Transporting-Sleep or Shutdown

Sleep. Shutdown is soooo Windows.

 

The safe bet is to shut it down. You never know when it might come out of sleep for whatever reason. This may never happen but if it does, can be very destructive. Intel Macs don't take that long to boot up anyways.

 

I always sleep mine, I have never had it wake so far and I hope it never does!

 

Sleep is fine. Apart from the battery change recall I've haven't shut down my 12" PB for 2.5 years. It's been on dozens of plane trips in the US and also a couple of trips to Europe in sleep mode without a hint of a problem.

 

Yes, rebooting takes time, but there have been many problems from waking the computer (at least laptops) from a long (days/weeks) sleep. Look at the threads on the Apple site and I think there were some threads on this on MR, with much controversy re: pros and cons of sleep vs. knockout.
For those of you lucky not to have a problem, lucky you, but according to the MBP manual "If you will be away from your MacBook Pro for only a short time, put the computer to sleep. When the computer is in sleep, you can quickly wake it and bypass the startup process. " I shut my current MBP after my last one almost required mouth to mouth to revive.

 

If I know I'm going to be away from my portable for twelve hours or more, I tend to turn it off and let it site. But when I'm taking it somewhere, it's always asleep. It's just easier that way since I can pull it out, pop open the display and I'm off to the races.