Happy Landfill

When I purchased my MacBook Air less than two months ago, I immediately noticed a feature called Safe Sleep. It’s not a new addition to Mac notebooks; it’s been present on every model with an Intel processor, as well as the last generation of PowerBook G4s.

When you put a Mac notebook with this feature to sleep, instead of immediately powering off all components (with the exception of the memory and a few others), it will enter into a limbo state that lasts anywhere from 10 seconds to over a minute. During this time, the screen turns off and the system is unresponsive while the contents of your computer’s memory is written to its hard drive. This is to ensure that in the event the battery drains completely while the Mac is in sleep mode, you won’t lose any unsaved work. The state of your computer at the time it was put to sleep will be restored from the data on the hard drive once it is plugged into a power outlet.

On older Mac notebooks (and all Mac desktops), the computer would enter sleep mode almost immediately without caching the contents of your memory. If one of those computers lost power during sleep, any unsaved work would be lost.

Safe Sleep seems like a good idea. Seems. It turns out, at least for me, that it’s not a very useful feature. Usually using a notebook on the go is a constant repetition of 1) turning it on, 2) using it for a few minutes, 3) closing the lid/putting it to sleep and go. The problem with this feature is that when putting my MacBook Air to sleep, I can’t move the machine until the hard disk spins down and it fully goes to sleep, resulting in a frustrating wait before I can throw it into my bag and be on my way. Any substantial movement when the hard disk is still active—especially when writing data—can result in data loss and damage to the disk. Now, hard drives are usually pretty resilient, but this isn’t something I want to risk on a regular basis. Furthermore, I’m not sure how effective the Sudden Motion Sensor is when dealing with constant, violent movement (like running to catch a train), or if it even works when the computer is caching to disk.

I think a smart solution (for users who want the feature, and those who don’t) would be to have a checkbox in Mac OS X System Preferences that allows Safe Sleep to be disabled. In the meantime, there’s always the command line that allows one to manually turn off the feature.

The MacBook Air is my first Mac notebook in almost three years. It seems backwards that I can’t put my new machine (in its default configuration) to sleep in less than 3 seconds like I could before with my old PowerBooks.

One thing I’ve noticed is that batteries in Intel-based Mac notebooks drain faster in sleep mode than PowerPC ones. My old PowerBooks discharged only 3% or so per day when sleeping, while my MacBook Air would discharge more than 10% in the same amount of time. Perhaps the Intel-based chipset is more inefficient—necessitating Apple building in Safe Sleep into their Mac notebooks to compensate.

I miss Arthur C. Clarke already.

A design triumph. Really.

I especially love the circa-1994 children’s sing-along album cover aesthetic of the typography.