Waste more energy? What are you talking about? Your laptop is running...on battery...and you're not using it. What is the purpose?
To boot a computer, energy is used, even more than during some hours of sleep, as the booting process is a bit CPU intensive and the HDD is spinning a lot to load the OS into the RAM.
The purpose of Sleep is to not have to wait a minute for the machine to boot and open all the applications again.
I normally have 10 to 25 applications running at the same time, to close them all and then to reopen after the boot process has finished, takes more time and energy than some hours of sleep.
On Windows the sleep function was a bit different (in my Windows 2000/XP), and the actual going to sleep and the awakening took sometimes longer than shutting the PC off and starting it again.
Anyway, I use Mac OS X now and as I wrote before, the sleep function is one of the highlights, I even put my iBook to sleep and awoke it several times in succession and was in awe, but that was in 2004, when computers were still ... whatever they were, they were not for me. The iBook was my real first computer.
My point is pretty simple: you are using battery power when you aren't even using the computer. THAT is the stupid part. I never called any person stupid, so stop putting words in my mouth.
What is the point of shutting the computer down for half an hour while commuting? More energy is wasted during the shut down and start up processes than during the half hour commute.
It also depends on what kind of user one is, I like the immediate availability of all my documents when the Mac is just being awaken, others don't mind waiting.
I had several cases when I got a phone call and had to look something up on my computer while I was traveling. The Sleep feature allowed me to almost instantly find the requested information, if it was not available in my head, on my computer, thus saving time and money for the caller, even saving battery life on both phones, saving valuable network time and many other things. If I had to wait for the computer to start up and then open the document and the application it needs, it would take ten times as long. And then I had to shut the computer down again.
But if that feature is bothering you, please contact Apple and give the feedback via its Feedback page (
http://www.apple.com/feedback), but it has worked for them in the last 10+ years with that feature.
I should power off now from this thread.
PS: I for instance, think it is stupid to power down the computer for short travels (less than a day or two), some friends of mine with Macs do that even for short commutes (30 minutes). I could never understand why, I even asked them and showed them the Sleep feature, but none ever could give me a normal answer. Saving energy was never in their minds either. They were just used to it due to Windows laptops not having such a nice sleep feature in past times.
