I have a 13" Mid 2014 MacBook Pro running macOS High Sierra 10.13.6.
I carry around my MacBook Pro in a backpack. I tend to close the lid to put it in sleep mode before putting it in the backpack. How do I make sure that it is indeed asleep before putting it in?
I did google this topic a lot. Many people agree that you can close the lid and put it to backpack and travel without any problems. Also, many people disagree that because sometimes MacBook get overheated and some hardware failed because of this.
From what I understand, the only problem against closing lid and travelling is because the MacBook may not fully-sleep properly somehow when closing the lid. So my question is:
- What is the best practice to make sure my MacBook is fully asleep and safe to be carried around and travel?
I am very confused how to make sure my MacBook is fully asleep. Whenever I put my MacBook Pro in sleep mode by clicking → Sleep or closing the lid, the built-in apple logo on the back of screen just turns off directly.
Some people mention to make sure sleep light begins to pulse. I have no idea what this means. I don't know what is the sleep light and I don't see any lights pulsing.
PS: Some tips I found may be useful to you:
How to ensure there is no apps preventing your MacBook to sleep?
launch Activity Monitor.app
--> Energy
tab --> look at the column Preventing Sleep
. If there is no Yes
. Then there should be no apps stopping the system to sleep.
I wrote a simple script to make beep noise to test sleep status
I wrote a simple script to make beep noise. Run the script before closing the lid. If there is no beep noise, it kinda means the app is not running properly, thus it's in a sleep mode. I run this script everytime from terminal.app
before closing the lid.
$ cat sleep-detector.sh
while true;
do
echo `date` " -------- not sleep yet"
tput bel
sleep 2s
done
From the output of the program (I am not pasting the output here. You can try it yourself.), even if there is no beep noise, you can see that the script is actually running for about 20 seconds (or less) after the lid is closed.
If anyone have any better scripts/ideas, please let me know.
Just close the lid. Do not use → Sleep button
In some of my tests, if I use → Sleep button and close the lid immediately without waiting for the system fully asleep, the system actually wakes up by closing the lid. (because my simple beep noise script makes sound in this situation when the lid is closed). So, it's much safer to close the lid directly if you intend to close the lid.
Turn off Power Nap
Turn off Bluetooth before closing the lid
Turn off Wifi (if possible) before closing the lid
You can not stop mDNSResponder MaintenanceWake so far in High Sierra
So You can just live with it and let MacBook wake periodically.
You can find this wake message from the output of pmset -g log | grep -i MaintenanceWake
from terminal.