MacOS – Why does the computer hibernate when it sleeps

bugmacbook promacossleep-wake

I am MacBook Pro w/ Retina, Mid-2014, running macOS Sierra 10.12.1.

About 2/3 of the time my computer times out and goes to sleep, the screen goes blank as normal, but tries to wake it don't work. Can move mouse, but screen is black, can't click, can't press a key, etc. The only way to tempfix that I know is closing and reopening the screen. Then, everything returns to normal.

I noticed other topics similar to this, but I do not believe it works eventually as other topics say. Might be wrong though.

Best Answer

Have you tried resetting the SMC?

Here’s what you do for your particular model of MacBook Pro:

Shut down your computer
Keep the power cable plugged in.
Press at the same time shiftoptioncontrol (on the left side of the keyboard) and the power button
Let go
Turn your computer back on with the power button.

You can read more info about this on Apple's article about when you might want to try an SMC reset:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295

Related Solutions

How to find out what application is trying to wake the MBP

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.

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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.

MacOS – Mavericks sleep/hibernate causes high fan activity

For whatever reason the kernel is encrypting the hibernation file and it's safe to assume that the encryption, as a CPU-intensive process, is causing the heating up. The Hibernation File, sometimes referred to as the 'sleepimage'-file, is usually the same size as your RAM and can sometimes get corrupted.

I would recommend checking your Powermanagement-Settings within the Terminal by using the folowing command:

pmset -g

You should get a list of the urrent settings which you can interpret by typing 'man pmset' or by looking at the Docs provided by Apple here. Please check it the Setting for 'hibernatemode' is anything other than 3 (for Mac portables). Perhaps you can post the complete Settings.

I would suggest you try to delete the sleepimage in case it is corrupted (even though i don't see any errors). You can do it within the Terminal with this command:

sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage

It will be recreated the next time your Mac goes into sleep-mode. Does the encryption still occur with the new sleepimage?

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to find out what application is trying to wake the MBP

MacOS – Mavericks sleep/hibernate causes high fan activity

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