How to send macbook pro to sleep mode at 5% battery?

Keep running your battery down to 5% or less and you won't have to worry about whether it goes to sleep or not, because you're gonna kill it, it's that simple.

In the other thread you've linked, you asked whether the machine not sleeping properly (after you ignore the low-battery warning that prompts you to connect AC power) is a sign of a degraded battery. The answer is yes. Shutting down instead of sleeping when the battery is nearly depleted tells you that the battery no longer reports its condition accurately enough for the OS to put the computer to sleep while there's still enough power left to do so. This is one of the common warning signs that it's time to replace the battery.

As wjosten says, frequently running your battery all the way down is a shortcut to killing it. It will be happiest and last longest if you make a habit of recharging it before its charge level falls below 30-40%. One can't always do that, of course, but the less often you run the battery flat, the better.

What does System Profiler report about the Cycle Count, Full Charge Capacity and Condition of your battery? What size and how old is your MBP, and how old is the battery?

Maffibaer wrote:

The interesting thing is that it says to check the battery...

That means your battery is ready to fail. Make an appointment at an Apple store. The geniuses can tell you for sure.

Look at this:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/low-battery-saver/id480383312?mt=12

How to send macbook pro to sleep mode at 5% battery?

Close the lid

wjosten: That will work nicely with a battery that is in good condition and properly calibrated, and it may even address Maffibaer's question temporarily. But as I wrote above, the reason Maffibaer's machine is shutting down instead of sleeping is that the battery isn't reporting its charge level accurately — i.e., it doesn't know what its charge level really is. When it thinks it's at 5%, it may actually be at 0.5%, which won't power the machine long enough for it to save the contents of RAM to the hard drive and go to sleep. It's typical of end-of-life batteries for that problem to get steadily worse. Eventually the machine shuts down for lack of power when the battery is still [erroneously] reporting a 40%, 50%, or even 75% charge.

Maffibaer: Whether you like it or not, the facts are that a) you need a new battery if you want it to report its charge level accurately and behave as it's designed to behave, and b) one of the reasons your battery hasn't lasted as long as you hoped it would is your habit of running it down to zero before connecting the AC adapter. That will shorten the life of any lithium-based battery and cause it to fail prematurely. 77% health, for a lithium battery, is near the top of a short, steep slide toward complete failure. At 50-60% health, a lithium battery is virtually unusable.

You may be quite right that lots of iPhone batteries are running down to 0% on a daily basis. If they are, they won't last long, and their owners will probably blame it on Apple instead of on their own habits.

Templeton Peck wrote:

How to send macbook pro to sleep mode at 5% battery?

Close the lid

Ah, sweet simplicity 🙂

For those with 32bit intel machines where the low-battery-saver application doesn't work, i have put together a simple applescript which achieves the same. I copied most of it from http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=23448.

Just paste it into Applescript editor, save it as an application with "run always" checked, and add it to your login items. The number in the first line is the % battery below which you want the computer to sleep.

property lowBattery : 6

on idle

set battStatus to do shell script "pmset -g ps"

if battStatus contains "Battery Power" then

set {TID, text item delimiters} to {text item delimiters, ";"}

set battStatus to text items of battStatus

set text item delimiters to tab

set battStatus to text 1 thru -2 of last text item of item 1 of battStatus as integer

set text item delimiters to TID

if battStatus < lowBattery then do shell script "pmset sleepnow"

end if

return 60

end idle

If you want to make it run in the background without a dock icon then download and install Applet Bundle Tools from here http://www.macosxautomation.com/applescript/bundletools/index.html

Unzip the archive and copy it to /Library/Scripts

Then open your applescript and have it in the foreground in Applescript Editor.

from the applescript menu, run "Applet Bundle Tools > Set Background Only"

and "Applet Bundle Tools > Set Icon in Dock Display"

Save the script again as an application "run always" and you are done.

This works for me on a 2006 Macbook Pro runing OSX 10.6.8

Hope this helps others as it was driving me crazy.