press the power button.

If there is a need to press the power button it is because the machine is off. Don't worry, it will make a distinctive and iconic sound once it is not off and display, you guessed it, a white apple logo on the screen.

What circumstances lead to your confusion about its state? I can't relate!

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The machine can wake up for many seconds (I'm running Windows 10 on my Macboo Pro). During that time, there's no communication on the state of the machine at at all (the keyboard doesn't light up for me). Is it still asleep? During wake up? Or maybe powered off completely for some reason? If it's powered off, then I should press the "Power" button... But what if it isn't? - will pressing it kill the wake up process? Who knows! So much frustration caused by removing a single LED.

I think this is one of the cases where Apple doing hardware and software shines through. They’ve made macOS resume quickly from sleep, to the point where I’ve never really thought about/noticed the problem you’re describing. So the LED really isn’t needed for 99% of the users, the same way that you don’t have a power LED on iPhones or iPads. On recent models the login screen is there before you’ve fully opened the lid.

(It’s interesting in itself to track the history of power/sleep lights on MacBooks, since as far as I can remember they only turned on in the case where the internal display is off, or when the laptop was sleeping (pulsing light). Jony Ive even talked about it in the Objectified documentary: https://vimeo.com/7827217 )

My private laptop is fine, but my corporate laptop with a lot of bloatware sometimes takes a few seconds to wake up. From hibernation sometimes it takes 10+ seconds from hitting the space button to see the something is happening.

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