All I know is that sleep eventually fails to work on every Wintel laptop I've ever touched, from the mid-1990s until today. Dell, IBM, Lenovo, HP, you name it.
I think it goes back to the unity of control Apple enjoys. Doesn't mean it CAN'T work for Windows, but the vendors would have to work harder to cooperate, and they clearly can't be arsed to do so.
I find it amusing that instead of addressing the problem and agreeing that OSX has a small usability wart you blame the user for using a feature built into the product, and instead suggest they do something quite different, which may or may not be appropriate for their situation.
I have multiple old laptops that can sleep just fine, none of them Apple. This sleep issue is a recent regression and Apple laptops are just as affected.
With proper sleep/hibernate, the power useage issue would be (mostly) moot. However, just when I get my sleep/hybrid sleep/hibernate working correctly, MSFT patches Windows and I'm suddenly back to square one.
I'd love to see a version of Windows where sleep "just works". From my research though, this appears to be as much a hardware + driver issue as an OS issue. Apparently that's why Mac's sleep so well. Hardware/OS all under one company's control.
My M2 Macbook Air has been flawless about sleep, but I set "Wake for network access" to "Never" so maybe I'm just avoiding Apple's issues there. At least it can be disabled; with Windows Modern Standby it was impossible to completely prevent wakeup last I checked. And new laptops are dropping support for S3 sleep.
As for the HiDPI stuff, it's one example among many of Apple making sure basic functions work without friction. I don't even know what I traded off for that - my Macbook works with normal PPI screens just fine - but it was worth it. For another example, I recently had trouble pairing a bluetooth keyboard on Windows 11 because their new settings panel is missing functionality. In 2023, that is an absolutely wild issue to have.
As a counter point, I've had repeated issues with my several different laptops in the last few years with them not going to sleep (2015~2018?). I have a new laptop now that I primarily run windows on now...
Saying Windows has had it since Windows 98 and then, acknowledging that the issue is wake-on-demand is a bit confusing to say the least. Obviously Linux can sleep easily since decades ago. The issue is wake on demand (and I don't know if Windows has that even)
Edit: I don't why everyone's having issues. I run Fedora on a cheap Gigabyte G5KD and never had any problems. Never did with either of my thinkpads or my Xiaomi Mi Notebook...
I have a gaming PC with Windows and Linux. "Sleep" on Windows fails every second time for me (the screen is off but the machine continues to run), whereas on Linux it fails every ~10th time. No idea what the issue is but I have fairly standard hardware.
On the other hand, I can't remember the last time sleep didn't work on any of my Macs.
Yeah, I was astounded when I recently found out about the "modern standby" idiocy. I've almost always used Mac laptops, but I just assumed that at some point in the last 20 years the PC world would figure out reliable sleep. And it seems like they mostly did, and then Microsoft broke it for no good reason?
If the OP does some internet research into this topic they will find articles detailing how almost all [1] non-apple laptop makers build to a single target: ms-windows. They also test against a single target: ms-windows. If it works there, they are done. Linux compatibility is not even an afterthought.
And as each makers various models all seem to also have slightly different ways to perform sleep/hibernate and subsequent wakeup, the result is that Linux kernel dev's are playing a continuous game of catch-up. One thing I've found is that upgrading the kernel to a later release sometimes fixes the issues (assuming patches were supplied by someone in the interim to fix them).
[1] Very few makers have any laptops that ship, from the maker, with Linux preinstalled, the few that do (one or two Dell models, the aftermarket "Linux Laptop" vendors, maybe a sliver of others) will more than likely work properly for sleep/wake. The reason why these work better is because the maker should, in theory, test for Linux compatibility and help fix any bugs (or simply build with compatible chipsets from the outset) since they are selling these with "Linux pre-loaded".
Sleep / wake in this kind of setup has always been an issue with my 2013 rmbp. I'm not even on high Sierra. USB stuff doesn't wake up the computer. Opening the lid doesn't wake it up. Sometimes typing on the laptop itself doesn't work and it requires a hard reboot. It's been four years now and I've given up hope that Apple will ever get sleep / wake right.
The reality is that Apple's software is absolute shit. OS X was the only software that wasn't shit. I can't think of a single counterexample otherwise. They take great software (like logic audio) and turn it to shit. It's incredible. Clearly macos follows in the shit tradition of iTunes, the legendary mother of Apple's shit software.
I don't think I've encountered a single smartphone by a reputable vendor that has had significant issues sleeping, no matter the chip vendor or OS.
Meanwhile people do have serious issues with sleep even on Intel Macs running MacOS and Thinkpads running Windows. For whatever reason PC chip / hardware vendors just cannot get sleep to work properly. Apparently the problem is so low-level that even a company like Apple cannot paper over the problems without throwing out Intel entirely and using their own SoC in the new Macbooks.
I get the impression that sleep doesn’t work properly on any current Intel laptop, regardless of OS.
I’d love to hear of a counter example. Use case is close it and stick it in my bag most nights, leave it plugged in and suspended others.
Acceptance criteria: < 5% battery drain per day suspended. Zero wakeups in bag, less than one failed resume from suspend per year (> 99.9% resume reliability). After resume, network / vpn reconnects without intervention in under 10 seconds, and no apps are janky.
Bonus: pressing the power button once when it is off must cause an led or screen to turn on within 1 second every single time.
Suspend/sleep mode on (recent) Windows laptops seems very hit-or-miss, since everyone started to move away from "proper" S3 sleep, and towards what Linux calls "s2idle" (modern/connected standby on Windows?)
It seems to be a fairly significant regression in terms of functionality, which nobody really asked for, but which results in significant idle drain, coupled with the risk of a laptop deciding to resume and heat up in a bag, etc.
Apple seems to have a (long standing) positive argument here - to point at how when you put a Mac to sleep, you can resume it days later with negligible battery drain. Windows seems to have lost this in the post-S3 sleep era.
Let's put it this way: We had someone in to demo a piece of software (webapp) this week which we were considering licensing, they had a Linux laptop (Ubuntu). They weren't able to connect to our corporate wireless and the meeting was delayed almost 40 minutes (ultimately we loaned them an in-house Windows ultrabook to do the demo). I felt embarrassed for them.
I've not seen sleep issues on MacOS or Windows for over ten years. You close the lid it sleeps, you open the lid it wakes. Seems reliable.
I think it goes back to the unity of control Apple enjoys. Doesn't mean it CAN'T work for Windows, but the vendors would have to work harder to cooperate, and they clearly can't be arsed to do so.
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