Mac laptops and issues with sleeping

When I first switched to using Macs from PCs, when I was faculty at Georgia Tech, one of the things I really appreciated about them was how reliably they went to and woke from sleep. Windows was crap at sleep / wake at the time, which meant you were basically stuck with turning off your laptop every time you wanted to put it away. By contrast, you could just close your Mac lid when you were during using it, put it away, and when you wanted to use it again you just pulled it out, opened the lid, and it was ready to use.

So I find it sad that sleeping really seems to have gone south with Macs over the last few releases. Earlier this week I closed the lid of my Mac laptop at work and left for the day, only to discover the next morning that the battery was dead. And then today I pulled my laptop out at a coffee shop to catch up on some things and discovered that its battery was also dead, despite sleeping it just 2 days ago with roughly 85% charge. I’ve gotten used to my laptop (a 2017 MacBook Pro) draining faster than my older laptops used to, to the extent that I’ve started shutting it down if I’m not going to use it for a few days instead of sleeping it. But losing 85% charge over 2 days? Clearly it never actually went to sleep. At least the old MacBooks had the heartbeat light that let you know when the machine was in sleep. Since Apple did away with it, there’s really no way to check whether it’s actually slept correctly. Apparently I’ll have to go back to just shutting it down every time to be sure.

At least OS X boots faster now.