So, you close the lid on your Mac, and you watch carefully as the sleep light glows, and wait until you see the light pulse on and off, like it’s breathing, just so you know it’s asleep. Until you see this, the CPU, and GPU are still on, and stuffing it in your bag will make it go nuclear.

So, what do you do? You vaguely recall some old G3 Macs from middle school. After shuddering at the memory of not being taught you could control click if you couldn’t ninja the two button mouse. Or that you could add a pic from a website to your powerpoint by literally dragging it in, instead of holding the mouse for 5 seconds and saving it to the server….(Gary, really you suck at the Apple evangelism thing)

BUT! You do recall those machines could go to the light pulsing thing instantly. All Mac desktops do.

The laptops do it differently. See, they not only suspend to RAM, they also suspend to the hard disk, in case they lose power. This lets you swap batteries without shutting down and rebooting, as well as avoiding a dirty shutdown when the battery dies. Apple calls this “safe sleep”

But if you’re like me and you only use about 40% of your battery a day, and only have one battery…wouldn’t it be nice to get your Mac to fall asleep like a desktop Mac? Just BOOM! Close the lid, and lights out. Well, System Preferences won’t let you, it sucks. But your Mac has another utility for this, a command line program named “pmset”. I won’t get into details about what this command does, you can type in “man pmset” if you’re interested. Just open Terminal (use Spotlight to find it), and type in the following EXACTLY:

sudo pmset hibernatemode 0

and hit enter. You will be prompted for a password (your admin password, not the root password), and you’ll see a warning if you have never used sudo before. Oh, and you won’t see any asterisks or anything else for your password, just type it in, it will take it. Hit enter again, and it’s done. You won’t see any confirmation, just another prompt. That’s normal, UNIX programs don’t ouput any text of anything unless you asked for something. But it’s done. To undo it, use this:

sudo pmset hibernatemode 3