What's the deal with INSTANT-ON part II

its a bonus feature

 

I was a bit dissapointed in this.

It was in no way a deal breaker, but when I learned that my '12 Air had this instant-on feature, I was a bit dissapointed because its not exactly instant.

Like the OP said, its better than most laptops, but instant to me means less than a second.

 

whats this? just when you open the laptop its on straight away? my mbp does it but so did my old lenovo?

 

Mine is pretty instant...I don't ever have to wait unless I close it and immediately open it again.

 

Even when it's in deep sleep? Like if you leave it over night?

 

Instant on is one of the best features of a Mac to me. PCs will wake from sleep somewhat quickly, but take a while to recapture a wifi signal and usually something gets messed up or doesn't work properly if you try to just close the screen and open it again later. The MBA blinks on the instant I open the screen with an internet connection ready to go. That helps a great deal in class if I need to take out my computer to check my calendar, or type something out quickly. It makes my laptop as easy to use as my iPad.

 

I agree that Apple shouldn't have advertised this as a big feature. While SSD's do typically wake up a lot faster than HDD-based units, it's not that different from other laptops, and frequently disappoints buyers.

 

I dont have "instant on" but have an early 2011 MBP with an SSD and with Lion it lagged waking up, around 4-7 seconds to wake. After I upgraded to Mountain Lion the thing wakes up before I get my hands to the keys, it is pretty much instant. My question being, why is this so inconsistent even on the same machine? I find it odd that a feature that was pretty much developed for this machine (native SSD machines) is being beaten by a machine that has a 3rd party SSD without this specific software?

 

Coming out of a deep sleep, my MBA isn't any faster than my Windows machines fitted with an SSD. Both have to reaquire the wifi signal.

 

I don't know, the only PC I have still working in my home is an 11" Sony Vaio core2duo TZ ultraportable running windows Vista, bought in late 2007, it takes more than a minute to resume from sleep. The difference is quite huge, with the MacBook Air, the screen is usually on before i get my hands to the keyboard, with the Sony, I could go grab a drink, use the loo, wash my face comeback and sometimes have the computer resuming still.

I think we got to remember before late 2010 launch of the MacBook Air 11" and 13", resuming from sleep almost instantaneously was unheard off. Sure almost every new ultra book touts in now but it really was an idea that apple brought to market.

I am really not too familiar with the deep sleep function as I turn off my Mac at night and boot it back up in the morning. Here is the thing, it takes less than 15 secs to boot the mac. Which is a whole lot faster than resuming from sleep on my Sony Vaio. I am guessing that resuming from deep sleep on the MacBook Air does not take as long as a fresh boot, but I could be wrong.

P.S. Remember back when it took so long for a notebook to resume from sleep you literally carried it "open lid" from the bedroom to the living room? Or when you held your pee in at Starbucks, because it took too long to either sleep or resume your computer. Yeah. Thank God those days are so over.

 

I haven't ever left it on all night, so I can't attest to that. But one example I do have is when I was in class for about 3 hours the other day. I pulled my MacBook Air out after class was over, opened it, and it instantly turned on. (I mean instant, not a 2-3 second wait)

 

That's really good to know, here is the thing with all my MacBook Airs, instant resume just works. I don't need to install some new OS, i don't have. The Sony came with Vista just like the Mac came with Mac OSX. There were no free Windows 7 disk(not sure it was even out yet) that came with the Sony at that time either, just one OS that came pre-installed.

Frankly I did not even know there was a sleep mode S3 or S4 for that matter. If I had to hazard a guess, the vast majority of people don't either. Here's the thing, if S3 mode was so much better compared to S4 mode, why did Microsoft and Sony not use it as a default mode, thereby saving end users who are ignorant of these things from unnecessary pain. People like me. It is awesome that you are way more tech savvy than I am. I am glad you have the tech skills to tune down the resume time on your machine but that's not the case for most of us.

