Indeed, I'm not even sure that aside from intentionally editing the PowerManagement.plist that you can do this. On my Macbook Air, you have to hold in the power

Indeed, I'm not even sure that aside from intentionally editing the PowerManagement.plist that you can do this. On my Macbook Air, you have to hold in the power button for a short period to produce the Sleep/Restert/Shutdown pop-up, and the default is cancel, I believe. Apple's own page on the matter says it requires a 1.5 second hold to produce. [0] I appreciate your over-all sentiment that when the default behavior for power buttons was to take action, but my expectation now is that bumping the power button should ask you what to do, not do something. I'm still surprised that many Windows based laptops have a default action mapped to the power button regardless of the placement of the button, as interrupting the state of the machine just seems like something you'd want a confirmation on - aside from a few outlier "oh crap no one can see this" moments, I'm not sure why you'd need the quick bump to initiate shutdown or any action from the power button at all. Even in the above situation, a shutdown is far slower most times than just a hard shutdown. Edit: Seeing your follow up, I feel that you should really update your original post to mention that it was running Windows via Bootcamp. macOS and Windows respond very differently to a power button press, and Windows' default is to take a sleep, hibernate, or shutdown action, and at least on our Server 2016 images, the default behavior is to initiate a shutdown. This isn't OS X behavior, it's Windows behavior. [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236#sleep https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236#sleep