El Capitan Frozen After Sleep

I'm running Sierra 10.12.1 at the moment, I've only seen this happen once in Sierra. I reset the SMC and it never happened again. I remember a lot of talk about people running VMware running into this problem, as well.

Mid-2015 15" MacBook Pro

Intel / AMD GPU

16GB RAM / 1TB SSD

Hmm. That doesn't make me feel much better. I tried just about everything mentioned on this thread. No fusion or parallels running, no time machine. Resetting the SMC didn't work, neither did clearing cache and cookies nor did messing with the sleep settings manually. Maybe I'll have better luck with Sierra though--nice to hear at least one person did.

Did you see the problem before Sierra, and now it seems better with Sierra after resetting the SMC? Not that it will generalize to me necessarily, I've got a mid-2012.

michaelwsherman wrote:

Did you see the problem before Sierra, and now it seems better with Sierra after resetting the SMC? Not that it will generalize to me necessarily, I've got a mid-2012.

I cannot say that the one time the MBP failed to wake wasn't because of a dodgy AC adapter (since replaced). It hasn't happened again since the adapter was replaced, either.

Now, I have had it take a while to wake from sleep--sometimes 15-20sec--but it's rare when it does happen. I reboot the Mac and don't see the issue again for weeks, possibly months so I'm less inclined to believe it's hardware or a specific macOS issue.

You may want to try (assuming you haven't already) doing a clean install and see if the problem goes away. Don't restore any old settings or TM backups (yet) but simply copy/paste data over as-needed (i.e., iTunes, Photos, etc.) into their respective folders. If the problem returns, the prospect of it being a hardware issue appears more convincing but that's just a guess.

The only time this was happening with any sort of frequency was when I was running ElCap and VMware. I don't run VMware anymore, the problem became far less frequent; when I replaced the AC adapter, it went away almost entirely.

I hope that helps!

Sounds like you've got a different issue. This El Captian wake-from-sleep probably happens semi-regularly for most users. It only started happening after I did a reformat and installed El Capitan.

Given the content of the thread, the problem being discussed here is most certainly not hardware, since it coincides with the upgrade to El Capitan. Fusion + El Capitan also caused the same problem, but given the many users in this thread over the past few months who never ran Fusion, and only had the problem after the El Capitan upgrade, there's more to it than Fusion or hardware I'd suspect.

Unfortunately, the deeper El Capitan issue and the Fusion-related issue are conflated in most threads about this sleep wake problem, which makes it harder to discuss 😟.

I'm also having this problem. Every time my MBP 2016 retina is shut or falls asleep, it's frozen in a blackish grey screen and has to be restarted. This never happened until I upgraded to Sierra. I took it in to the Apple store, but they told me to wipe everything and reinstall the OS and that didn't work. Just tried resetting the SMC. We'll see if that works. I'd love a clear answer to this problem.

It seems that recent patch has broken/changed default hibernation settings.

By default system goes from sleep to hibernation after 2/3 hrs.

You can check it by running:

# sudo pmset -g | grep delay

These values will say something like 10800.

You can change them to 86400 (1 day), which will solve most issues:

# sudo pmset -a standby delay 86400

# sudo pmset -a autopoweroffdelay 86400

This has solved hibernation issues for me and now my macbook has no issues with waking up from sleep.

I'm not sure what you're meaning by sudo peset -g and all that stuff. Can you post a more detailed reply?

I try to avoid changing system settings this way, but it seems to have worked for me. First time in ages that I don't have to restart my machine after a few hours of inactivity. Thanks for reducing my Yosemite Sam-level cursing.

FYI, to add additional info for possible solutions, my MacBook Pro (2015, upgrade to El Capitan) never has problems when docked--AC power, USB keyboard, Thunderbolt monitor, and Ethernet), but locks when separated on AC or battery.

I am the original poster on this Question. I am not sure what Salciu is talking about on the settings. I think a step by step as to where to go to change that setting would be helpful for people like me. 😝 But I will say that I no longer have this problem. I upgraded to Sierra and I never freeze after sleep anymore....so it is definitely a setting in the preset software. They were offering a free upgrade a while back and I took advantage of it. Don't know if it's still free, but if you can upgrade, you probably should. If you want to stay in el Capitan, I highly recommend fixing that setting that Salciu mentioned above. If you are like me, and do not have any idea how to do that, I would copy the message and then contact AppleCare if you still are in that program, or go to the Genius Bar. They will be able to help you set it. (Just thought of a point. If they are now charging for Sierra and if you tell them why you want to upgrade, because of the software problem with their software on your Mac, they may just give it to you free. Cheers!)

This is no longer a problem for me on my mid-2012 Pro. I upgraded to Sierra and replaced my HDD with a (non-Apple) SSD. Haven't seen the problem in the month or so since the switch.

My problem is that I can use the keyboard to log into my account, but the cursor seems frozen. Need to do cold-restart. Then everything works as expected.