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Comment by hakanderyal | Hacker News Reader

One of the top reasons I'm staying with MacBooks. It's not unusual for my laptop to have hundreds of days of uptime. Going back to shutting down everything every time I close the lid is unusable for me at this point.

Whoever fixes this first will make a lot of money.

Edit: SteamDeck is also very good at this and that's why I'm sticking to it for handheld gaming.

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MacBooks aren't immune to sleep issues either though. Mine used to forget the external display about a fifth of the time, and forget it has any display at all once every 20 or 30 lid close->open cycle.

The solution happened to be unplug and replug for the first issue, and force reboot for the second. I've enough people having issues with external displays that I don't think it's an isolated problem.

For comparison a Surface Pro failing to go to sleep or getting hot in the bag hasn't happened to me in 2 years of owning these machines. It might surely happen, but it's far from a regular occurrence I think.

> It's not unusual for my laptop to have hundreds of days of uptime.

This isn’t something to be proud of. It means that you’re not applying the regularly-released security updates.

macOS is spectacularly good at restoring state on reboot. It’s like it never happened.

Update your software.

It depends what your risk profile is. There are no absolutes.

Numerous minor updates have screwed up things for me, particularly with some applications I rely on. I will usually lag 2-3 patches behind and wait for other people to suffer first and confirm what I use is stable. I am still on Sonoma / 14.5 at the moment.

Incidentally I actually have a Mac Pro here which is running Monterey which hasn't been patched for about 9 months. The universe has not and will not be imploding any time soon.

Everyone forgets the "availability" bit of security.

That's a good idea. I'm not keeping it as long nowadays.

> Update your software.

I don't disagree, but also...

I find it a bit surprising that this is still a thing. Why is there ever a time when I _must_ reboot? Is it just that mainstream kernels were designed at a time when people had lower expectations around this sort of thing, and now it's too hard to evolve their designs toward something that would allow for zero-downtime patching in ~all cases?

Other examples that make me wonder if it's mostly because people haven't demanded better:

- Enormous updates for all kinds of things (gigabytes for a bug fix release) because differential updates aren't pervasive. - Windows updates where a huge amount of work is done during the "rebooting" phase (why can't most of this be done before reboot?) - Absolutely atrocious power management on pretty much anything that's not a MacBook, and even not perfect on those.

I never thought we'd have flying cars by now, but if you asked me a decade ago to predict the future of operating systems... it wouldn't be this.

I have had this exact problem on many of my previous Macbooks (2009, 2015, 2019). I'm hoping my newest Apple Silicon one will solve it.

edit: maybe not the specific S3 sleep problem but a general inability to sleep correctly

Is there a specific piece of software or driver you got installed on all of them? I've owned 2 of 3 of your MacBook model years and 'sleep on lid close' was very reliable on all of them. Apple Silicon works even better, resume from sleep is instanteneous instead of taking 1-2 seconds.

A few were work laptops, so they came with the suite of poorly-written corporate spyware agents which I suspect was the culprit.

On my personal laptops the cause could be all the accumulated junk I installed. Apple's refusal to support legacy software may help out since it seems the old software doesn't want to run on new hardware.

AS Macs sleep fantastically. Much snappier to come out of sleep, too.

They still do the trick of presenting a screenshot of what was on screen when you suspended, to make you think the system is fully ready before it is?

If they do, they swap out for the real thing quicker than my hands can go from the lid to the keyboard.

I've never had any issues with entering my password/doing TouchID to unlock the laptop as soon as I've opened the lid.

Same issues on 2015 13" and 2019 pro 16". Having it overheating in my backpack is quite common.

It's solved, perfectly.

The steam deck? Mine is terrible at this, I have to shut it down cause otherwise it just dies. Battery holds up just fine when playing games though.

If I leave it on sleep for a long time it dies also. But it's perfect for playing games in short breaks, especially with kids. I can immediately drop it when one wakes up crying and return back to it a few hours later and pick up where I've left off.

Yeah that makes more sense. You compared it to "hundreds of days" of uptime which is where I got confused :)

That's interesting as my post just describes the exact opposite. I love to shut my PC down. It gives me a feel of "I am done. It's okay to stop now"

Closing the lid and putting it into the bag has the same effect for me.

I've my own ritual for preparing myself for the "I am done" phase. Doing the last commits, writing down a few sentences on what should I do when I go back to work and closing the lid.

I have to restart my MacBook every few days unfortunately because sometimes it just has weird issues (like usb devices or networking stopping working).

The issue is not for one person or company to fix. Just like it's impossible to convince all the OSS desktop folks to follow one displayserver/toolkit/UX paradigm it's equally impossible to enforce bug free hardware and drivers from all the PC hardware manufacturers and whatever Microsoft is doing at the moment it seems fixing this is very low on the priority list...

I only use mine occasionally, so I turn it off an put in a drawer. When I power it on a few months later the battery is flat, and the machines date in far in the past.

This have never happened with any other laptop I've had.

But… macbooks have a habit of waking for a few seconds while they're supposed to be asleep.

I got woken up in the night a couple of times because of my macbook doing that.

Good you do not hold a company-controlled macbook where they force you (after annoying you to death) to do OS upgrades that may break software they themselves provide and require you to use. And then tell you to wait the next of apple's update or some fix because there is nothing they can do. At least windows updates usually do not break software. Unless something gets corrupted or wrong on the way and it does not boot to the OS at all, in which case good luck.

Note that security updates are independent of the OS updates (or should be). There is no real excuse of forcing a user upgrade an OS version.

Otherwise under personal use/control macbooks are great, though, in not forcing you do updates of annoy you to death about them.

Windows updates have lately been causing lots of problems, from relatively benign things like getting stuck in background failure loops to more problematic things like silently removing drivers to outright nasty things like constant BSODs. Using both macOS and Windows regularly, I'd say the two companies are neck and neck for how cavalierly they've been breaking things with major OS updates.

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