MacBook doesn't sleep when closing lid with external monitor attached with Lion

petersuser wrote:

Agreed, this is unintuative and even damaging to the hardware – shutting the lid blocks the airflow. I just came back from work to find my macbook had been on the whole day. Unhappy.

Just to clarify, it is not damaging to the hardware. MacBooks and MacBook Pros are designed to work and cool properly with the lid closed.

I understand why they did this, but it's really annoying not to have a choice. There should be an easy way to put a computer to sleep when you close it. At home, I have an external monitor that I keep my MacBook Pro constantly plugged into. It used to be that when I walked away or went to sleep, I could just close the computer and it would sleep. Now, I actually have to manually put it to sleep.

Lion's changed behavior for "sleep on lid close with an external monitor attached" has been really frustrating. I can confirm that your fix successfully put it back the way it worked under SN, and the way that makes the most natural sense for how I use my MBP.

Thanks!

HEY APARTMENT<

I tried your method and check out TERMINAL.

THis is what i saw. Can you further advice me?

Assertion status system-wide:

ChargeInhibit 0

PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep 0

PreventUserIdleSystemSleep 0

NoRealPowerSources_debug 0

CPUBoundAssertion 0

EnableIdleSleep 1

PreventSystemSleep 1

DisableInflow 0

DisableLowPowerBatteryWarnings 0

ExternalMedia 0

I dunno what to do after i see this.

This is with regards to my MBP 13 inch not abling to sleep. I'm using OSX Lion too.

Yong Xian

Mise well throw in my two bits, in hopes that Apple will eventually see enough posts here to fix the issue.

With External Monitor plugged in:

Close the lid in Snow Leopard = Sleep Mode.

Close the lid in Lion = No Sleep

Apple, please give us the ability to select which option we prefer - sleep or no sleep when the lid is closed.

I love Apple products, but every once in a while they do something a little awry. A couple of years back, I was blown away that the iPhones didn't have the ability to change the font size. Millions of customers who have poor eyesight couldn't see the phone without glasses or contacts. Imagine getting a text or call in the middle of the night, and you don't have your contacts in, or your glasses near by.

As good as Apple is at designing great products, they missed this most important obvious issue.

After submitting thorough feedback to Apple, providing statistical evidence proving they were losing millions of customers who wished to own iPhones, but couldn't because the font size was too small, they finally corrected the issue. I'd like to think my feedback opened their eyes!

You guys do realize that it's your option to choose if your Mac goes to sleep when it's closed or not...

If you go into system prefrences and choose "energy saver", you can choose if your Mac goes to sleep plugged in or on batter, etc.

Hope this helps.

CCEDDYY, you can't actually. I think you misunderstand what's going on -- but I appreciate you trying to help. The preferences in Energy Saver let you decide how long until your computer goes to sleep after leaving it idle. It doesn't let you choose what happens when you close the lid.

After reading this thread I found: macosx-nosleep-extension.

NoSleep makes closing of your MacBook lid possible without going to a sleep mode. Now you shouldn't have to plug your mouse and monitor to stay computer awake - just activate it by clicking a menu bar icon or check a tick in the System Preferences and continue downloading huge files and watching favorite movies over the network with lid closed.

Worked well for me.

It sounds like Apple considers this "intended behavior", so I doubt there's anything to "solve." We can see if anything changes in 10.8, but I doubt it.

I've just gotten used to using CMD+OPT+EJECT to put it to sleep, instead of closing the lid

well, maybe it's a "one line code change" thing, but I would be careful when assuming how easy any change to a critical funtion (sleeping/waking) of a huge operating system would be.

We really have no way of knowing if the change in Lion was a business decision, or a technical one. It could have been a business decision, where, for example one of the OS X managers likes to use his macbook with the lid shut, and got tired of waking it back up after shutting it and told an engineer to "flip a switch" to make it happen. Or maybe some of the new graphics subsystems or libraries in Lion require the video card to remain active for some reason (i'm just making stuff up here) and implementing the old Snow Leopard behavior would have required a lot more work and they decided to drop it. Who knows....

Well my mac book pro doesn't go to sleep when I close it and neither when I press "sleep". But everytime I close it without turn in it off starts to get hot and the light doesn't flash as is supposed to. I just wanna know if it's a problem with the battery or what? 😟

jk10003 wrote:

...

sudo nvram boot-args="iog=0x0"

...

One snag was that I had to run it with the external monitor disabled, but it worked great!

Yeepee, it finally worked. My MPB (late 2008) with OSX 10.7.4 is sleeping again, when closing the lid, even so the external monitor (and power) is connected.

The trick came from jk10003 above AND the comment of having the external monitor "disabled" when doing so AND doing a reboot. Only after typing the command in terminal again (confirming this with my password), while having my external monitor DISCONNECTED, and rebooting again, I have the "normal" behaviour again. :-) 🙂

There are several reason why your laptop may be staying on, when I shut my lip the laptop would continue to run but if you disconcerted the power cable it would then go to sleep. If you enter "System Preferences" this click on the "Sharing" button you will see all types of sharing options. If you have any of the "Sharing" options ticked (The ones with sharing at then end of the word) you will find that your computer does not sleep, untick these and your computer when you close the lip should sleep 🙂

I have been suffering with this for ages and not wanting to "insert code" or "turn off sharing" as others have suggested i hadnt found a solution until tonight.

I just happened to shut the lid with no power cable connected.

Both my MBP and my external monitor went to sleep.

so i tried again with the power in and this time my External monitor stayed on and the desktop transferred to there.

I cannot recall if this was the case before Mountain Lion but i find it really easy to just pull out the power cable before shutting the lid, certainly much easier than disconnecting the external monitor.

Hope this helps. (sorry if this has already been suggested)

This is really confusing.

As a first-time Mac user (Macbook Pro 2012), I found that no matter what I did, I couldn't get the laptop to stay awake when the lid was closed. No preference for it - that confused the **** outta me! - and nothing I could see or find in the online documentation regarding sleeping.

The responses to that enquiry led me to believe that everyone's Macbook automatically went into sleep mode when the lid was closed. In fact, there are third-party apps that specifically disable this functionality (unfortunately they break each time a new OS update is released, but still...).

So finding this thread, where everyone posting seems to assume that it's normal for the exact opposite thing to happen, is really making me scratch my head!

Could someone clarify this for me please? Is the Macbook Pro supposed to always sleep when the lid is closed (which is what mine does, as well as around a dozen other Apple expert users), or is it supposed to stay awake, and you have to do something to make it sleep when the lid is closed (which is what this thread's users seem to find)?

Thanks for any clarification!

-Pete

N.B. Really? The word h.e.l.l. is censored? My apologies. I wasn't aware this was a fundamentalist religious site.