Either way, I had laptops dating back to windows 95. Spreading across difference brands such as Sony(2), Dell(1), DigiLand(1), Twinhead (1), Acer(3), BenQ(1), Asus(1), AlienWare(1) as well as Macs(5), I can't honestly say that any of them boot as fast or resume as quick as the Macbook Air series, regardless of which OS they were running. Yes that also includes a pretty current acer ultra-book purchased earlier this year running windows 7, which I sold off at a huge loss, because it kept experiencing BSOD sometimes as often as twice a day!

For the common non-tech gurus, what apple did with "instant on" is just amazing.

 

It depends on hibernation mode that is set if im not wrong,

Mode 0 - Old style sleep mode, with RAM powered on while sleeping, safe sleep disabled, and super-fast wake.
Mode 1 - Hibernation mode, with RAM contents written to disk, system totally shut down while “sleeping,” and slower wake up, due to reading the contents of RAM off the hard drive.
Mode 3 - The default mode on machines introduced since about fall 2005. RAM is powered on while sleeping, but RAM contents are also written to disk before sleeping. In the event of total power loss, the system enters hibernation mode automatically

mode 3 is on default.. basically after 1 hour the MBP/MBA enters "deep-sleep" which consumes almost 0% battery... but it takes 5-15 seconds to wake up
mode 0 is the "normal" sleep it consumes ca. 1-4% battery in 24hours, but wake up is instant.

This is how to set it:

check which mode is on (terminal):

pmset -g | grep hibernatemode

and you set mode 0:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

 

Not in my case. While W7 may take a moment to connect WiFi my Air is already connected when I open the lid and I'm ready to surf immediately. I guess the type of WiFi router you use may affect how instant the connection is (I'm using an APBS from 2007).

 

I always leave my MBA sleeping overnight and when I get up ithe morning and open the lid it comes to life just as quickly as it always does. I'm using ML with powernap enabled but having powernap disabled makes no difference. On Bootcamp Windows 7 does wake up much faster on the Air than it does on a comuter with a spinning hard drive, but even on my Air W7 takes up to 10 seconds to resume compared to 1-2 in OSX and it always takes a while after getting to the desktop to reload all of my background programs.

I think it's perfectly acceptable for Apple to advertise is as a feature because, while Mac users may take it for granted, most PC users expect to wait 90 seconds for their computers to boot up every time they use one. Not many people are actually using an SSD ultrabook that can resume from sleep in less than 10 seconds.

 

wake up

to me its a bonus just to wake up no matter how long it takes, never timed the
wake up but as long as it does

 

For me, the worst part about Instant On is how it actually takes longer to become responsive than my 2006 Macbook Pro did. Seriously.

Here's what Apple did:
Have great technology in 2006
wait 6 years
increase HDD speeds, optimize, etc
mess up said technology
give users a worse technology than they started with.

As someone who paid real money for a real feature that doesn't even beat a 6 year old computer, it's annoying.

and it's a crappy feature.

 

I shut down both my MBA and MBP at night but they both boot up quickly. My Air is more or less instant on. It's brilliant.

 

Reposting this because it's a good guide.

I have mine set to 0. Not only does it get me 4GB of extra space (by not having a RAM image), it also wakes up truly instantly.

Also worth noting, I lose only 1-2% maybe, if that, every 24-36 hours in this sleep mode. It's certainly negligible.

 

Thanks a lot for posting that! I have 8GB of RAM, so switching from [3] to [0] got me 8GB back on my tiny 128GB SSD. I'm surprised Apple set that as the default, because it seems extremely unlikely that I will be in the middle of working on something very important, put my computer to sleep, and not come back until the battery dies in 2 weeks.

 

more than welcome

 

I'm gonna give this a try when I get back home. Thanks for posting. Are you sure there's nothing that could go wrong by changing this to 0? Other than losing what you were working on if the laptop loses all its charge