Hacker News Reader

Comment by fizwidget | Hacker News Reader

“Less than a minute” is going to feel horribly slow to people that are used to instant-resume and not having to think about shutdown vs. sleep.

You might be okay with it, but I suspect most consumers today won’t be.

View on HN

This, so much. I read that comment and immediately recoiled at the idea of waiting "less than a minute" to be able to do anything. I'd estimate that 1/3 of the time I even open my laptop, I'm done with what I needed in less time than that boot up sequence takes and have closed it and moved on to something else. So often I just pop it open, do/check something and close it within seconds.

I go _months_ without rebooting/proper shut downs. And this is on a MacOS install that I've migrated from one Macbook to another for 5 macbooks now O.O

...recoiled... Some people go to work, switch on their computer and turn it off when they leave. I would say most in the world do that. Sure they don't know the diff between clapping their macbook shut or switching something off, but 1 minute does not make people 'recoil'. Very strange.

Totally understandable. You're right that those people are highly unlikely to really care between 2 seconds to being functional and 60 seconds. They're at the coffee machine anyway.

I've been obsessed with building things since I got my first lincoln logs set. I don't "clock out". There's no work computer and life computer, or even more foreign to me, no computer when not at work. I take my laptop nearly everywhere with me and have been known to pull over into the nearest gas station or any parking lot, pull it out and immediately write some code or make some notes due to something I'd just then had some breakthrough or idea about. There's no way I'm doing that if it takes a full minute to boot up and I'm there looking at a fresh rebooted OS. But if I can open it, touch my finger to the fingerprint reader and _immediately_ be productive? Happens all the time.

Hell, I'll walk across the room and open my laptop when my phone is in my pocket because it's just easier to use and it's immediately functional.

Different strokes for different folks, but I'd venture to bet that my experience mimics that of many others.

I'm reminded of this Steve Jobs story: So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879509

I know it's poor form to speak ill of the dead in general and of St Jobs in particular, but I do not see how anyone gets much more from stories like this than "Steve Jobs was an ill-tempered dick of a bully" and "power made Steve Jobs immune to getting his head kicked in which is absolutely what happens if you behave that way outside of an air-conditioned Silicon Valley office".

I've never used sleep on my laptop. I always have the lid set to 'do nothing' when closed (i.e., stay on and keep running). In the past I gave up on using a macbook for many reasons, but a key one was that I couldn't keep the machine on when closing the lid. I can't fathom having to reconnect terminal sessions or other similar connections every time I want to move from one meeting room to another. Carrying my laptop awkwardly with the lid open between rooms just seems silly. I just close my lid and let the laptop keep running and then hibernate at the end of the day, resuming the next morning. True instant-on, and no downsides to me.

There is a command line tool for this: "caffeinate". You can add a script that runs it while there are SSH sessions open.

It's a failing that I need to pre-empt every situation where I don't want the machine to sleep and run a tool to prevent it from sleeping, when I could usually just say 'don't sleep when I shut the lid'.

That's probably because most people _want_ their laptop to sleep each time they close the lid.

The exceptions are really narrow. E.g. if you want your SSH sessions to stay alive, you also need to ensure that you never leave the WiFi coverage.

I don't disagree, but at least give me an option like windows does.

Not to mention open apps

Reply on news.ycombinator.com