2013 MBA - No "Computer Sleep" Setting - WTF? - Here's Why

I know Apple likes simple, austere etc, but a HD activity light and a sleep light, like all other laptops sure would skip all the silliness guessing.

Yet it still lists "Put hard disks to sleep whenever possible." Is this for connected external hard drives?

Have I understood this correctly?

You can't independently set the timeout of the display to 5 minutes and the computer sleep to say 1 hour when using Haswell?

flight said:

Yet it still lists "Put hard disks to sleep whenever possible." Is this for connected external hard drives?

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Yes it is.

mayuka said:

Have I understood this correctly?

You can't independently set the timeout of the display to 5 minutes and the computer sleep to say 1 hour when using Haswell?

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Probably via the terminal:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1.html

Type:

man pmset

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in a terminal window on your OS X platform for the details.

techn0lady said:

Yes People on the Apple support forums are starting to complain. In a related thread I posted how you can still do this via the terminal pmset command but for some reason, yet unknown to me, they took the UI away for that .

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That's a classic Apple redux. Whereas I absolutely agree that silly clutterish or even obsolete things can be removed, Apple has a tendency lately to remove practical and even important things. That annoys me. For example: All versions prior to ML (<10.8) had the option to ask for the user password after wake-up. In ML they removed the option and replaced it with a single option to ask for the password after a specific time period. That sucks. I want the computer to ask for a password when the lid is opened not when the screen went to sleep...

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Mr. Retrofire said:

Probably via the terminal:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1.html

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Thanks for the advice. I'll definetely try that when my 11" 2013 MBA arrives.

Does the computer also go to sleep if you assign a "Hot Corner" to "Put Display to Sleep"?

techn0lady said:

The display blanks but I am unsure if the entire machine actually sleeps or not - I'll have to test in a different way for that.

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In the 4th Gen Core Haswell generation, the U and Y parts implement the S0iX power state.

S0iX replaces both S0 and S3. S3 is your sleep mode where it suspends everything to RAM, while S0 is the active state, but can clock devices to minimal speed and such. S0iX is called "power use of S3 with wake time of S0". The biggest trick of Haswell is allowing wake up times that are near-instant when it used to take at least few seconds to do so. Think of Smartphones for example.

That's why just turning off the Display is nearly same thing as the sleep we know. Since the hardware sans the display would use extremely low power just being idle.

techn0lady said:

The display blanks but I am unsure if the entire machine actually sleeps or not - I'll have to test in a different way for that.

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I'm interested to hear what your results are.

techn0lady said:

The thing is, as I'm sure you know, that sometimes you want the machine running a long time on battery power doing a task - but you don't need the display on and want to blank it out to conserve power.

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Absolutely. I use both Hot Corners and the automatic display shut-off feature and am curious how these have changed with the move to Haswell. I'm currently considering switching from my 2010 iMac to a Macbook of some sort and although plugged-in clamshell mode does not appear to be affected, I wouldn't want to keep the laptop on external power whenever I'm sitting at the desk.

Is there any chance you could test clamshell mode with an external display while on battery power?

techn0lady said:

Yes, I can do that - what do yu want me to look for - to test ?

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I just realized that my understanding of the clamshell mode was incorrect - there actually is no battery-powered clamshell mode on Macbooks. Apple's own documentation mentions power adapter as a requirement for operating a Macbook in closed clamshell mode:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3131

So... never mind

Lets assume you download a large file and the display is getting to sleep. Will the download continue?

techn0lady said:

Also the poster above seems to say that with the new chipset that sleep mode is unnecessary - only display sleep. An interesting idea if true.

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That's actually the new sleep mode. It just wakes up so fast that you don't know it is. The wake up time certifications are under 300ms, or 0.3 seconds. At the lowest state, it does everything the normal sleep mode does, like moving contents into RAM.

techn0lady said:

Apparently so - I just tested that and things still go on in the background

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Interesting.

That sounds similar to Windows 8 Connected Standby, and the new Mac feature Power Nap. The new sleep not only allows fast wake up times but for the network connection to be active - just like a Smartphone.

techn0lady said:

There still is a separate settable sleep mode setting in the terminal pmset command . I haven't actually tested whether that sleep mode kicks in or not at the allotted time setting.

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Would be very interesting indeed.

I guess when you close the lid, the download would stop?

I have the same problem. I just got a new Macbook Air and did a restore from time-machine backup. I also don't have the "Computer sleep" setting.

Same issue: http://i.imgur.com/N6PJF0W.png

techn0lady said:

Yes - that is what happens.
I am beginning to understand the change thanks to that great write up a few posts above that explained the new power states.

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So closing the lid is not the same as sleep now?

When would Power Nap work then? (Like all those background software updates and stuff)

Here is a temp fix. run the command "pmset sleep 180" to change sleep from 1 to 180 (180x of the display sleep time). This seems to work, macbook air won't fall a sleep 2x from the display sleep time.

Power Nap actually needs Haswell's new power states to work. It does look like it already works without Mavericks though.

If I remember right, I read something about the 2013 Air's that after closing the lid for more than 2 hours, it would go into something similar to a Hibernate state, where it uses zero power and moves contents from RAM to drive.

UPDATE: That's actually what Apple's page says

http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/design.html

Put MacBook Air to sleep for more than 3 hours, and it enters standby mode. That means you can come back to MacBook Air up to an entire month later and it wakes in an instant.

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That's identical to the Hibernate function. So leave it less than 3 hours, then you get your regular sleep with virtually zero wake up time courtesy of Haswell. Leave it for longer than 3 hours, than you get Hibernate-like sleep where it uses virtually zero power.