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Microsoft Is Forcing Me to Buy MacBooks (youtube.com)
395 points by xbmcuser on Dec 3, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 196 comments



Finally, an explanation.

I don't run around enough to care about quick/instant startup. Despite using the Windows 10 Windows menu Power command to "Shut down" my Thinkpad X1C6, I took it out of its bag the following day, on a few not too infrequent occasions, to find it warm and "doing stuff" (Windows Update sticks in my mind). Moreso than a lowered charge, the idea of it cooking itself inside its padded sleeve and bag caused me concern.

After a bit of investigation, I settled on training myself to always open/use a command window to issue "shutdown /s".

No more warm or hot, drained laptop since then.

I agree with Linus: Microsoft's behavior and indifference WRT this problem is reprehensible. For me, it is another example of how Microsoft has not -- fundamentally -- changed since its E3 days. The 900 pound gorilla that we will, per force, accommodate. Amazing how entrenched such cultural mindsets are.

By the way, the X1C6 as configured by Lenovo does not support S3. Since Linus, in his demo of a possible BIOS configuration change, was using a Thinkpad, maybe I'll get lucky with that option -- watch the video to see whether you might have such a fix for your system.


You're just not understanding the situation.

Someone in Microsoft has a KPI related to the percentage of machines updated with the latest patches every month.

He or she can best meet their KPIs at the low, low cost of the occasional destroyed laptop, fire, or -- very rare -- customer death.

People just have to accept the risk of burning to death so that this person can meet their KPIs by forcefully updating laptops even if they're hibernating, in a laptop bag, and in the cargo hold of an airliner.

Those passengers knew what they were signing up for when they boarded that plane together with a Windows user.


"He or she can best meet their KPIs at the low, low cost of the occasional destroyed laptop, fire, or -- very rare -- customer death."

With millions of users it's less likely to be rare. As tragic as it sounds, Microsoft likely won't brought to heel until it too experiences a Boeing 737MAX-type incident of its own making.

Such is the arrogance of those who run Microsoft.

"PS: one would hope that this bad unsafe design would already be under investigation by various safety regulators/authorities. Perhaps this story may awaken them."


> Those passengers knew what they were signing up for when they boarded that plane together with a Windows user.

The good thing is, once a fix for this is pushed, even laptops in cargo holds will get it. Win win!



I will never buy a Microsoft laptop or tablet again unless there is a switch to really truly turn the damn thing off. My Surface Pro 4, which was only lightly used, had the battery degrade about as fast as you might expect from a very heavily used machine probably due to "shut down" not actually shutting down.


I'm sure someone has pointed this out already, but if you hit the Windows key and search for "lid" there's a setting that lets you make the machine hibernate when the lid is closed. Hibernate is different from sleep in that it moves all of the memory state to disk and actually turns the machine off. Assuming your laptop has an SSD you're not going to notice the extra restore time next time you open it.


That's one of the workarounds suggested in the video actually!


Dang it.


Perhaps so, but my dang MacBook does the same thing. I have turned off every single thing that I possibly can that would cause it to wake up, and yet I still randomly find it turning on for no reason pretty much every other day. I’ll walk by my study and find it turning on for short periods, I’ve pulled it out of my bag hot as fire, I’ve had it drain the battery in the middle of the night, etc. Looking at the logs, I’ll often see that it just decided to get into a random loop of dark wakes and sleeps. It’s infuriating.


I think the issue with macbooks is similar, but happens when you have USB-C dock with an external display connected. When you close the lid while connected to the dock, mac does not go to sleep but just switches to using the external display (aka clamshell mode) and when you unplug your computer to put it in your backpack, it just remains active instead of going to sleep.

The solution to this is to install noclamshell via brew or just get in the habit of disconnecting your mac first before closing the lid.

I noticed this because previously it was sleeping completly fine and the problems started only recently which is inline then I started using the dock.


I've seen that happen, but I'm specifically talking about disconnecting my dock (if it's even connected), closing my lid, confirming the fans are off, putting it in a bag, then finding it back on later doing an infinite loop of darkwakes for no reason.


This is addressed in the video, Apple provides a setting to turn it off. Windows has disabled every workaround for turning it off.


Wake on network in macOS settings is actually not what this is for. It's for listening to wake on LAN packets. Linus got this wrong in his video.

The "modern standby" feature on macs is called power nap: https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mh40773/mac

It already has different behavior depending on whether it's on battery or mains.

You can turn it off but it's not the option that Linus mentioned. It's elsewhere: https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mh40774/mac


Power Nap is only an option on Intel Macs.

On Apple Silicon Macs, the machine is never going into that deep a sleep to wake up from (it's basically a huge iPhone, remember?) and Wake for network access is not for Wake on LAN but rather if you want it to keep WiFi running to get push notifications etc while in "sleep" (the description under it in Settings even says it's for iMessage and iCloud updates).

Marcan has talked about Apple Silicon sleep states wrt to implementing it in Asahi Linux and IIRC they never put the machine to sleep, they just stop all the processes and hardware like the display and let the CPU idle normally (which it's extremely efficient at)


I've never had an issue on Macbook Pro or M1 Air. Never had to try the workaround from the video.


Yeah. I have an Intel MacBook Pro (nearly 10 years old) and never hit this problem. I can leave it on the shelf for a month and it’ll still have a 70% charge. I just gave up on Windows and brought a new M1 Mac due to this exact issue (the Intel one wasn’t getting OS updates any more).

The speed and reliability with which a Mac sleeps and wakes and how well it maintains battery is insanely good. My Windows laptop was more like a portable desktop, as I always had to plug it in and would walk around with the lid open rather than risk a sleep/wake attempt between meetings.


But according to the video; a 10 year old windows laptop wouldn't have this issue as well. It would probably go to sleep properly as expected almost every time.

Also I have had this issue with Macbook Pro 15 (2019), so it can't be guaranteed every-time for any OS I guess; not sure of the reason though. To me closing the lid should take preference over everything.


I'm temporarily sleeping in the room with my MacBook Pro, and it wakes up (and turns on a glowing peripheral too) half a dozen times during the night, to the point I unplug that peripheral before I go to sleep.

My previous, older Mac wouldn't sleep at all for more than a few seconds unless I unplugged the external monitor.


Yeah, I've turned literally everything off that I can. Not just power nap, all the random wake settings they have: powernap off, proximitywake off, networkoversleep off... all the way down to actually disabling wifi and bt when my lid closes. It's a mess.


What worked for me was disabling the feature of keeping the TCP connections alive. No idea if it's covered by 'networkoversleep', but this is as deep as I've went, considering I've then received a warning that "Find my Mac" will stop working after this toggle.


yep, I did the same. So, last time I dug into it, I found a separate issue where it would darkwake to do things like check in with find my mac, and then an app that had an idle power assertion would prevent the darkwake from fully shutting down again. That's separate from it getting into a weird loop of waking and sleeping though.


Did you try the solution in the video?


I gave up running Thinkpads when I ran out of ways to actually get the damn thing to turn off. I'd shut it down, only to find that my bluetooth peripherals were still connected to it instead of the computer I now wanted to use. I'd fully charge it and stick it in a bag for a trip, only for it to be dead when I got there. The straw that broke the camel's back was the unending Steam notification of "Thinkpad is available for streaming" popping up literally every five minutes. Off should mean fucking OFF.


