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MBP Sleep Mode - Lid Closed versus Not

M

Melodeath

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
When I close the lid of my i7 MBP, it goes to sleep as expected. This way, the battery lasts for hours. I can go to sleep for eight hours, and wake up, and the computer still has almost all of its juice left.

However, if I don't close my lid, the sleep mode doesn't seem to work right. Or, there is something I'm misunderstanding.

Under System Preferences/Energy Saver, for battery power, "Computer Sleep" is set for 10 minutes, and Display Sleep for 2 minutes.

So last night I went to bed with the MBP running on battery. I put a very short album on in iTunes, and turned the keyboard backlight off, and the screen brightness all the way down so the screen was black/off. When I woke up int he morning, the MBP did not respond to touchpad movement. When I plugged it in to the charger and hit the power button, it's clear the MBP had gone to sleep but was in its reserve power, because a loading bar came up and then the MBP came back up with my open firefox window from the night before.

My question is, is the sleep mode caused by closing the MBP lid a different sleep mode than when the lid is open? I don't understand why the MBP did not last through the night, whereas it would have lost 10% battery max if I had closed the lid.

Thanks
 
My 2007 MBP does the same thing, but I don't know why. I've checked the settings many times and couldn't figure it out. I just got into the habit of always closing the lid when I was done using it on battery.
 
eh you may wanna check if your mbp really did go to sleep after 10mins.
my past experience tells me sometimes it doesnt, hence going into reserve power.
 
There are a lot of reasons why the MBP will not sleep with the lid open.

There is a knowledge base article here

However, I must say that mine didn't sleep when I got it (when I was finished installing all kinds of applications, etc)

Then I've uninstalled a few bits and pieces and it finally slept again. Then now since two days it doesn't sleep again. Problem is that right now there's no easy way what is keeping it from non sleeping. Nowadays what I do (I run the computer with lid closed) is to hit apple-option-eject before going to bed.

Tom
 
The idea is I'd like to be able to fall asleep to music playing, and have the MBP go to sleep when the album is over and I'm already asleep. Is this not possible?
 
You ran into a combination of things.

Yes, there are (kind of) two kinds of sleep, but this is not what happened to you in the first place.

In my experience, the 'go to sleep after inactivity' does not really work most of the time. This is because all kinds of stuff count as 'activity' (see the kb article linked above), stuff like iTunes playing music (which is what you want) or some other program accessing the hard disk regularly (which is not what you want, but hard to distinguish for the OS).

On the other hand, events like closing the lid, pressing cmd+alt+eject or the battery running really low trigger going to sleep immediately, regardless of any activity possibly going on (there may be some stuff that can still prevent this, but that's really rare).

Only *then* the two kinds of sleep come into play: there's suspend-to-RAM and suspend-to-disk. In the first case, basically only the RAM is being kept powered, in the second case the RAMs content is written to disk and the computer is powered off completely.

All recent Macs do a combination of both: the RAM contents are being written to disk, but the RAM is also being powered. This is when your MBPs light is breathing.

As long as the power to the RAM is not being cut off, your Mac will wake up 'immediately' on a keypress, opening the lid or the like. If on the other hand the power is being cut for any reason (e.g. battery running low), its contents will be restored from disk. This takes some time, and you can see the progress bar. Since the computer is completely powered off in this case, you will need to press the power button to turn it on, just as if you had shut it down.

On MacBooks with removable batteries, this can be provoked by removing power and battery while it is asleep. Dunno if pulling the plug on a sleeping iMac does the same, but I think it should.

So, here's what happened to you: Something prevented your MBP from becoming 'inactive', thus it never went to sleep even after iTunes had finished playing. When the battery ran really low, it went to sleep forcibly to prevent data loss (just af if you had been working on it beyond the "Reserve Battery Power" warning). Because the battery was already low, it couldn't maintain suspend-to-RAM, which is why the 'usual' wakeup routine didn't work and you had to press the power button.

If you're not afraid of the command line, there's a manual solution to your problem: the command 'sudo shutdown -s +<minutes>' (this is a literal +) tells the computer to go to sleep after the specified time. This is regardless of whether iTunes is playing, so the length of your playlist doesn't matter. It's like 'close the lid for me after x minutes', except that it can't physically close the lid of course.

Other time formats are possible (like 'now' or a specific time, refer to the shutdown manpage). You can also use '-h' to shut the computer down at the specified time, if you want to.

A problem with this is that it will repeatedly send beeps to all open terminals as the shutdown (or sleep) time approaches. I have no simple solution to this. (Anyone?)
 
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