MacBook – Why is the MacBook Pro’s screen going black for a second

A new conjecture is that this is due to a non-compliant mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable that is causing the problem.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3533

In certain circumstances you may notice a black screen after waking your computer from sleep. The computer may also appear to be unresponsive when the black screen appears.

Certain cables advertised as being VESA 1.1a compliant may contain a construction issue that may result in the DisplayPort power pins at either end of the cable shorting together. VESA 1.1a compliant cables must isolate the DisplayPort power pins at either end of the cable.

Supposedly, this only affects resolutions above 1920x1200, e.g. of the popular resolutions, only 2560x1440 and above are affected.

The StarTech mDP to DP cables are not VESA compliant, and very few mDP to DP cables are actually compliant.

There's a web-site with a list of compliant cables:

http://www.displayport.org/products-database/?products_category[]=cables-connectors&products_manufacturer=

So here's what happened:

I took the computer to the AppleStore, seeing it was only about three weeks old, and got them to take a look at it. Since it's a company computer I had some company benefits granting me a temporary replacement while they were fixing mine. I took my TimeMachine copy and restored it on to the borrowed Mac. I was surprised to find that the issue still appeared, which was quite annoying. So I restored the Mac again, messed around with the pmsetsettings and tried to reproduce the issue but it was impossible.

I then remembered that the issue started appearing a few days ago when I did a battery calibration (Drained the Mac completely) so I restored to a TimeMachine backup from before that and Boom, the issue was gone. At about the same time they called from the store and said that they couldn't reproduce the issue, so I told them what I had found, came in and got my computer back.

All in all, a really weird story but apparently something related to draining the battery while the computer was still on got corrupted and was then included in the TimeMachine backup.