Having owned countless Mac notebooks over the last 30 years — starting from the PowerBook 140 up through the M1 MacBook Pro — I can tell you with confidence that Apple has made the same sleep change shenanigans mentioned in OP’s article.
It used to be that you could count on a sleeping Mac to stay asleep until you explicitly woke it up by opening the lid, pressing a key on the keyboard, or pressing the trackpad (or separate trackpad buttons — yes, those used to exist). Perhaps more importantly, you could count on the sleep function to have barely any effect on the Mac battery.
I don’t recall when, but at some point over the aforementioned three decades, Apple started changing the terms of this sleep contract.
It seems Apple decided that some functions should still be available when the Mac is “sleeping”, with no way to restore the previous behavior. As a result, random wake-ups are the new normal, replete with unexpected battery drainage.
I have seen modern MacBooks go to “sleep” with an 80% charge at night, only to be rendered dead with a 0% battery level by morning. Does something this extreme happen often? No. But it never happened before. And moderate battery loss while sleeping? That happens very often on today’s MacBooks.
Your mileage may very. And Apple probably continues to implement better computer sleep behavior than competing vendors. But I would argue that people who think MacBook sleep behavior is excellent… have never experienced how it behaved in the past. That behavior was superb.
But sadly, I imagine most people have never experienced that excellence.
It used to be that you could count on a sleeping Mac to stay asleep until you explicitly woke it up by opening the lid, pressing a key on the keyboard, or pressing the trackpad (or separate trackpad buttons — yes, those used to exist). Perhaps more importantly, you could count on the sleep function to have barely any effect on the Mac battery.
I don’t recall when, but at some point over the aforementioned three decades, Apple started changing the terms of this sleep contract.
It seems Apple decided that some functions should still be available when the Mac is “sleeping”, with no way to restore the previous behavior. As a result, random wake-ups are the new normal, replete with unexpected battery drainage.
I have seen modern MacBooks go to “sleep” with an 80% charge at night, only to be rendered dead with a 0% battery level by morning. Does something this extreme happen often? No. But it never happened before. And moderate battery loss while sleeping? That happens very often on today’s MacBooks.
Your mileage may very. And Apple probably continues to implement better computer sleep behavior than competing vendors. But I would argue that people who think MacBook sleep behavior is excellent… have never experienced how it behaved in the past. That behavior was superb.
But sadly, I imagine most people have never experienced that excellence.