Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

2013 MacBook Air screen shuts off?

W

whooda4

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 14, 2011
29
0
I have a new 2013 13" air i7 8gb ram 128gb ssd and like the title states I have had the screen shutoff on me 2 times now. I will be browsing a forum and the screen will just go black. I know it shouldn't be going into sleep because I just scrolled down 5 seconds before. I will hit the spacebar and nothing happens. 15 seconds later it turns back on and opens all minimized programs.

It acts like its restarting but I never get the boot screen or have to reenter the password. Has anyone had this happen?

My previous mac was a 2010 MBP 13" with a ssd upgrade and I never saw anything like this.

Thanks
 
I actually had this happen in the Apple Store, when I tried out the new MBA 13". Asked a sales man what it was, but he didn't give me any answer. Thought maybe I had hit the off button, but it turned on roughly thirty seconds later. Might be a bug of some sort.
 
I have a 2010 MBP 15 with an SSD and I have that problem. Sometimes the space bar wakes it, other times if I hit the power button it'll come back. I had a refurb 15" rMBP for a couple weeks and happened on that one as well. It must be a weird OSX issue.
 
I wonder if this is a 10.8xx issue. I was running 10.7xx on the other so I could retain the option to right click and 2 finger click at the same time.
 
My 2013 i7/8GB/256GB config does the same. I have chalked it up to a software issue and not a hardware one, though. Hopefully it is something that gets sorted out, but other than a minor 5 second annoyance, it really isn't that big of a deal.

But, like anything else, when you spend that much money on a product (and from a company that harps on how rock steady its machines are), you expect something like that to be fixed.
 
I've had the base model Haswell MBA for 2 weeks, and this happens at least every day. Just now it happened 3 times within the last few minutes which causes me enough frustration to google about it.

As a note, I was on a brand new 15" rMBP since february before purchasing this, and it doesn't happen on that machine with the same applications and system settings. For what it's worth, we have several MBPs MBAs and iMacs (all between 2009 and 2011) in the office and it doesn't happen on any of those.
 
I had it happen to me a couple of times on my new 2013 13" i7 and I was sure it wasn't the screen timeout as I had been scrolling just a few seconds earlier. Regardless of that thought, I did increase the display sleep time from the default time of 2 minutes up to 5 minutes, and it hasn't happened since I did that. It might be worth trying to see if that fixes the issue. Before I made that change, it happened twice in a day, since that change, it has not happened.
 
No, I'm using no case and I can confirm it happens regardless of the surface (legs, counter, table, etc.).
 
.psd said:
No, I'm using no case and I can confirm it happens regardless of the surface (legs, counter, table, etc.).
Click to expand...
Definitely sounds like a problem with the Air itself, then. If you take it to the Apple store, they should give you a replacement even if you can't reproduce the problem right there in front of them. Just be sure to have all your files backed up first.
 
From what I'm hearing, you guys are having the same problem as this thread over here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1595455/

My MBA would also randomly go to sleep, but after following @hags2k's solution, every thing is fine again :)

"The pmset command seems to have fixed this for me.

Code:
sudo pmset -c sleep 0
sudo pmset -c displaysleep 30
The above seems to get me what I need - the display turns off after 30 minutes but the system does not go to sleep. For battery I did:

Code:
sudo pmset -b sleep 5
sudo pmset -b displaysleep 5"
 
whooda4 said:
I have a new 2013 13" air i7 8gb ram 128gb ssd and like the title states I have had the screen shutoff on me 2 times now. I will be browsing a forum and the screen will just go black. I know it shouldn't be going into sleep because I just scrolled down 5 seconds before. I will hit the spacebar and nothing happens. 15 seconds later it turns back on and opens all minimized programs.

It acts like its restarting but I never get the boot screen or have to reenter the password. Has anyone had this happen?

My previous mac was a 2010 MBP 13" with a ssd upgrade and I never saw anything like this.

Thanks
Click to expand...

this is all of a sudden happening with my 2008 mb in which i put a ssd. i think it's a software glitch in the OS somewhere. i suspect it has something to do with the dropped-laptop detection in my computer but i'm not sure if the the airs have that feature, i would suspect not.

something to do with something trying to put the hard drives to sleep?

permissions and SMC resets are going to be the google-related answers you find for this problem. either that or a trip to the fruitstand.

it's a minor problem but its absolutely infuriating, isn't it? you're typing along and then your machine goes to sleep for no reason.


EDIT - i just noticed what you said about minimized programs...could there be something weird going on with shortcuts and "sloppy" typing?

I know this is less likely, but I am forever hitting command-t to open a new tab for a new google search in chrome, typing the search string and hitting enter too fast which results in 2 new tabs, one with the search string.

I also do comm-M by mistake quite a bit as well... i would poke around the shortcuts and see if there's a likely culprit in there.
 
Funny, now that I have received my 2013 13" Air, it also has done this to me a few times. It's only happened maybe 3 times in the 5 days I've had it, but they were all while I was actively using it, without any magnet near it. It wakes right up a a few seconds after I click or press a key, as if it had just went to sleep. It's a pretty rare thing and not a big inconvenience, but it's jarring when it does happen. Hoping it doesn't become more of an issue or is fixed in the future.
 
I've had my MBA for approx. 3 weeks now and I've had this issue happen to me at least 5 or greater times.

Its definitely not an exciting experience to have on a device which i've spent an equivalent of my bi-weekly pay on!

What is the solution guys? do the replacement MBA's you're getting not have this? what are they doing to fix this? hardware or software issue?

:mad:
 
How fast does it turn back on when you guys wake it back up when this happens? The first few people in the thread say it takes 15-30 seconds to come back on, however the few times it's happened to me it's turned back on within 3-5 seconds, just how it was when it turned off.
 
sometimes I have to restart

3 week old 13" MBA, on a stand on my desk. Nothing close by or touching it, magnets or otherwise.

Usually seems to shut down right after waking up from sleep. About half the time it doesn't wake back up, and I have to restart it.

Maybe I'll swing back by the store, seems like I'm not the only one having this problem the last few weeks.
C
 
It happened to me a couple of times a couple of days ago, but it hasn't happened since. I haven't done anything different to troubleshoot or test. Very weird. Well, I did install that update that came out....
 
Can anyone that has 10.8.5 Beta or 10.9 Mavericks on their MacBook Air 2013" confirm that the issue has been resolved?
 
I think that it's safe to assume that its a software bug, and that it will be resolved in OS 10.8.5 and OS X Mavericks 10.9.

I'm basing this on the fact that most people that are complaining about the issue are all running 10.8.4 (Build 12E3067).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back