Know how your Mac Sleeps!

It’s always a better idea to turn your Mac to sleep mode when you are not using it. Doing this saves you plenty on battery. But, do you know your Apple Mac can sleep in three different ways? Let me explain them all in this blog today:

Sleep: It’s the most common method, which is set as default settings, on Mac desktops and portable devices in general. When your Apple device is made to sleep using this mode, the RAM (Random Access Memory) remains active and powered. As a result, when you try to bring your Mac back to normal, everything happens quickly. This is because your RAM knows what all programs you were running before putting your device to sleep. It does not need to copy or load anything from hard drive.

Hibernation: You must have heard of this term before. This mode is the default sleep mode on Widows desktops and laptops. But in the case of Mac, it used to be the default sleep mode for most of Mac devices and portables released before the year 2005. In the modern next generation Macbooks or portables, it is no more the default setting for sleep mode.

In this mode, when you wake your Mac from sleep, the process is usually slower. So what does slow down the speed? Well, when your device is hibernated, all the data of your running programs are stored to hard drive, and the RAM is turned off. So, when you awake it, all those data are first copied to RAM from your hard disk, and this extra time adds to the total wake of time from this mode.

Safe Sleep: Now when your Mac uses this method for sleeping, it first copies all data from RAM to the hard disk but does not remove power from it. It means your RAM stays awake. Why it copied data then? Well, it is done to ensure that you do not lose your date even when the battery fails or something awkward happens. Even if the battery fails at the time of waking it up, you can recover all your data.

Your Apple devices may have Safe Sleep as the default mode if it has been manufactured after 2005. But for most the portable devices, Apple still uses normal Sleep mode as the default setting.

Want to know which sleep mode does you Mac use?

If you would like to find out the sleep mode being used by your Mac, go to Applications and then Utilities. When your device opens its Terminal window, enter the following:

pmset -g | grep hibernatemode

In return, the system will come up with one of the following responses:

  1. hibernatemode 0
  2. hibernatemode 1
  3. hibernatemode 3

Here zero (0) refers to first sleep mode I describe in the post, 1 means the second, and 3 means the third respectively.

How to change the default sleep mode?

Well, if you would like to do this yourself, I would advise you to avoid. The best option will be to let the expert do it for you. Ask the technician to do it for you when you call an Apple Repair service guy next time.

About Support Desk

Apple Mac and Computer Repair blog by the Support Desk at Geeks Onsite Limited