I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen6, and indeed there is the "Linux" sleep-state option, which has been working for years just fine for me. I'm running a Linux-based OS. Before Lenovo added this option via bios update (via fwupd:), i indeed had to manually manipulate the DSDT to achieve S3 sleep.


Even with Linux, sleep on my Thinkpads is still a coin flip


sydney6 is referring to a Thinkpad BIOS setting that is labeled "Linux" but really pertains to enabled sleep/power states -- per Linus' video (the OP), this setting works just fine with Windows, too.

This is all described towards the end of the video, for those who don't want to watch the whole ~11 minute thing.

P.S. I should clarify that it works just fine with Windows settings hackery that was being used prior to BIOS implementors disabling or eliminating S3 in their BIOS's.


It depends, this thinkpad has lpddr memory and if i suspend the system, it can indeed go for weeks (2-3) on a single charge on S3. I used to only update the truly necessary like firefox and the like on do reboots only every 50-60 days with a kernel upgrade and had never issues with multiple daily suspend/resume cycles execpt every 3-4 months, the wifi/bt controller wouldn't correctly load FW and needed reloading, that's about it. _But_, imho, this works only completely "naked", that is, i use a separate usb-c DP-alt-mode cable, a separate usb-c charging cable and keyboard/trackpad via bluetooth. I have had issues with Thunderbolt-Docks _and_ USB-C Docks (so far: Lenovo, Caldigit, Belkin, no-name), USB-C Monitors with integrated Hubs and NICS, USB-NICS, USB-Hubs, pretty much everything external connected, that is not onboard the machine itself. This works well, the rest is a complete disaster and i fear not completely Windows/Mac/Linux Kernel's fault.


I have a CalDigit mini Thunderbolt 3 dock that provides two DisplayPort ports, a 1 Gbps Ethernet port, and a USB (2? I forget) port. I use it to connect two WQHD monitors, Ethernet, and a wired mouse.

It's a real crapshoot whether the dock will properly or fully connect upon cold startup or reboot. Sometimes everything is dead. Sometimes the monitors get signal but Ethernet and the mouse are down. Sometimes only the mouse is down; very occasionally, only Ethernet is down.

About a year ago, I spent multiple hours on the phone in a looong call with a CalDigit support rep. Essentially, we used my system to troubleshoot. We never solved the problem.

With time and observation, I've learned it's best to cold boot (with power connected, my daily work configuration) with this CalDigit Thunderbolt dock physically disconnected. After Windows has booted and gotten to its desktop, I then wait 90 - 100 seconds or a bit longer before I plug in the dock. Doing this, my success at having everything come up working is 50% or even a bit more.

If dock isn't fully functional, repeated warm rebooting is not too likely to correct this. The best bet is to hard shutdown, maybe wait a bit for whatever capacitors to discharge, and then start the above procedure over.

The CalDigit rep thought it was maybe the Thunderbolt support/configuration in my X1C6 that was/is to blame, but I have since formed the impression that Thunderbolt, for all its vaunted power, is actually kind of a shitshow.

The X1C6 did initially have a problem: It rewrote its Thunderbolt configuration upon every boot, into a kind of physically memory not designed to have a lifespan of that many writes. About a year, as I understand it, was what it took for many users to start having problems. Lenovo did eventually ship a firmware update to stop this behavior, and through circumstances I'll skip I ended up de facto avoiding the problem. My point in mentioning this being, maybe the X1C6's Thunderbolt support is still/also borked in some manner that causes my problem with the CalDigit dock.

But, I'm not too convinced of this. And I suspect CalDigit is using the same chipset that many other brands are using for similar docks.

For all the premium they charge for it, Thunderbolt designers/implementors should... be induced to provide a better result. IMHO.


> The X1C6 did initially have a problem: It rewrote its Thunderbolt configuration upon every boot, into a kind of physically memory not designed to have a lesson of that many writes.

Heh, that's such a Lenovo problem. I hard bricked my old ThinkPad W520 four times (and got warranty replacements) just by hitting F12 to bring up the BIOS boot menu. It did some sort of write that wore out the BIOS flash chip. I don't think they ever fixed that problem.


I actually have a W520 that I'd like to continue to use. (That keyboard, plus a surprisingly decent display panel for Lenovo.)

I hadn't heard of this problem, so thanks for the heads up! I'll be very planful and sparing in my BIOS config access/writes.

I think CoreBoot has made it to some if not all of the -20 series. I wonder whether it would make any difference, although I can't see how if you're still writing to that storage.


Interesting! I didn't know coreboot was available for the *20 series. I hadn't touched my W520 since the last warranty replacement. Maybe coreboot will be my next weekend project.


I had always assumed I was doing something wrong, glad to hear it’s not just me. Ubuntu works extremely well except for sleeping just emptying the battery. Got way to used to MacBooks not killing the battery in like 24 hours of sleep…


using linux + sleep = ur wrong. turn your computer off. sleep is a lie that never EVER did what it claimed. the only thing it's good for is enabling bad user behavior. period.


I close the lid of my MacBook and come back two days later: my MacBook has lost 3% of its battery.

If I open my laptop within 24hrs then it is already ready by the time I finish opening the lid. This immediacy means I don’t lose my train of thought (ie; the reason I grabbed my laptop in the first place).

I’m a hard Linux lover, and begrudgingly use a MacBook, but sleep has a lot of value, and the Mac stuff seems to work a lot more consistently than what windows is offering. (Linux too, in a number of circumstances: though my old precision 5520 never had an issue with suspend)


> the only thing it's good for is enabling bad user behavior.

Okay, I'll bite. Care to expand? What behavior, and why is it bad? Why should users not expect a "suspend" state to work (more or less) as advertised?

edit: Or are you arguing that the only "correct" states are running and complete shutdown? Why would that be preferred?


I’ve run Linux on both my Dell XPS 15 (9500) and my Zephyrus G14 (2022). In both cases, the default state is to sleep like Windows 11’s modern standby. In Zephyrus’ case, I can force the old behavior as it’s still supported by the UEFI. However, the Dell can only be powered off or use modern standby. It does not support traditional sleep states. This is, in fact, one of my main reasons for the “downgrade”.


Thank you!


What I do on my work Thinkpad is disabling standby altogether. I just let it hibernate. Windows 10 and 11 are very quick at restoring. Not instant but good enough.


Exactly what I do on linux.

Save to to swap and hibernate (turn all the way off) on lid close.

It's like 8 seconds longer to boot back up - but It uses no battery and produces no heat.

Crazy how fast machines boot these days. I'm low 30s and still vividly remember the days of waiting 3 to 5 minutes for a machine to come up. Those days are gone - The value proposition of sleep is just really, really low right now.

Generally speaking - I'd rather have the extra 10% battery life per day over saving 15 seconds basically always - even when sleep works perfectly.

I can leave a machine for 5 to 10 days, and it comes right back up at the same battery I left it. A machine in sleep will be completely dead.


I once lost a Surface 2 Pro to self-cookery--took it out of my bag at the airport departures lounge, the thing had to be 140F on the outside and it was bricked. On the plus side, Microsoft later replaced it gratis with a like model.


Upgrade that CLI to:

  shutdown /s /f /t 0
or in PowerShell:

  Stop-Computer -Force


Thank you.

For myself, I prefer not to force application closures. If something's stuck, I'd rather look into it and avoid potential data loss. I'm seldom in that much of a hurry, these days (but I understand others can be).

