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

I have the same issue, adding to the chorus.

Apple please fix this! Options! There not always bad!

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 would like to offer this solution. I have a MacBook Pro with an external monitor, and, for a year and a half both displays slept when I closed the MBPS. This behavior stopped when I installed Lion. They would sleep when I removed the power cord, but what a pain that would be. The command "pmset -g assertions" gave no indication of which process ought be preventing sleep.

I contacted Apple support, and after some searching, the guy working with me found this thread, which was flagged as an Apple-approved solution:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3190417?start=165&tstart=0

This is the important part:

Correct AnswerRe: How do I tell Lion to disable the LCD screen even when the lid is open?

Aug 31, 2011 9:56 AM (in response to Bob_viking)

Here's the command to make your laptop behave like it did Pre-Lion (courtesy of my friend):

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

Works perfectly for me. If it screws up your system, just zap the PRAM next boot (cmd-opt-p-r) and you'll be back to the default Lion state. Or if you can still get into terminal, this command will get you back to Lion's default state as well:

sudo nvram -d boot-args

Enjoy!

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

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

Thx, worked like a charm

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.

After almost a year....has this been solved?

I'm still having this issue and I couldn't find a working solution anywhere 😟

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

Yeah I'm also using that shortcut...but still....I'm sure that for the apple devs it's like a "one line of code change"....grrrrr

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....