I normally don’t gripe about Apple stuff in public, after all look at the alternative! But once in a while I indulge my desire to gripe about even the best things in life.

You see, I had been having this annoyance with my MacBook Pro… but let me back up.

I purchased my first Apple computer, a shiny new 1.33 GHz Powerbook G4 in the later half of 2004. Came with Panther (10.3.x… .5 or .6 I believe). Now, you must understand that I bought this my first Mac somewhat grudgingly. I had held that Apple Computer products were akin to evil Martians, here to invade, and completely stupid. And ya know, they were incompatible, no software, couldn’t do anything, only appealed to a specialty group… etc. etc.

Well, I quickly fell in love with my Powerbook! I learned that there is an abundance of good software, that it made even the smallest of everyday computing tasks so much easier and friendlier. But the time came recently when my beloved Powerbook just wasn’t cutting it anymore. It was a good solid computer, but really showing it’s age after these few years. It really wasn’t a viable main computer anymore as far as the power I needed, editing, graphics, etc.

So, after a few sobs, I parted with my Powerbook (which is still in good use by a good friend of mine), and bought my current computer, a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo MacBook Pro. And I really do love this computer, it’s FAST!!! But there was one thing in particular that was bothering me about this computer. That was it’s little problem with waking up from sleep (you PC folks call it System Standby… but whatever). For that matter, I hated how long it took it to even actually go to sleep. When I close my computer, I want it to go to sleep right away so I can put it in my backpack and haul it off RIGHT AWAY! I don’t want to wait for it for 60 to 90 seconds then take it away. I want it to be ready now. My Powerbook had always gone to sleep and woken up instantly, why was this new computer being such a pain.

Well technically, I knew “why” it was being such a pain… it’s because all Apple portables since about sometime in 2006 do something called safe sleep. Safe Sleep is a combination of something you PC people call Hibernation, and regular good old fashion Sleep (system standby). When you put one of these safe sleepin’ Apple portables to sleep, they first write the entire contents of the RAM to hard drive, like a PC does when it Hibernates (only it does seem at least a little faster than a windoze PC), but then it doesn’t hardware suspend as does a hibernating PC, noooooo, it then goes to sleep just like the old models used to, only now with more hassle and time involved. The idea is that, in the VERY UNLIKELY event that your battery goes complete dead, or falls out, or whatever, that your computer will still come back to life in the same state you put it to sleep in (only it would just take a little longer to write the contents of RAM back to the RAM from the hard drive). Of course this is just stupid because even if the battery died or whatever, your computer is going to be just fine… you just have to boot it back up. And if you had unsaved documents before you put your computer to sleep, well frankly, your just STOOPID anyway!

So that explained why the stupid computer took so long to get to sleep. But there was this other problem, waking up from sleep. It seemed that, the first time you put the computer to sleep after a cold boot, it would wake up normally. And the second time was usually alright too. But after that, it’s pretty much a crap-shoot as to whether the computer would wake up at all, or if it did, the whole system might be unstable, requiring a re-boot which of course, as you might guess, completely defeats the purpose of putting the thing to sleep as opposed to just shutting it down in the first place. In fact, I started shutting the thing down completely almost anytime I needed to pack the thing somewhere. I mean, it took the same amount of time to go to sleep as it did to shut down. And a cold boot insured that the system wasn’t somehow destabilized by whatever sleep bug was plaguing it.

But on a hunch, I figured that, OS X being OS X, this whole safe sleep thing had to just be a preference in a .plist preference file somewhere. So I did some googling and found a preference pane plug-in that will allow you to turn off safe sleep completely (called Smart Sleep, available here). So I downloaded it, turned off Safe Sleep, and would you know that not only did it fix this problem of taking 300 years to actually get to sleep, but it COMPLETELY cured the “stability on wake” issue. So obviously SOMEONE (I’m looking at you Apple) let this whole safe sleep business slip out of Cupertino with some stability issues!

But who in the world needs safe sleep anyway. I hated hibernation because it literally takes the same amount of time, if not more, to shut down and boot a PC anyway. So why would we introduce this as a “feature” on OS X? And then not even really allow us to USE the feature, but tie it to sleeping.

So that’s my gripe. It’s actually two gripes about the same thing. 1). Why do we even have this bother in the first place, and 2). why was it allowed to get out of the gates with such a huge stability issue? This is very unlike the Apple I used to know and love…

But again, as a whole, I still think Apple is years beyond anyone else in the computer world so… Like I said, look at the garbage you would have to put up with from the alternative.