For anyone who's curious:

shutdown:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

Stop-Computer:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...


I had this problem more than once when I used Windows and resorted to shutting it down completely before putting the machine in its bag.

There was one really obscure docking station problem which was the real last straw.

I think it was a Dell which updated itself while docked.

After that update, the laptop would not work undocked.

Reinstalling was of no use as every update would reinstall the same problem.

Moved to Intel MacBooks and Bootcamp. I don't remember when I last needed anything Windows specific.


PROTIP: set your internet connection to metered and windows won’t pull or send arbitrary data


I like the fact that "shutdown /s" always carries sarcasm


I'm confused. What you're describing sounds quite different from what's in the video. The video is about sleep. You're talking about shut down.


If you're a Linux user and you can get S3 support on your laptop's firmware, make sure to check out systemd's suspend-then-hibernate! It gives you the same behavior as macOS, so your laptop will still have good battery capacity if you close it and walk away for a whole week. (It's unlikely to feel like truly 'instant on' unless you're running an open-source UEFI like Coreboot. But S3 resume is still very fast, just a couple seconds at most.)

Docs:

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-sle...

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-sus...


Note that suspend-then-hibernate is badly broken in some systemd versions. It will always wait until the battery is drained to 5% SOC before waking up and trying to hibernate - of course, this can easily fail and lead to lost data, plus a completely drained battery (with the ensuing wear-and-tear on the battery itself). What's especially broken about this is that options intended to set a different behavior for hibernation are ignored, the 5% threshold is effectively made mandatory. Fixes for this issue are apparently ongoing and not yet ready for release.

Reference: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269


tl;dr: if you're not on a bleeding edge rolling release, this will probably be fixed before the affected versions hit you. If not, read below for a summary of what happened, a workaround, and a proper fix you can apply as a patch.

God that's annoying as hell. Apparently the Systemd dev who added this functionality intended it for a different use case than mine or yours. They revised their implementation to better serve their original purpose without realizing it broke our (mis)use of their feature.

For convenience for anyone running a sufficiently bleeding edge distro to have this very latest release already, here's a direct link to a comment with a configuration workaround which restores the old behavior: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269#issuecomment...

And here's the PR for the formal fix, which combines the old behavior (new config value name, read carefully) with that new 5% emergency fallback behavior, for folks who want to patch it themselves:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/25374

It's not merged yet but maintainers have approved it for merging with a few comments on config value names, so it should be safe to add as a patch.


Man, reading systemd issue #25269 is like pulling teeth.

Person A reports that he wants to hibernate after being suspended for 30 minutes, and that it used to work and is now broken. Person B doesn’t understand why, so asks why 30 minutes and not 4 hours? Person A thinks Person B is judging them for their personal preferences, and says that they chose 30 minutes because they like it. Person B then deduces that Person A is an idiot who thinks that the systemd default behavior should be determined Person A’s personal preferences.

What Person A really wants is to pull their laptop out in the morning and have it still be at 90% charge instead of 5% (or 0%!) charge. Given no other configuration options, they chose to have it hibernate after 30 minutes. They would not choose to configure the delay to 4 hours because then the battery would be a lower the next morning.

Then Person C comes along and tries to correct the misunderstandings by suggesting that there’s no reason why it cannot do both at the same time. Person B is still focused on improving safety, and still sees the configurable time as unsafe (because someone might configure it for longer than their battery can last), and misunderstands Person C. Person C has to return and reexplain, with amplification from Person D, that the default behavior should be to hibernate when the battery is low for safety, but also to hibernate at the expiration of the timer, if the timer fires first. This would satisfy everyone, even the weirdos who want their battery to stay charged when they’re not using their laptop.

Person B finally understands and says that would be fine. Elapsed time? 6.5 excruciating days, plus two more days for Person E to push a patch.

Then Persons F, G, H, I and J chime in to add their own amplifying explanations, congratulations, thanks, etc. Even I wanted to re–explain it to Person B.


> Person B doesn’t understand why, so asks why 30 minutes and not 4 hours? Person A thinks Person B is judging them for their personal preferences, and says that they chose 30 minutes because they like it. Person B then deduces that Person A is an idiot who thinks that the systemd default behavior should be determined Person A’s personal preferences.

My experience is that something like 25% percent of the people who run open source projects are just "like this" and there's nothing you can do about it. If you end up forced to deal with them because there aren't other contributors who can step in, or because they're the BDFL of the project, your best bet is just to move on and/or fork it to do what you need. I have probably half a dozen soft forks I maintain myself because the project leads are impossible to work with for exactly this reason.

This isn't about open source explicitly, to be clear. It's just more obvious and visible when it's happening because there's often 1:1 contact on bug trackers. Likewise, it obviously doesn't excuse shitty entitled behavior from issue reporters, of which there is plenty. I'm only making a comment about what I've observed from developers.


It's a problem where they stare themselves blind on what the ideal rule or code or mechanism should be, not realizing the requirement is something entirely different like "a user should never lose their data".

These people have no idea how to build products and have never read anything on the subject.


This is mostly why I don’t bother trying to fix things is open source projects. IME, people are dramatically less professional (meaning communicating clearly, considering input, etc) then I see at work. The exceptions tend to be projects mostly run by people doing it as their day job for a big company.


If I have a choice between fixing an issue locally vs interacting with a large upstream project - who tend to always have a Person B (someone who isn't equipped to handle the subject but will nontheless form a premature opinion and attack anyone who challenges it), then I ALWAYS fix it locally because it takes more effort to convince Person B. Sometimes they silently fix it in a couple of years later, other times another project comes in and renders their project (and my local fix) obsolete.

Perhaps projects should have policies and codes of conduct that protect them against this type of harmful behavior.


Lol, having a policy against miscommunication is not going to make it less common.

Edit: note also that there were _two_ harmful misunderstandings here: Person B misunderstood Person A, but Person A also misunderstood Person B’s question. A Code of Conduct is not going to help.


A code of conduct might be able to help, but not by banning rudeness or defensiveness. If a code of conduct succeeds as part of as an effort to develop or maintain a generous culture of patience, assuming good faith, thanking others for their work, and gentleness regarding mistakes, that could short-circuit some of these interactions.

Like when B highlights that this change in suspend behavior was not only documented but '6 months of work', it kinda seems like they were defensive or irritated because they felt like their hard work to implement a useful feature was being discounted. If they felt like that work was recognized, they might have been less defensive about defending the original idea for their future and more curious about why the bug reporter wanted the behavior they wanted.

Same thing for Person A; if they had been less inclined to read Person B's question as critical, they might have explained themselves more completely earlier on.

A code of conduct treated as a rulebook to cite against people would definitely not help, but a skilled moderator pointing to a policy that encourages people to slow down, listen, be curious, or to a shared statement of values that makes people feel relaxed and safe, or to something that evokes pride in their shared participation in the project... that could have gotten this resolved more quickly.

Some projects have maintainers/authors whose kindness, deliberateness, or thoughtfulness seems to flow downstream to later contributors as a norm. Something like a code of conduct could serve in part just to encode that explicitly as a community aspiration.

But yeah you can't just say that being confusing, confused, frustrated, or frustrating is g allowed lol


A code of conduct will only prevent certain language from being used but will not change B's perception of the bug report which I assume involves his own code.


