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I like OSX on a laptop because it's the only portable machine I've ever used where everything works correctly when I am constantly opening and closing the lid o

I like OSX on a laptop because it's the only portable machine I've ever used where everything works correctly when I am constantly opening and closing the lid of the machine. At work I will leave my desk several times per day for meetings in conference rooms, then I take the machine home and I may open and close it a dozen more times in the evening. I've probably had 50 laptops over the last 20 years, and the only one I've had that approached the number of successful suspend resume cycles with Windows or Linux were Thinkpads, although even with Windows, there's a whole world of pathological resume behavior. Sometimes they'll just sit there, sometimes they never wake up. Sometimes you close it and then reopen it a second time and then it magically wakes up. The worst cases are when the video comes back but the sound doesn't, and you're faced with living without the sound for a while or enduring a reboot. I feel like this is the fundamental thing that a laptop is supposed to do and it is disheartening to have used these machines this long and to still have endless problems with it. That being said, all I use the MBP for is to ssh into my Linux desktop machine (Debian), where my tools are. Occasionally people suggest to me that the linux distros are pretty good on the MBP, but I've had such a bad history with Linux on laptops and I'm getting to be an old fart now and I lack the enthusiasm for fiddling around with the machine for several weeks to get everything working right, so OSX is a (albeit outrageously expensive, at the treat of my employer) compromise :)

collyw 12y ago
Am I the only person out there who hasn't got a clue what the point in suspend / hibernate are for. Whenever I use them, it seems to take longer to boot than a complete restart, and half of the times it doesn't boot, and if it does, there is a good chance something is not working.
- gsnedders 12y ago
  Suspend should take less than a second to resume. If not, something's gone wrong. Apple pushed in a big way to get it to a point of waking up from suspend being quick enough that by the time you've opened the screen fully, it's ready. Hibernate will often take longer than a clean boot — because it has to read all allocated memory from storage into RAM.
- cycojesus 12y ago
  That's hibernating you're describing. Suspend wakes less time than it takes to open the lid and the laptop is directly usable.
- losvedir 12y ago
  No, there are probably other Linux / Windows users who are similarly confused. :-p Among Mac users, your comment is hard to understand, though. We don't have "suspend" or "hibernate" so we don't think about that. Want to relocate? You close the lid, no thought about it. Get to the new place? Open the lid, and your mac is operational instantaneously - literally as soon as the lid is fully open. Of course, the laptop was in power-save mode while you were relocating, but you don't think of that.
  - saurik 12y ago
    If the Mac laptop starts running out of power while asleep it will in fact hibernate; when it comes back it will display a progress bar as it reloads the contents of memory from disk. (Being able to explicitly tell the system "I know I won't be using you for the rest of the day, please just hibernate so you have tons of battery when I turn you back on next" is something I miss from Windows.)
- pmontra 12y ago
  HP Zbook 15 with Ubuntu here. Boot to an empty desktop: 15 seconds, typing the password included. I timed that days ago out of curiosity. Resume from suspend to RAM: maybe 2 seconds to the password prompt, plus all my programs are open and in the state I left them before suspending. I never tried hybernating to disk but I bet moving 16 GB of RAM back and forth to disk wouldn't be as fast, even to SSD (I got a dual disk system SSD+HD).
ForHackernews 12y ago
FWIW, I run Ubuntu 14.04 on a rMBP, and suspend/resume works just fine when I close/reopen the lid. (Yes, including wireless)
mattdeboard 12y ago
Ubuntu 13.10 on a ThinkPad X230 works flawlessly in this way as well. When I first got this machine, I also ordered the docking station with it so I could plug my monitor, mouse, headphones, and phone charging cable into that instead of the laptop. I can drop my machine into the docking station, and either open the lid (out-of-the-box, no-config multi-monitor display) or not and everything just ... works. It's amazing. I don't have a dog in this OS fight but just wanted to throw that out there.
tim333 12y ago
Yeah the reliable open close the lid thing's cool. Also going from a Win7 Thinkpad to a Macbook Air I'm struck by how almost everything works pretty much instantly. On the Thinkpad if you just right click a file it would often take 30s just for the right click menu to appear.

collyw 12y ago

Am I the only person out there who hasn't got a clue what the point in suspend / hibernate are for. Whenever I use them, it seems to take longer to boot than a complete restart, and half of the times it doesn't boot, and if it does, there is a good chance something is not working.

gsnedders 12y ago
Suspend should take less than a second to resume. If not, something's gone wrong. Apple pushed in a big way to get it to a point of waking up from suspend being quick enough that by the time you've opened the screen fully, it's ready. Hibernate will often take longer than a clean boot — because it has to read all allocated memory from storage into RAM.
cycojesus 12y ago
That's hibernating you're describing. Suspend wakes less time than it takes to open the lid and the laptop is directly usable.
losvedir 12y ago
No, there are probably other Linux / Windows users who are similarly confused. :-p Among Mac users, your comment is hard to understand, though. We don't have "suspend" or "hibernate" so we don't think about that. Want to relocate? You close the lid, no thought about it. Get to the new place? Open the lid, and your mac is operational instantaneously - literally as soon as the lid is fully open. Of course, the laptop was in power-save mode while you were relocating, but you don't think of that.
- saurik 12y ago
  If the Mac laptop starts running out of power while asleep it will in fact hibernate; when it comes back it will display a progress bar as it reloads the contents of memory from disk. (Being able to explicitly tell the system "I know I won't be using you for the rest of the day, please just hibernate so you have tons of battery when I turn you back on next" is something I miss from Windows.)
pmontra 12y ago
HP Zbook 15 with Ubuntu here. Boot to an empty desktop: 15 seconds, typing the password included. I timed that days ago out of curiosity. Resume from suspend to RAM: maybe 2 seconds to the password prompt, plus all my programs are open and in the state I left them before suspending. I never tried hybernating to disk but I bet moving 16 GB of RAM back and forth to disk wouldn't be as fast, even to SSD (I got a dual disk system SSD+HD).

ForHackernews 12y ago

FWIW, I run Ubuntu 14.04 on a rMBP, and suspend/resume works just fine when I close/reopen the lid. (Yes, including wireless)

mattdeboard 12y ago

Ubuntu 13.10 on a ThinkPad X230 works flawlessly in this way as well. When I first got this machine, I also ordered the docking station with it so I could plug my monitor, mouse, headphones, and phone charging cable into that instead of the laptop. I can drop my machine into the docking station, and either open the lid (out-of-the-box, no-config multi-monitor display) or not and everything just ... works. It's amazing. I don't have a dog in this OS fight but just wanted to throw that out there.

tim333 12y ago

Yeah the reliable open close the lid thing's cool. Also going from a Win7 Thinkpad to a Macbook Air I'm struck by how almost everything works pretty much instantly. On the Thinkpad if you just right click a file it would often take 30s just for the right click menu to appear.