macbook promacossleep-wake
Whenever I put my MacBook to sleep and then let it run out of battery, it takes a very long time (5-10 minutes) to wake up and let me log in, and then it runs slowly for 15-30 minutes after that. This is slow enough that in many cases, I would rather just restart my computer and pull up the work I was doing beforehand by myself.
When I open my laptop's lid to wake it up from sleep, is there anything I can do to interrupt the wakeup process and immediately have my computer restart instead?
Macs will wake up in response to many hardware events. Changing a USB/Firewire/Thunderbolt cable or even plugging in / powering on a connected device will wake Macs that are sleeping. Keyboard presses, clamshell sensor detecting an open of the display lid will also wake up a sleeping Mac. These are pretty well known and obvious, even if you don't realize a pet or power fluctuation can cause a wake event.
Two software items will also wake a sleeping mac and both rely on the power management / system management controller. Both are seen in the Energy Saver preference pane. This is how applications can do the same thing as hardware and wake your mac.
For macs with a battery - the power adapter needs to be connected and powered for much of this to work. The Wake for network access is both the standard WakeOnLan (WOL) as well as Apple's Bonjour Sleep Proxy. I like the article About Wake on Demand that explains how Apple has extended the concept of WOL and made a service.
If you disable these two items - software can no longer wake your sleeping mac and you can know if it's a hardware event or a software event. The other answers go into how to look at the logs to know which event has made a specific wake up request. Hopefully this helps frame the bigger picture of how your mac can take a cat nap with one eye open.
Possibilities include (listed from the best case to worst case):
There are other possibilities but let's try these first. Feedback if these doesn't work for you.
Best Answer
You can hold down the power button for 10 seconds, wait a couple seconds, then press the power button again and it should boot. However, if the computer battery is still dead, it may take a few minutes before the battery will charge up enough before the computer will boot.
So, once the battery has had enough time to charge up from dead (~5-10%) it should allow you to restart it.