How about a communication center of excellence producing weekly communication quality reports? You won’t be able to access the project page until you have read the latest report and answered three quick questions to verify that you have read the report.


it's that a real thing any org does?


I hope not. I would leave any that tried to implement such a thing.


Yeah that sounds like a nightmare lol


I should reword part of this; it’s not like pulling teeth, it’s like _having my own teeth pulled_. I imagine pulling teeth could be pretty cathartic by comparison.


Systemd has been fine in my experience, but rather nvidia has to go and mess everything up: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/systemds-suspend-then-...


Note that suspend-then-hibernate is badly broken in some systemd versions

What?! How could this be??!


Yes it's awesome. If you just shut the lid for a short time it's instant on if you open it again and if you keep it shut for longer it goes to hibernate. I think that is the perfect compromise. And with new SSDs restore form disk doesn't really take long.


“Same behavior as macOS” minus the instant on…


'Instant on' isn't a macOS feature. It's a chipset feature, which is extremely clear when you take a look at an M1 MacBook Pro and an Intel MacBook Pro— both, of course, running macOS— resuming from sleep side-by-side. You can see an example here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjyrfAK6Ib4

It's also mediated substantially by firmware, which is apparent if you examine the resume time of an Intel laptop running Coreboot instead of the chipset manufacturer's original firmware:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxNalLoFclU

Resume from suspend is at about 06:15, and looks like about half as much time (between 1 and 2 seconds) as the Intel MacBook Pro's resume time in the previous video (2-4 seconds).

And strictly speaking, macOS actually turns on kinda slowly compared to other desktop operating systems. It's one of the first things I notice whenever I start spending time on a Mac again! Here's one comparison, for example, on identical hardware:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UXCreX57H8

And this is still true today in comparable laptops with fast SSDs, even with the Mx chips:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsioUHMxCsw

(And none of that matters relative to what you quoted, because 'sleeping, then hibernating after a bit' is indeed the same behavior, whether your firmware handles the hardware wakeup part of the process quickly or slowly.)


Back when I sometimes used a laptop, I had that same feature enabled on windows. Is that feature still supported by Microsoft?


Are you talking about hybrid sleep? IIRC that does both hibernate and sleep at the same time, i.e. it writes memory to disk and then goes to sleep. I guess it would feel roughly the same, except:

- unnecessary disk writes (for the times you slept only for a short time)

- keeps using battery until power runs out (rather than after some interval or at some non-zero battery level)


I saw this with a Dell Alienware x14. In both instances, it appeared that the problem was caused by an automated Windows update that triggered a reboot, during which BIOS decided to prompt the user before allowing booting to proceed. My theory is that power management software is not loaded at this stage, so the CPU remains running at full speed.

In one case, the BIOS screen that prevented booting was a warning screen that comes up when the laptop is attached to a charger that supplies less than 90W (!) ... for example, the charger built into the USB-C external monitor it was connected to. That's funny, I thought ... my MacBook can boot when it's not even connected to any charger at all! Actually, the Alienware will boot without a charger also, but complains self-righteously when connected to a 60W charger. Eventually I found a BIOS setting that appears to disable this behavior.

In another case, there was an unrelated BIOS warning screen. I forget now what it was, but on a second attempt the reboot completed without any warning.

Both cases resulted in a disturbingly hot computer.

I could not find a way to disable automatic Windows updates.


Yeah whenever my Dell XPS 15 turned into an inferno, it was basically the same (not surprising given they’re the same manufacturer).

Windows update triggered while the laptop was sleeping, went to BIOS where the device ran full throttle, and I’d find it just sitting there while being scalding hot.

That was the last windows laptop I bothered owning. Other than maybe the ThinkPad line, the XPS line was the closest I could get to a MacBook Pro in build quality, yet I had tons of other issues like audio buzzing, swelling batteries, trackpad issues and just generally, a very plastic build quality.

The one thing I do really miss though is the touch screen. I know it’s divisive but there’s something just nice in being able to touch the thing I want vs navigating to it via a proxy device.


I don't even understand why Microsoft is forcing S0ix this hard, i.e. as i understand, forcing OEMs to remove the option for S3 via certification programmes, etc. Suspend/Resume is painful enough as is, with Thunderbolt devices on a picky pcie-connection and else, even with their "improvements".. What a state of affairs. Half an hour ago, my AMD Desktop freezed from suspend/resume due to a Mellanox ConnectX-3 NIC not properly resuming/entering from sleep. Gotta try to reduce the allocated tx/rx-rings from the kernel module, surely, then everything will be, must be good to go. Oh, well..


> I don't even understand why Microsoft is forcing S0ix this hard

Because for whatever inexplicable reason, they've gotten it into their heads that laptops need to achieve feature parity with smartphones. Smartphones get to be always-on, so laptops apparently need to as well.

It's completely ridiculous, and I'm quite upset at Microsoft for continually trying to destroy the PC ecosystem in new and creative ways.


It's because smartphones are a goldmine of data sensors always collecting information on their users. Microsoft failed their attempts at making a phone catch on, but if they can get laptops to collect the same (or similar) data they could become very profitable products.


Microsoft has a lot of insight about the Windows ecosystem works and crashes, and i'm even willing to believe that there's some sane technical reasoning behind all this. Perhaps the state of S3 is indeed this FUBAR, let's not forget, that MS cannot control the windows ecosystem like apple does with MacOS. MS has no/very little power over OEMs not conforming or only partly implementing standards, and yet has to deal with whatever hardware customers stick into their ~2 billion windows installations.


> that MS cannot control the windows ecosystem like apple does with MacOS. MS has no/very little power over OEMs not conforming or only partly implementing standards,

I mean, we're discussing this because they are forcing S0ix; the question is whether this resulted in fewer buggy implementations, which I doubt.


I doubt that too, without hesitation. But, i'm also not sure if the old way is indeed so much better. I left a comment above, describing some of the issues, apparently many, people have with suspend/resume and i wonder why MS is this strictly continuing this road. People may or may not like the new security mechanisms that windows 11 enforces, but they are there for a technical reason, reasonable or not may perhaps be a different question.


I get if they use those reasons to make S0 the default. But not making it configurable at all and even removing obscure commandline/registry options (instead of creating a switch which is just visibly disabled if you can't flip it due to missing S3 support) has no a technical justification.


Holy shit this is so bad now, even Macbooks and iPads are not immune. I have an older Macbook Air and Pro and the batteries both go to 0% in under a month, when they were shut down, don't know what they are doing. I also have 2 iPad Pro 11" that just drain sitting there, under a week it would be almost dead, i didn't even look at them. I thought it was something wrong with my iPad at first, but a second one does the exact same thing.

It wasn't always like this. We still use an iPad 2 and 4 for CC processing and they don't need to be charged for 2-3 months at a time!!! It is definitely on newer devices. I have a Yoga 1 that i can have in sleep for almost a month and I can still have it turn on with some percentage of battery i can do a few things.

What Microsoft and everyone else it seems, is doing is maddening, the batteries are getting worst, and you simply cannot just rely on a device to be usable anymore without being next to a power outlet and probably even waiting 15minutes before they can even power up.


Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Modern iOS keeps polling and doing stuff in the background regardless.

I actually built two Shortcuts to simultaneously toggle low power mode and all wireless connectivity. I have an older iPad I use for videos and podcasts while exercising that lasts over a week by using those, with zero power usage in between sessions.


