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Comment by shirro | Hacker News Reader

I don't remember having "range anxiety" under S3 suspend on my old intel laptops. It just worked and they woke up reasonably reliably and quickly under linux if you had a regular thin and light with integrated graphics. I had an Apple intel laptop that might have been marginally faster returning to life but it basically just worked on either.

The move to modern standby has been a mess. It seems to have improved a lot but my kid always shuts down his windows laptop before putting it in a bag because it seems to have become urban folklore that laptops turn on in bags, overheat and get damaged. That is new. I carried laptops in bags suspended for years and nobody thought that. It just worked.

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As someone whose job was to improve Windows fundamentals this makes me really sad. I worked on making Windows respect modern standby better, and there just wasn't a whole lot of interest in making it work. The whole OS needs a lot of considered improvement, and it's not getting it.

Thanks for your effort. I still have one of those early ARM based Windows machines: HP Envy X2.

While I rarely use it, when I do the instant-on still works pretty flawlessly. That is after running a few hours of Windows updates!

I'm in the same boat as the article. I actually use a Macbook Air these days for coding instead of the usual MBP and the battery life still surprises me.

I think it is more lived experience than urban folklore - it definitely happens.

can confirm, my MS Surface did it all the time, something about shutting the lid before removing the power supply. I can't recall now, but it was the thing that make me switch back to apple.

> it seems to have become urban folklore that laptops turn on in bags, overheat and get damaged

My previous laptop cooked its screen like that. Some of the layers warped into a wavy pattern visible through the backlight.

My Windows work laptop has a low-power CPU, so the danger is minimal, but still it consistently goes full throttle when asleep.

I've had it happened, sure it was with Linux but it was scary taking out a fire brick from my bag and praying it was still working. I had been using Linux for 10+ years until the M1 came out, and for as much as I love Linux unfortunately I haven't looked back, the hardware is just that good.

When it's time to replace my M1 air, if the laptop is still working (I tend to replace when they break), I'll try to install Asahi Linux to see how it is. It feels a bit too experimental/me being too inexperienced with OS to risk it on my main computer.

My M1 is suffering from a bug where there is runaway SSD writes and I have to restart it every few days. I've learned so many coping techniques. I'd never call this the best hardware I've ever owned, that was a 2011 MBA.

Yikes that sounds terrifying! What program is doing the writes? Apple or third party? Some demon going crazy with logging?

I've had my M1 Air since they launched, five years, and it doesn't show any sign of getting retired soon (except for the slight bend in my case where my lid jumped on it when it was open on the couch... but that mostly bent back.)

I had a 2011 MBA but vastly prefer everything about this one.

That's normally a sign of a dying ssd controller more than anything

I think I had that happen with a Windows laptop once like 6 years ago, I have used a couple MSI and Lenovo laptops and haven't had any issue. Windows has a much more wild driver ecosystem, and I'm sure there are bad drivers/motherboards/GPUs. (I do have some issues with my MSIs around USB-C docks causing bluescreens and refusing to resume from "screen shut off to save power" but as far as the laptop stuff it's been flawless.)

I’d noticed recently that my Macbook was consistently being warm even when I hadn’t used it in hours and it was closed and unplugged. I wound up doing a clean up of a bunch of processes that might be running in the backend, and it was resolved. I believe in the end it was some daemon for a built-in app, the contacts app maybe.

I’ve certainly had that particularly with older Dell XPS computers. So has Linus at LTT, which I suppose how it entered folklore.

I say this as my lab mate had his laptop do exactly that just last week, with up to date windows and a newer XPS laptop. It simply has never happened to my Macs

Modern standby is a disaster.

Only mildly relevant, but I dualboot windows and arch on my xps and decided to disable the grub boot screen timer... Accidentally left my laptop in grub mode for a few hours and it was toasty

I have never observably damaged a laptop in a bag, but I absolutely have had them burning-hot-to-the-touch after they decided not to sleep properly.

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