Is it bad to walk around with my Mac in my bag while it is still on?

[Smackintosh]

I have gotten in the habit of taking my Mac to classes with me and without shutting it down, I will close it and put it in my bag. I am concerned that maybe the HDD could be damaged if the Mac accesses it for some reason. Is this concern unwarranted?

 

[psxguru]

It'll be fine as it's in sleep mode once you close the lid. Give it 20 seconds or so for the hard drive to park the heads before chucking it around

 

[Smackintosh]

Cool, thanks for the tip.

 

[Makosuke]

I thought when I read the title that the question was going to be about leaving the computer on and awake while in a bag. That would be a terrible idea due to heat and the hard drive both. Asleep, though, entirely safe, as said, so long as you give it a few seconds to finish backing up the contents of RAM so it can turn off the hard drive. You can tell it has finished going to sleep when the light starts pulsing.

 

[Codeseven]

This is a risky thing to do, be careful.

I once did this and 'thought' my MBP was asleep. Luckily I had left my backpack zipper open a little and heard a weird, high pitched wining sound. At first I had no idea where it was coming from then I realized it was from my backpack, yikes! I pulled out my laptop and it was screaming hot! Almost too hot to touch!! The fans were going full blast. I opened the lid to help with air movement and as the minutes went by it was still super hot and the fans were still screaming. So I opened the refrigerator door and held in inside. Soon the fans started to slow down, the casing felt cooler and it went back to it's normal, quiet and cool self.

I know there's been many posts about MBP's getting 'a little' hot and things like graphics cards failing but man I'll tell you, I'm seriously impressed that my stupid mistake didn't kill this thing. Rock on Apple!

 

[dusk007]

Actually Intel put in some safe guards which should just shut the whole thing down if it really reaches dangerous levels. Doesn't mean it is a good thing to do but before it dies from the heat it will simply shut down.

I prefer to kill the whole safe sleep hibernation mode and just let it sleep. Works in seconds and unless you often run out of battery or almost entirely empty it, hibernation is just not worth the time it takes and energy it consumes. Kill it in Terminal -> sudo pmset -a hibernationmode 0
With hibernation off it enters sleep within 2-3 seconds. Effectively it means you can close the lid and almost immediately take it off the table with no worries.

 

[Harmush]

Actually Intel put in some safe guards which should just shut the whole thing down if it really reaches dangerous levels. Doesn't mean it is a good thing to do but before it dies from the heat it will simply shut down.

I prefer to kill the whole safe sleep hibernation mode and just let it sleep. Works in seconds and unless you often run out of battery or almost entirely empty it, hibernation is just not worth the time it takes and energy it consumes. Kill it in Terminal -> sudo pmset -a hibernationmode 0
With hibernation off it enters sleep within 2-3 seconds. Effectively it means you can close the lid and almost immediately take it off the table with no worries.

My advise exactly!

 

[-tWv-]

Actually Intel put in some safe guards which should just shut the whole thing down if it really reaches dangerous levels. Doesn't mean it is a good thing to do but before it dies from the heat it will simply shut down.

I prefer to kill the whole safe sleep hibernation mode and just let it sleep. Works in seconds and unless you often run out of battery or almost entirely empty it, hibernation is just not worth the time it takes and energy it consumes. Kill it in Terminal -> sudo pmset -a hibernationmode 0
With hibernation off it enters sleep within 2-3 seconds. Effectively it means you can close the lid and almost immediately take it off the table with no worries.

I'm not sure what happened but I had issues when I switched the sleep mode setting on mine. I would often open my MBP and it would be completely switched off with charge left in the battery, even though I only closed it when I last used it. I decided to switch it back to the normal setting and haven't had the problem since, not sure what was going on but it did go to sleep a lot quicker when I had the setting on.