I have found the same as GP. I have an iPad Mini Retina (2014?) and an iPad Pro (2018). I once ran a test with both of them in airplane mode, and the Mini outlasted the Pro by a mile.

My hypothesis is that the Mini still runs iOS, and the Pro runs iPadOS. I think I started noticing the Pro standby battery drain after "upgrading" the Pro to iPadOS, whenever that came out.


With iDevices the unexplained drain is probably the Find My feature in action.

The way it works is that the Bluetooth and GPS stacks are powered on every few seconds briefly, even if the device is supposedly off.

iPhones that have "home" buttons demonstrates this not-true-sleep very well. The button looks like it is embedded in the front glass and have a nice satisfying click when it's depressed...

...except that it's not a button at all. It's just a polished circular indent in the glass! There is no moving part.

The click? That's haptic feedback from the vibration motor that works even if the phone is "off". If the phone loses all power or is truly turned off, then suddenly the button goes dead and you realise that it's just smooth glass. I had that phone for years before I first noticed this.


That is incorrect. I have definitely noticed that the haptics do not activate if the iPhone is turned off. Unless this is something they’ve started doing with newer versions of iOS that I have only used on a buttonless iPhone.


It’s funny, if you want your battery life to be really good on an iPhone, just put it in airplane mode. This even disabled the Find My stuff that stays on when powered off.


> I also have 2 iPad Pro 11" that just drain sitting there

I find that having an Apple Pencil 2 snapped on the side makes the iPad drain its battery.


With the Apple devices, you probably have the 'Power Nap' setting turned on, which tells it to occasionally silently wake briefly to get background updates (emails, notifications, etc).


I don't even see this option anymore on the M1 Macbook Pro. I suspect you can't disable power nap on M1


Nah, I’ve seen it too. I have everything turned off, but it still attempts to turn on randomly. I’ve even set up a script to turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when I close the lid.


I had a Dell laptop that's somewhat recent. It had Modern Standby/Connected Standby on by default, so I followed the instructions online to disable that and get back normal S3 sleep. Things went well until one day after a Windows update Modern Standby was turned back on again, and apparently the old way of disabling it no longer worked, as MS removed the option in the registry. Fine, I grudgingly searched and found a new way to disable the stupid thing. Things seemed well initially until I realized that the new way of disabling Modern Standby also broke Hibernate - my laptop couldn't go into Hibernate anymore (or couldn't wake up from Hibernate - I forgot the exact symptom).

I hate Modern Standby with a passion and I wish it a painful death.


I run Linux and I always just turn my computer off. I don't say that to convince people to switch or anything, but more to explain that "off" really means "off" to me. For my workflow this works totally fine. I have my browsers set to restore the previous session. I open up whatever I was working on and I start up again. It seems so crazy to me that this isn't just a standard workflow. Computers with new SSDs start up so fast from totally being turned off that it never causes me any issue at all. There is an explanation in the comments here about how to activate S3 sleep on Linux, but who cares? I'm just amazed that something that is like 50 times faster than a decade ago is apparently too slow.

Maybe I'm just old. It feels like I've totally lost touch with the way most people use computers today. (Not necessarily in a bad way.)


If it is for short duration, then power off/on drains more battery than just sleep[0].

[0] https://www.macworld.com/article/675859/should-i-shut-down-m...


I guess it’s different use case.

With my work laptop, I shutdown by 5pm, as I don’t mind booting and opening everything in the next day.

But for my personal laptop, there isn’t a defined use time. Sometimes I just want to check something for 15 minutes, so 2 minutes to boot and open apps is way to long. I don’t want to keep the laptop fully running the whole day while I’m not using it, it should just go into a power saving mode. And I would expect for the laptop to hold the battery and state meanwhile.


Same, even when i take a quick break for maybe 30 minutes and put my laptop in my backpack, i turn it off. I have a startup time from lid open -> login prompt of 7 seconds (measured with `systemd-analyze time`), and i don't have anything that needs to stay open.


yeah i gave up trying to get any sort of suspend working on my 2013 mbp under linux and eventually just set it to power off if i closed the lid. it starts up in literally 2 seconds so i dont notice it.


Same for me with Windows. I just shut it down.


Somehow I thought that Windows now would even wake up computers that people "shutdown". If Windows won't wake up computers after shutdown, then I don't see why people don't just turn them off.

I'm not saying that suspend isn't a useful feature, but given that it doesn't work I'm not sure why people keep using it.


IIRC, I had to fix some settings before it started working like that.


Windows does not have the appropriate support to restore the working environment upon a full restart - e.g. it can't even restart MS Word/Excel with the exact same documents in the same locations, much less the same for third party software. I could "just shut it down" on a Mac, which has this support, however, I don't need to because there the standby works as I would expect.


That is expected behavior for me. New day, new tasks, new documents.


The fact that computers can now turn themselves back on at any time without the user's consent to do whatever they want to do is absolutely mind-boggling to me, but what's way worse is the fact that this is actually considered normal and acceptable by most users. Where did everything go so wrong?


A multitude of factors, one of which being that users refuse, are unwilling, or are unable, to learn how their tools work, therefore corporations have taken it upon themselves to shield them from having to do so, and have become the stewards/priests of this magical item living in their house/office/pocket.


When computers went from speciality devices to a necessary home appliance. People were not updating or turning off automatic updates. Leading to huge bot and malware networks.


What exactly is the problem with most users finding this normal and acceptable? I assume that you have some personal dislike for this behavior, but can you really apply that to other people?


Are you really asking what's wrong with people willingly being owned by products instead of owning them?


Until you prove that devices turning on without human intervention is equal to "people willingly being owned by products" then no, I don't see why I'd be asking that. Is that something you want to prove?


Computers are a tool.

The human is supposed to own and control the tool so he can use it to perform tasks.

If the human wants to use the tool to perform a task and the tool says "sorry, I don't feel like doing that right now, I decided to do something else, tough luck", then the human does not control the tool, the tool controls the human.


Let's take that to it's obvious conclusion. The user is running a kernel update. The user wants to run minecraft. The system cannot run a kernel update and run minecraft. The system actively prevents them from starting other apps while doing a kernel update! Therefore the user is ruled by their Operating System! How dare Linux Torvalds!

You should think about what users want, not just what YOU want. Most users want security and convenience. They therefore WANT auto-updates and they are entirely OKAY with making the tradeoff that entails. YOU may not like it, but you don't get to stop things from working a certain way because you disagree with the average user.

TL;DR: Your own argument defeats itself. Computers are a tool, and users are choosing the best tool for the job. End of story.


Yet another example of something with "modern" in its name which is much worse than what came before. This trend has been so infuriatingly consistent that anytime I hear something advertised as "modern" I think "the only reason they want you to think it's better is because it's newer, not because it's actually any better".


Newer often means better for corporate bottom lines rather than users. That’s why the telemetry can’t be stopped for even a few hours.


Yup. Modern often means “we re-wrote it and got 90% of the functionality but totally missed all of the thousands of edge cases the previous team worked so hard to handle in their implementation”

What jumps to mind is macOS’s Disk Utilities app.


I've experienced this and arrived at the same solution as Linus' team recommends: unplug laptop, then close lid. This worked for Dell, HP, and Microsoft Surface branded laptops ever since S0 was introduced in Windows 8 or was it 8.1? Either way.

