Hacker News Reader

Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

I have always been curious why I have been seeing people with MacBooks close their lids and walk away at a moment’s notice for nearly 20 years, but I still do not expect to be able to do that from any non Macbook.

Such a killer feature that one would think Microsoft would prioritize.

View on HN

Microsoft has traditionally believed in abstractions (i.e. interfaces) while Apple believe in concrete implementations. Abstractions are flexible but always leak and therein lies the problems.

I think the interface approach made sense I earlier days of computing. These days it is better to make a zillion, exactly the same computer like Apple does.

So it is technically impossible with Microsoft’s software?

Surely Microsoft has the resources to coordinate hardware and software with Dell/HP/Lenovo on making at least 1 reliable line of laptops where you can close the lid and reliably expect it to instantly sleep and not randomly wake up.

I bet Microsoft would like that - they tried and then after it didn't work out for 2 decades of laptops they started making their own hardware. The 3rd party vendors don't care too much to change the ways they work - they juggle the hardware they put into the laptops all the time, one model-year can have over 100 variants (some Lenovo models go into thousands). Apple has few standard components shared across all products and that's it.

It used to work, S3 suspend is a problem-free experience on both Linux and Windows . But some genius thought that laptop hardware needed power management more like a phone without all the software being built for it, with no fallback.

In my Windows experience since 2000, closing the lid to sleep did not work on Toshiba Satellite, HP NW8000 series business machines, HP Elitebook, Dell Precision, and still does not work on Dell Latitudes. And I believe those were all business grade laptops, except the Toshiba Satellite.

At least on Linux, machines that have proper suspend states integrated into their CPU should get picked up by the kernel and managed properly. My T460s with an i7 6600u sleeps and hibernates just fine, but my 12700k desktop still doesn't know what to do in suspend/hibernation states. Hopefully AMD is doing better with this these days(?)

You don't get instant on with most hardware (some laptops have achieved it through CoreBoot, System76 sells some like that), but with anything that supports S3 and NVMe you can definitely get a reliable system where your laptop can sleep for weeks at a time. Just set up suspend-then-hibernate in systemd on a laptop with a fast SSD.

it seems like more often than not my macbook completely drains its battery or comes out of my backpack hot when I just close the lid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com