Why doesn't Macbook Pro have Air-like standby battery life?

Here's a question I never see discussed or brought up...but why exactly is the Air capable of 30 days standby battery life but the Macbook Pro isn't? Is this another one of Apple's arbritrary differentiators for the sake of setting products apart from one another or is there a proper explanation for it? Does the more beefy processor somehow influence standby power consumption?

I find that I realistically use my laptop intermittently throughout the day, so it's being put to sleep quite often. With the Pro I just bought (late 2011) that results in a lot of wasted battery life with the thing not even being used. It's one of the biggest factors I was considering prior to the purchase, and still can't decide whether it's substantial enough of a difference for me to care.

I have a 120 GB SSD installed in the macbook pro, so as far as the hdd space goes, I have what is essentially equivalent to an Air anyways. Is it justified to keep the Pro for that extra processor speed if I'm not using the computer for anything crazy?

My reasoning was:
1. Upgradability, including possibly going the Opti-bay route http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/ (which I realize will degrade battery life even further)

2. IF i were to ever need the processing power, it would be nice to have it

Question is, are those factors worth sacrificing the Air's standby battery life and size?

What are your thoughts?

Hahaha, yes I know it's okay to plug it in, I'm speaking for those times where an outlet isn't readily available. I don't need 30 days of standby battery per se, however considering it's capable of 30 days of standby, I would assume that means if I had it in standby and unplugged for, lets say 3 hours, a Pro would lose probably around 3% of its battery while the air would have lost substantially less. Adding up all the times I put the computer to sleep within a typical 12 hour day, it might be a factor.

Do you have any more details on enabling hibernation? Perhaps links or something? Seems like a viable option for those who have SSD's installed in their Pro's like me.

Does anyone know the exact mechanism by which the Macbook Air sleeps/hibernates? It's instantly on when opening the screen, so it doesn't seem to be hibernating. What exactly is it doing to achieve the 30 days standby? I'm not necessarily looking for a way to make my macbook pro do the same, tweaking it to hibernate instead of sleep is fine, but I'm really just curious to know what technique apple is using to achieve the standby battery life the Air gets.

maril1111 said:

Check this thread for how it does it:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1050278/

Click to expand...

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

To summarize in case someone stumbles upon this post and wants a quick answer:

Since the macbook air is designed to be used with an SSD, there is an option enabled for "deepsleepdelay" where it basically works like this: When you close the lid on your air, the computer enters regular sleep and the session is stored to ram (some power is used to power the ram). After about 70 minutes, the content written to ram is stored to the disk and the ram is turned off, thus battery usage drops to pretty much zero.

There is no option for tweaking deepsleep settings in terminal for the MBP as it needs to be supported by the hardware. In this case, MBA is the hardware supported and not MBP.

However, one could force the computer to "deep sleep" or hibernate instead of sleeping altogether in order to save battery, but this would probably not be advisable for those with HDDs OR for those with SSDs. Why?

HDD users: the time it'll take to restore your session will be substantially longer than what you're used to with regular sleep.

SSD users: the content of your session is stored to disk every time you close your lid, which runs down your SSDs lifespan. However, technically with "safe sleep" that Apple has enabled by default, your session is saved to disk every time you close the lid of the computer anyways. In otherwords, the session is stored to both ram and disk; stored to ram for quicker resume and stored to disk in case of power loss. This might be the safer option, but in my opinion, you get "the best of NEITHER worlds", especially for those with SSDs.

What apple should have done was keep the deep sleep delay arguments available for any hardware configuration, just in case someone buys a MBP and throws an SSD in it (like I and many others have). Seems silly to restrict it to just the air.

I'm leaning toward disabling safe sleep via this command: "sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0" and either using manual terminal tweaks, a tool to enable hibernation when I want to hibernate, or just shut down the computer if I feel like I won't be using it for a long period of time. Definitely not as elegant, but seems like the best option since Apple seems to like imposing arbitrary restrictions on their hardware lines

upon further investigation, there is actually a way to completely emulate the Macbook Air's standby behavior.

This applies for those using Mac os x 10.6.8 or newer. For those using older versions, substitute "standbydelay" and "standby" with "deepsleepdelay" and "deepsleep" respectively.

Here are the steps:

1. Open Terminal
2. Type the following: sudo pmset -a standby 1

and that's it! if you type in "sudo pmset -g" it'll show you what your current power settings are set to. there should be a line that says "standbydelay" and then a number (likely 4200). This is the number of seconds it will wait before hibernating. You can adjust this number by performing a similar step to step 2 above. For example, if you want it to wait 2 hours (7200 seconds) before hibernating, you would type "sudo pmset -a standbydelay 7200"

Thats it! now your macbook pro should theoretically behave like the air, that is, it will sleep when closing the lid and only enter hibernation after however many seconds is set under "standbydelay". Ideal for a nice balance between SSD maintenance and battery life when sleeping!

Rhyalus said:

Has anyone confirmed this?

I have a 2011 MBP and did a "man pmset |more".

Note this section on "standby":

STANDBY ARGUMENTS
standby causes kernel power management to automatically hibernate a
machine after it has slept for a specified time period. This saves power
while asleep. This setting defaults to ON for supported hardware. The
setting standby will be visible in pmset -g if the feature is supported
on this machine.

standby only works if hibernation is turned on to hibernatemode 3 or 25.

standbydelay specifies the delay, in seconds, before writing the hiberna-
tion image to disk and powering off memory for standby.

But...here is my pmset -g, which does not show anything about standby. I am using 10.6.8.


Active Profiles:
Battery Power -1
AC Power -1*
Currently in use:
hibernatemode 3
halfdim 1
lidwake 1
acwake 0
womp 0
sleep 0
disksleep 10
sms 1
hibernatefile /var/vm/sleepimage
ttyskeepawake 1
displaysleep 15


Thanks,
R

Click to expand...

Strange, your pmset -g results look very different from mine. I have a late 2011 macbook pro, and mine looks like:

Active Profiles:
Battery Power -1*
AC Power -1
Currently in use:
standbydelay 4200
standby 1
halfdim 1
sms 1
panicrestart 157680000
hibernatefile /var/vm/sleepimage
disksleep 10
sleep 10
hibernatemode 3
ttyskeepawake 1
displaysleep 2
acwake 0
lidwake 1

I'm running 10.7.2