It's even sillier when using a dock with the lid closed: unplug, open lid until screen wakes, then close lid.

The real shame here is that the supply chain seems to be moving away from supporting S3, as the video notes, with hardware (CPU or motherboard) and firmware support disappearing in newer models.


I thought my new laptop was broken when I noticed this. Certainly this could not have been done intentional. I would close my laptop at night and come back the next morning to find out my battery was dead (and quite hot). Did some Googling and found out this is just how it works nowadays. I then changed my power settings to have my computer go into hibernation when I close the lid.

WTF Microsoft.


"This allows laptops to perform small house-keeping tasks while they're asleep"

- or to be remotely logged on to and operated, without your knowing.

A computer system that is on and connected the internet while you thought it was turned off, is IMO an attack vector.


Main takeaway here is: Unplug laptop from power before closing the lid. This (theoretically, per the video) will make the Windows sleep mode operate correctly without vampire drain from network usage.


I've got an old SSD with a dual Linux/Windows boot on an old laptop.

Being in Linux, issuing a reboot, picking Windows instead of Linux in GRUB and booting Windows takes less than 20 seconds.

The argument that people "suspend" or "hibernate" or "close the lid" or whatever because Windows takes "too long to boot" makes zero sense.

Just turn the fucking computer off. Windows boots in no time nowadays.

I hate Windows. I really do. It's a mediocre piece of turd. Every time I need to help a relative with their Windows issue I'm reminded how much of a turd it is.

But it's not slow to boot.


I don't think "time to desktop" is the reason people sleep their computers. When I close my laptop lid and then re-open it an indeterminate amount of time later, all my programs, browser tabs and what have you are where I left them. Just like how when I pull my phone out of my pocket, all my apps are where I left them.

Turning the machine off means I need to re-open all my shit again. That's annoying.


Hibernate also saves and restores your complete state, and doesn't require any power when off either.


This is personally frustrating me right now because I'm trying to help somebody select a new laptop, and I'm finding that I don't have the confidence to recommend _anything_ anymore. This is the situation:

- Switching away from an M1 MacBook because they can't stand macOS.

- Happy with Windows or Linux from past experience.

- Close lid, put in bag is an important workflow.

- Something reasonably modern and capable would be nice, but doesn't need to be a powerhouse (don't need current gen CPU necessarily, don't need discrete graphics).

Does anything on the market actually have reliable power management? I've been looking at the Dell XPS range, Lenovo Yoga, X1 Carbon, and Framework laptops today. But I can find power management horror stories for all of them, so I don't know what to think.


Decade of 24/7 jet engine fans on every laptop I've owned and "surprise furnace in laptop bag" is basically why I bought the M1 Mac, which is the first Apple device I've ever owned.

If I can't stand MacOS for whatever reason, I can wait for asahilinux to modernize. If I had bought another intel leafblower, it would have still been a jet engine under linux.

I can't go back to the craziness of chasing on horseback with a lasso the power user features and how/where windows moved/removed/unset them on every update.


I'm not sure on this, but something that runs coreboot would have a better chance at supporting the proper s3 sleep, wouldn't it?


This could fit your needs: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.


My old Lenovo X6 Carbon had support for S3 sleep. Maybe you could go to a store and check all the laptops until you find one that supports S3.


You could try a M1 macbook with linux on it?


I am genuinely curious how effective a "celebrity" [0] making a call to action is for behemoth mega-corporation. This and other deficiencies in common software (Teams, Spotify, Slack, Discord, etc) have been noted for years and yet big corporations continue to not seemingly prioritize basic usability problems that impact everyday users.

Just the other day Carmack was complaining about Google GPUs - will anything happen? At least there is a chance, unlike if thousands of other developers listed their grievances.

[0] No offense to Linus, but he is not Beyonce.


This should be the highest priority for Microsoft and Intel. It's a deal breaking problem for any non-Apple laptop. It doesn't matter if the laptop looks sleek and has windows hello and has gaming specs if the damn sleep function is broken. The frustrating thing is that I don't even want any of the features it provides. When I shut the lid, the machine should sleep, halt all processing, until I reopen it. It's not a hard-to-understand concept. I don't need updates in the background. I'll install them when I can. I don't need notifications; I'll use my phone for that.

Modern standby is absolutely useless in the best case. And devastating to usability in the worst. Just nuke it, go back to normal sleep. Or at least give an option to users!


I had a similar issue with my MacBook and the fix was even sillier. I plug my MacBook into a USB-C monitor, which also supplies power. Upgrading the monitor firmware fixed my MacBook sleep issues.


The way Apple typically writes its support for third party devices assumes strict adherence to the spec in question, with funny things happening when they don't. Totally different philosophy from MS where writing in hacks to accommodate badly behaving/out of spec peripherals is just another Tuesday.

With that in mind it's not too surprising that a display firmware update fixed your problem.


So few displays have field/user upgradeable firmware. Dell publishes info about the latest firmware on their website, but with no downloads. You contact them and say my monitor has spotty DPMS and I see I’m a couple of firmware versions behind, how do I update? They tell you it’s not possible.

Might as well call it a hardware revision instead of a firmware version.


That makes sense. I don't know exactly what went wrong but the MacBook was having trouble sleeping and waking due to something related to talking to the monitor over USB-C sometimes timing out.


oh, I'll have to try that, my intel mbp does the same thing.


Only decades ago, it seems the user of the device was the master. Now it seems the other way around. If the user does not explicitly request something, don't do it. If I turn my device off, I expect it to be doing absolutely nothing.

It's a little disconcerting, and I wonder what hope there is for user empowerment in the future? There's just so many layers in the stack, and users have high expectations about what capabilities they want from devices.

I often envision a low-tech alternative, where everything is as simple as required. Where devices are tools, and not distractions. And we can still do everything which is necessary with them.

The walled-garden effect makes it impractical to even design an alternative, because homebrew devices aren't supported by our institutions. The APIs aren't open.

The solution is increasingly to remove devices from life, and incrementally introduce only those that are necessary. But complex and user-hostile devices are becoming the standard for what is required to interact with banks, government, and other important institutions.

Does anyone see a possible out here?


> Only decades ago, it seems the user of the device was the master. Now it seems the other way around.

"There are only two possibilities. Either the user controls the computer or the computer controls the user" - Richard Stallman


I'll choose to control the computer.


Current work sent me a Dell Lattitide 7330 with Windows 10 Enterprise. It's not a bad little machine. Light, small, obviously designed to be portable.

One of the first things I noticed was after I closed the lid to suspend on a full battery, walked 20 minutes to the library intending to work there and opened it to find the battery down to 80% already!

Not a great start. As the lid settings are to sleep on closing the lid when on battery, I figured out the same idea as the article: Unplug power and external display first, wait a bit, then close the lid.

I thought that was working, but after enough tries doing that, only to find it stayijg hot for hours in my bag, I'm confident the unplug-then-sleep method is unreliable.

I've tried going to the Start menu's power icon and clicking 'sleep". That often doesn't work. It turns things off, eventually, but the fan keeps going and it stays hot about half the time. Sometimes it doesn't even bother pretending, and the power light stays on.

I've tried to change the lid settings to Hibernate. Not available: Lid settings are set by remote policy, not user configurable except by local admin access to override policy, which I don't have.

Under the Start menu's power icon there is no Hibernate option, of course.

