My initial reason for switching from Windows laptops to Mac laptops 7 years ago — which has remained a primary benefit across those 7 years — was better power management. The details are many but the result is simple: a laptop that sleeps and wakes consistently and quickly, which never crashes on wakeup, never drops the Wi-Fi connection on wakeup, and is on the network and ready for me to type almost as soon as I open the lid. Almost like what we expect from a tablet or smartphone.

That’s the dream, anyway. I’ve never owned or used a Windows laptop (or Linux laptop, for that matter) that pulled that off, and not for lack of trying. It was much truer of Apple laptops running Mac OS X, ever since their introduction in 2001. It remained one of my favorite things about more recent Macbooks, but I’ve found it getting less true over time, culminating in my 2012 “Macbook Pro with Retina Display” (henceforth rMBP), which seems to take like 30 seconds to wake from sleep, then sometimes crashes immediately as the crowning touch.

After getting frustrated enough by the slow wakeup time to get to the bottom of it, I think there are 3 pieces to the puzzle.

1. The rMBP (like Macbook Air models) has no external status lights. No charge level indicator on the battery like older models with removable batteries, no charge level indicator on the side of the unit like previous unibody Macbook Pro models, no power light that winks while asleep and glows while awake like all previous Macbook models. So when you open the lid, if it wakes up and is ready for use, great, but if not, you don’t know whether it’s powered off, has a dead battery, or is already trying to wake up and just taking its sweet time.

2. The default power-management plan is “Safe Sleep”, which means that when you close the lid the computer writes a suspend image to disk, then suspends to RAM¹. Then wakeup is normally fast because RAM contents are still present, but if power is lost for any reason (battery dies, battery is removed on models where that’s possible, or the computer decides to power itself off to stop expending battery power to support the RAM), it can still resume from where you left it, just more slowly, by reading from disk. This last bit about deciding to power itself off is crucial; it’s controlled by a parameter known as standbydelay, and on this computer at least (rMBP running OS X 10.8) the default value of standbydelay was 4200 seconds, or 70 minutes, just over an hour. This means if you suspend the computer and wake it up again within 70 minutes, it will resume from RAM, but if you leave it asleep for more than 70 minutes, it will have powered off entirely, and will resume from disk. On my previous laptop (a 13” Macbook Pro from 2010, also now running OS X 10.8), standbydelay was not set at all, which I assume means it will try to keep RAM supplied with power until the battery dies. I don’t know the reason for the different defaults.

3. This rMBP has 16 gigabytes of RAM, more than any laptop I’ve owned in the past. Now, it also has a fast SSD, so I wouldn’t have thought it would take that much longer to resume from disk vs RAM (and in actual usage it shouldn’t have to save and restore all of it anyway) but it’s likely a factor: if it had to transfer the entire 16GB, even at 500 MB/sec that would be 32 seconds. It actually only needs to save/restore the active pages; say on average that’s 60% of memory and add a few seconds to get the hardware devices from cold boot to powered on, and you’re in the 20 second ballpark that is long enough to annoy me.

So boiled down: this machine feels slower to resume than previous ones because it’s suspending to disk, has a lot of memory to restore from disk, and doesn’t show any visible signs of progress while restoring from disk.

I changed the standbydelay value to 12 hours on battery (sudo pmset -b standbydelay 43200) and disabled it entirely on AC power (sudo pmset -c standby 0) and things seem much better now².

Oh. And sleep reliability³? That’s even more important. When I first got the rMBP, it would kernel panic and show “Your computer must be restarted” when resuming from sleep once in a while, roughly once a month. That was intolerable; at a guess I disabled PowerNap; I don’t know whether it was the actual problem but I haven’t had reliability problems since.

So these are my current recommendations for power management on a rMBP or Macbook Air:

• Increase standbydelay value enough that you don’t notice the computer resuming from disk in normal use
• Disable PowerNap