Hacker News Reader

Comment by kps | Hacker News Reader

> I believe this is because of how Mac is designed

Yes, that they actually got sleep working properly.

I still remember reaching into my backpack to retrieve my Macbook in sleep mode only to find it hot to the touch, having woken up for some goddamn stupid reason. We had "proper" sleep decades ago: we called it "hibernate". Modern "smart sleep" is a technological regression, and Apple is as big an offender as any.

Sure. Do you shut off your phone every time you put it in your pocket?

I leave my phone off for most of the day, and 100% of the time that it's on it's in battery saver mode. In any case, it's an irrelevant comparison, because a phone's thermals have nothing in common with a laptop's thermals.

With Apple, it’s nearly the same software and CPU architecture, so yes, it is relevant. I don’t know anyone who turns their iPhone or Mac Book off.

What's the point of sleeping your computer? If you are not using it then it's better to just turn it off

So I don't have to spend 10-15 minutes saving all my open files (including the scratchpad ones I haven't named) and then later reopening all my applications, recreating all of my tmux windows and panes, setting up my vim splits and tabs again, and starting all of my stopped Docker containers?

I have a feeling someone is going to jump in with a "solution" to each of these forgetting that lots of work is ephemeral/transient and undeserving of even the slightest bit of automation or pre-configuration.

funny, decent text editors like VS Code save even the unnamed unsaved files

Vim~ #emacs#

some of us use more than text editors.

It takes ages to cold boot. My desktop is ok-ish, but it doens't matter since I only use it occasionally.

My old HP laptop had a slow-ass BIOS that I was convinced had some kind of bug. I replaced it with a brand spanking new thinkpad 2-3 months ago. Guess what? The freaking BIOS is EVEN SLOWER somehow!

They all wake up instantly from sleep.

I therefore only shut them down when I know they'll be unplugged for a while, because for some reason the HP eats through the battery even when off. If suspended, the battery will be out of juice in like two days. Haven't tried any of this with the Lenovo yet.

Suspend used to work great, but since MS figured they should copy Apple half-assedly, suspend is borken. And I have really no idea what we've gained in exchange.

Now that I have an nvme SSD in all my computers and boot times are roughly 10-15 seconds or so unless something has gone wrong, the advantage of sleeping is somewhat mitigated.

Back in the spinning rust era, though, a good unsuspend could be something like 50 times faster to get to a running computer. Possibly more, depending on what your OS needed to start up.

It is still more convenient to have my previous environment most of the time, and still faster to unsuspend than boot, but it isn't as much of an advantage as it used to be, no.

On Windows and Linux it is better to just turn it off because sleep is broken on most hardware. But on Mac there is next to no advantage to doing that. MacOS sleep is also more of a hybrid between sleep and hibernate where it will after enough time offload the ram to the SSD and fully power down so the machine can be in "sleep" without any power drain.

If you turn it off, it might attempt a 45 minute update when you start it again (yes this has happened to me with macos).

The same reason that you don't do a full shutdown every time you walk away from your computer. I don't really believe that you don't understand this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com