Doing "powercfg /a" as in the video, I see S1, S2, S3 and Hybrid Sleep are all "does not support". I'm reluctant to change BIOS settings on a work laptop managed remotely with a strict security policy.

It seems I'm doomed to take the laptop out in the library and coffee shops and find it drained and very hot sometimes, even if I charged it before going out. But unpredictably.

So I haven't found a reliable way to make this Dell laptop sleep yet. Hibernate and S3 are unavailable. I suspect Shut Down might be the only option, but it's a bit drastic and I'm not confident even that will always work.


Yeah, I ran into a similar problem with a Lenovo and set the power button to be hibernate. Worked so far.


My (arm-based) Windows laptop has this problem, with the extreme case being that sometimes when I open the lid there's nothing opened because apparently Windows decided to reboot after an update...

M1 macs also do something when sleeping, whatever that is, although they don't lose enough power for it to be a problem. The only reason I notice is that for some reason it sometimes connects to my 2.4GHz Wifi, which I then notice because it interferes with my bluetooth trackpad on another computer... That being said, I've also noticed that M1 macs lose more battery while sleeping than intel macs did.


> M1 macs also do something when sleeping, whatever that is, although they don't lose enough power for it to be a problem.

That would be the 'Power Nap' setting that allows it to occasionally wake briefly for background service updates.


Windows modern (or connected) standby sucks donkey balls. When my laptop is in the sleep mode I don't need it to be connected, I don't need it to wake up to check for messages (or critical updates or whatever else). I need it to conserve as much battery as possible. It doesn't bother me that the wake up from the standby can be a couple of seconds slower. I don't care about a couple of seconds I care about waking up with as much battery charge as possible. With modern standby Microsoft misses the point entirely. Now I have to actually shut down the laptop before I put it in a backpack because I'm afraid that it's going to wake up from the modern standby and run down all of the battery while being in the backpack. I'd rather wait for the laptop to cold boot but have most of the battery charge left than my laptop waking up instantly without any battery charge.


As mostly a Mac user, I was amazed when I bought an Intel NUC to run some Windows applications natively at how bad the power management is. Part of it is Windows, but part of it was also the EFI firmware. You’d think Intel of all companies could produce a working computer, but no, the thing would literally just die when it was meant to go to sleep or hibernate, and wouldn’t wake up despite being in a semi-on state. You’d have to hold the button to kill it.

After more than a year of the machine being out they finally fixed that firmware bug, but it still doesn’t quite work as I expect (now I think I’m on to some of Window’s quirks). Just things like it still being on after a day of not being used when it should have gone to sleep and things like that. It just doesn’t work like I expect it should, whereas my Macs tend to just do what they’re meant to.


> You’d think Intel of all companies could produce a working computer

Yeah, you only think that until you have your first Intel motherboard/computer. They might not be the worst at it, but they're pretty bad. I'd probably rather have an ECS board than an Intel board.

> but no, the thing would literally just die when it was meant to go to sleep or hibernate, and wouldn’t wake up despite being in a semi-on state.

Sleep definitely requires a cooperative firmware, but hibernate should work regardless of firmware (although windows was doing hibernate + sleep for a while). If it can turn off, it should be able to hibernate.


I don't necessarily dislike the move towards managed devices, we need more explicit choices. 'self managed' , 'OEM managed', 'work managed', 'MSP managed', etc. The group policy technology already exists, we need these options to be surfaced a lot better.


Sleep, hibernate, etc. Who cares? I just want my laptop to act like it's shut off when the lid is closed. Just copy Apple. Exactly. Is that too much to ask?


My wife’s new last year laptop had this problem - and it was pretty embarassing since I’d convinced her that a) she needed a new laptop and b) extolled that with this one she doesn’t need to shut it down every time - just close the lid!

“fixed” it by making it hibernate instead which kinda sucks.


Here I am (probably along with millions other) poised to buy an Intel laptop after 20 year hiatus (due to crusty older laptops and recently MacBook Pros), this is not looking good for Intel/Microsoft.

Power conservation during non-use stage is paramount for us users who travel or have limited power available.

Looks like our next laptop is going to be an AMD or ARM laptop with BIOS having configurable S3 support.

And non-UEFI and non-ME (no management engine) too!


Used laptop is all I need…keep the hard drive; I’ll install my SSD… Fresh install of my favorite Linux flavor and windows can blow off.


I had this happen to my XPS 15 when I was a student, and within 2 years of purchase the battery had degraded by 80%. If I recall correctly it would last about 20 minutes before abruptly turning off, making it completely useless as a laptop.

Absolutely maddening to hear that not only is this not an isolated issue, but it's also still not fixed (and apparently getting worse?).


This was one of the things that made me return the last Windows laptop I had. I couldn’t trust that it wouldn’t be dead wherever I was going. I tended to just close the lid and slip it into my bag between classes as I had done with my Mac and would find that it often was very warm and had been running the entire time.


The title is somewhat clickbait in that the problem isn't only with MS/Windows but with the hardware vendors not supporting S3 along with S0 suspend states. The video itself says that some Framework and ASUS laptops did support S3 (presumably out of the box).


I wonder if this is in any way related to my laptop's tendency to go to sleep, get hot, and then never wake back up when the lid closed OR it put itself to sleep OR it turned the screen off... even when plugged in the entire time. These lock ups would occur every few days and always required me holding the power button to manually reboot.

Somehow, me manually putting it to sleep (through Start menu or with the sleep button) is safer (not 100% though), so my current solution is to set the Screen-off and Sleep timers to 166,000 hours (disabling or setting to zero didn't work) and also only close the lid when the laptop is (supposedly) fully off.

It's a used Asus that I bought off eBay, so I'm not too invested in figuring it out... but it is annoying.


Our knowledgebase at work has instructions on how to disable Modern Standby. Shout out to Lenovo and their shitty laptops - never waking up from standby may have been how they started, but I know they're all going to end with dead USB-C ports.


> they're all going to end with dead USB-C ports.

Curious as to what this means.


All the USB-C ports are slowly failing on all the Lenovo laptops we supplied to an important customer. Many have already required motherboard replacements to get the batteries to charge again, although whatever's been happening to the batteries as the USB-C ports fail has been killing them too.

We've also had Lenovo USB-C cables fail, and Lenovo docks fry themselves.


There's probably so many of us, who have just quietly moved to macs out of frustration. Two Windows laptops in a row over several years, I suffered with this sleep bullshit. Never again!


I bought a new Z13 which is a Ryzen, I still have this issue on Windows I called up support to complain that the machine is boiling hot every morning when I take it our of my brief case. They sent a tech to replace the motherboard. Still have the same issue, not sure if I should bother calling them back. Luckily I also purchased the battery warranty (expecting this issue as I had a HP and a Thinkpad which had the same issue and I suspected it was a Windows issue) as I am sure this is destroying its life.


Didn’t watch the video but powercfg -h off gets ran on all my laptops to prevent battery drainage when lid is closed. Does this somehow not work anymore?


I've had this exact issue with my Dell XPS13 and it pushed me to move to a MacBook.


dont get too confortable, apple is going the way of microsoft


Over the last 10 years of using MacBooks, the battery and power management has only kept getting better.


I want free watching the youtube


[flagged]


You seem to have very strong feelings about this topic. You could chose Linux, it’s not a binary choice.


Linux can't help if your computer doesn't support S3 sleep, and S0ix support in linux is even worse than in Windows.


