Last night I installed the OS X 10.8.3 update on my laptop (updating from 10.8.2). This morning, upon plugging my laptop into the external Thunderbolt display as I always do, and it didn’t wake up when I opened the lid, nor when I started tapping on the external keyboard.

As I noted before, a retina MBP (or MacBook Air) that doesn’t immediately wake when you open the lid is annoying not only because it slows you down, but because Apple’s removed all the battery indicator buttons, and there’s absolutely no sign of life from a powered off (or hibernating) machine until you press the power button.

So I woke it up with the power button on the builtin keyboard, and watched it boot to the preboot login screen associated with an encrypted boot drive¹, and was further annoyed that at this screen it was still ignoring the external keyboard plugged into the Thunderbolt display. Having to use the builtin keyboard for a docked laptop is suboptimal. Anyway.

When it finished booting, I fired up pmset to ask it what’s going on, first on AC power:

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magi@duality ~> pmset -g
Active Profiles:
Battery Power     -1
AC Power          -1*
Currently in use:
 standbydelay         4200
 standby              0
 womp                 1
 halfdim              1
 hibernatefile        /var/vm/sleepimage
 darkwakes            0
 gpuswitch            2
 networkoversleep     0
 disksleep            10
 sleep                0
 autopoweroffdelay    14400
 hibernatemode        3
 autopoweroff         1
 ttyskeepawake        1
 displaysleep         10
 acwake               0
 lidwake              1

And then again² on battery:

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magi@duality ~> pmset -g
Active Profiles:
Battery Power     -1*
AC Power          -1
Currently in use:
 standbydelay         4200
 standby              1
 halfdim              1
 hibernatefile        /var/vm/sleepimage
 darkwakes            0
 gpuswitch            2
 disksleep            10
 sleep                10
 autopoweroffdelay    14400
 hibernatemode        3
 autopoweroff         1
 ttyskeepawake        1
 displaysleep         2
 acwake               0
 lidwake              1

As posted before, I’d previously changed standbydelay to 43200 seconds on battery power, and disabled standby entirely on AC power. Apparently the 10.8.3 upgrade reverted the former change to Apple’s new default of 4200 seconds, though it left the latter change alone.

Note that’s not quite consistent with my observation that my rMBP (bought in 2012 and shipped with OS X 10.8) had standby enabled by default, while my previous MBP (bought in 2010 and shipped with OS X 10.6 and subsequently upgraded to 10.7 and then 10.8) never had standby enabled at all.