2023 is the year...


This joke while funny, was old in 1999 and is certainly ridiculous now in 2022.

I honestly can't think of there be any reason why one wouldn't run Linux on the desktop , it's perfectly fine, I'd say excellent for 98% of the tasks I do.

Video editors, designers and photographers probably struggle a bit but I'd say nearly all of those people use a Mac anyway. I have both myself. Linux and an iPad Pro.


There is still the problem of gaming. With tools like CrossOver from CodeWeavers and shadow.tech things are getting better as well as some native support on Steam, but at this point I still need a dedicated Windows desktop specifically for gaming and nothing else (I use a MacBook Pro for personal projects, work, and Alpine for Docker to run production services at work).


I’m running games on a Linux machine just fine. It’s kinda remarkable. Steam lead the way and there especially since the steam deck runs Linux now . There is an app that will configure and launch your GOG and epic games too. (Ive tried it with a couple epic games to great effect)

If you are hard core and looking for top performance and need anti heat, maybe windows is still the way to go. I sometimes use my partners windows machine to game. It’s good but not that different from my machine. (We both have laptops with nvidia cards.


Besides anti-cheat gaming just mostly works these days on Linux. It's pretty nuts how much it's improved with things like Proton.


I'll have to look into it again. I am still scarred from the early days of trying to get a given Linux distro working painlessly on the laptop.


Linux gaming is pretty good on rolling releases, especially with AMD GPUs. I am no FOSS nut, nor a Linux guru. Not even a tinkerer.

These days all you have to do is install steam, right click a game, enable compatibility, hit play. It takes less effort than dealing with windows.


A year ago I might have been inclined to argue, but my wife's PC died horribly and I "loaned" her my Ubuntu desktop. A year later she's still using it and hos told me not to bother replacing it. Replaced her printer at one point and feared the worst, but I literally had to do nothing. It just worked. I think my support time has actually gone down!


I set my uncle (a smart but non-technical guy in his mid-60s) up with a Linux desktop running KDE Plasma several years ago, when I lived we were roommates. During the first few weeks, he would occasionally have a question about how to do something or what something was. It was a gift to replace a painfully slow old Windows computer he was using at the time.

In those 5 years, there has been no instability issues and no performance degradation. The content he likes to browse and stream all still works smoothly, and he seems comfortable and happy with the user interface. (He's actually told me that by now, it feels more intuitive to him than the Mac desktops they recently switched to at his workplace.)

Light power users are in sort of a valley along the Linux suitability vs. user technical expertise curve right now. But for non-technical users to their left and sysadmin/developer types to their right, the Linux desktop is a pretty good fit these days.


I installed Linux Mint on my elderly mother's laptop 8 years ago and never touched it again until it quit and she replaced it about a year ago. I should have checked on it, but "Windows was working just fine" for her, and on my side I forgot I had even done it since I had lived overseas for much of that time.


>This joke while funny, was old in 1999 and is certainly ridiculous now in 2022

The joke is that this wasn't a joke, it was constantly someone seriously saying that desktop Linux is momentarily about to kill Windows when $NEXT_YEAR rolls around and then getting a lot of traction and upvotes.


You're 30 years late as far as I'm concerned, SLS on tape followed by Slackware followed by RedHat followed by Debian in an unbroken line. OK, I was editor for a unix-related publication which gave me an extra incentive but on the desktop (and laptop, an anaemic Toshiba with a black and white sluggish LCD, 4 MB of RAM but quite a good keyboard, no mouse because that wasn't a thing yet) it did run ever since then.


heh, i followed the same trajectory, except starting with SLS on floppies and after debian i tried ubuntu and then worked with foresight before switching to fedora...


For what it's worth, this is the year I've stuck with a Linux desktop the longest. Thanks to the work from Valve, even modern game releases have been playing reliably for me. Linux still has plenty of issues, but it's been a very stable platform so far and that's even with me torturing myself by using NixOS.


People who go on this specific angry rant always seem to have Android devices instead, which are worse in every metric. More data collection, worse privacy, worse security, shorter longevity and hence more e-waste.

I once worked out that Apple's annual AirPod production would fill approximately a couple of shipping containers. Meanwhile if AirPods were made by an independent company, that company would be bigger than Twitter, Spotify and Square combined. Or about the same size as NetFlix.


  - Elwood: What kind of music do you usually have here?
  - Claire: Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.


both apple and microsoft are bad, and yet apple managed to make a better laptop, cherry on the top, with ARM!


Microsoft does not really pretend to be good



It is surprising how long some things can survive beyond their due date. As a parallel; everyone knew the Soviet system was rubbish, beyond fixing, but stuck with a shrugging, de-facto acceptance of something nobody believed in and couldn't change. It was the momentum of stubborn ideology and resignation that kept it going. To me, Microsoft represent a similar failure mode unique to capitalism, where pure momentum of accumulated capital can prop up a dead company. In their heyday Microsoft were so successful and made so much money that today a mixture of memories, brand nostalgia and bought influence can keep the show going despite an abysmal product.


In the consumer market that is probally true

Microsoft is still king of Enterprise because of vertical integration, centralized management / security tooling, and Microsoft Excel (which really has no competitor)

Linux and Apple both lack the centralized end point management / identity / and configuration that AD, Azure AD, Group Policy, ConfigMgr, etc offer for the windows platform


I think you're right, but that further confirms my understanding of Microsoft as king of the hill of centralised, moribund, managed mindset facing a diverse, dispersed, interoperable zero-trust future.


Zero Trust is all the rage in Silicon Valley, and Startups...

Zero Trust has almost zero traction outside of the tech sector from what I can see.

Microsoft has even dipped their toes into the market, and some pieces of their "zero trust" type of tooling as gain some adoption (like Autopilot), but for the I think we are atleast a 10 decade or more away from wide scale Zero Trust adoption is most organizations, and in some ways IPv6 has a greater chance because it likely will be forced on organizations in the next decade where zero trust will not be

Never underestimate the power of "we have always done it this way"


I was trained by MS that sleep mode functionally doesn't exist on Win PCs and that updates need to be installed eventually. So every day when I finish working I simply power off and optionally update laptop and PC and that plus morning boot wastes maybe a few minutes on a laptop, even less on faster PC. I honestly don't see why people are making such a big fuss about this, as to warrant wasting thousands of dollars and a lot of hours of time to switch operating systems. And MacOS by reviews is not without its quirks and issues, they are just different.


> So every day when I finish working I simply power off...

This. At least I'm not alone. It's not rocket science.


Not everyone wants to spend dozens of minutes trying to get everything they were working on opened again to where they were after turning the machine back on. The same reason forced reboots are an absolute disaster for productivity.


In case you haven't explored the thread, the function you're looking for is hibernate, which saves RAM to disk, shuts down, then on reboot restores your session.


The function is called s3 sleep which has worked fine since the nineties.


S3 must be advertised by BIOS to enable suspend to idle.


*must not


Citation needed.


Updates, sadly, wreck all of that.


Sleep exists because people want it, it's convenient -- they just expect it to work correctly.


English word suspend is available on menu.

The functionality is there. If resume from suspend breaks 3 times in a row, disable, enable hibernate.

If working, after 30 mins suspend, awake, do hibernate.

If fails 3 times, always use hybrid suspend.

If this functionality does not exist is because resources are being misallocated.

If they don't want to support suspend: REMOVE the option.




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