Sleep Wake Failure with High Sierra 10.13.2

I have the same issue on my late 2013 iMac. Apple/AppleCare are in denial that it has anything to do with High Sierra. They act like no on else is having this issue. Their 'default' solution is to wipe the drive and do a clean install of High Sierra. Hopefully they will realize this is a fault and update the OS soon....

I suspect that the problem lies in a rewrite of all or a portion of the screen saver module in High Sierra. I recall that after installing 10.13.x last year, I could not run the BOINC screen saver for a few weeks until they rewrote their code to work with new screen saver APIs in High Sierra.

What is unusual for my iMac is that occasionally, when trying to wake it from sleep using the keyboard, I get no response. Pressing the power button briefly causes it to wake and restore the contents of RAM from the hard drive. I have only ever witnessed this behavior before on my MacBook when the battery is near death and as its final gasp, it saves the contents of RAM to the hard drive.

I am using a brand new iMac Pro and am having a similar problem. When I wake from sleep a gray screen opens ope and notifications show on right side of screen. External hard drives thrash away, then after about 15 minutes the screen itself wakes up and I can work. I think the problem is somehow related to external drives and porting them through the thunderbolt 3 port.

I've been following this thread since December 2017 when I upgraded my late-2012 iMac 21.5" to High Sierra. I'm currently running 10.13.3. Like many others, I've tried all of the suggestions in this thread and nothing works. I keep getting the sleep wake failure every single time my computer goes to sleep. My workaround has been to disable sleep completely, and this obviously works, but I don't like leaving the computer on all the time.

Just chiming in to plead Apple to fix this problem. If there are others out there lurking on this thread, please chime in. This needs a fix.

Hi Jim, there are many sites that purport to direct you in backdating to a previous OS. For example you could consult the devils themselves at macOS Sierra: Revert to a previous macOS version. As far as I understand the procedure suggests you return to a time machine backup where you were still with the previous OS. All this, of course, is well and good in emergency situations, where you somehow lost and/or corrupted your work and need to recover the best you can. Now, the instruction to go to a previous backup, appears to assume that one sits around between backups and does nothing else but wait for a new OS upgrade to enjoy and glory.

Why I would want to loose my uncorrupted work, which could be even very valuable, only because an update of the OS malfunctions, is totally beyond me.

Obviously, this is my very individual take on the situation, so please, explore options, which could be helpful in your particular circumstances.

Dear IdrisSeabright,

Thank you for your response. I fully appreciate the proprietary aspects of this forum and I try to respect rules, terms and conditions, use agreements and all. If you (and anyone else, who has the power to decide the fate of this comment) could kindly bear with me for a few more paragraphs, I shall do my best to present my position concisely and in the spirit of this discussion.

Firstly, few people will be surprised, if I say that I have not read the full terms and conditions or the use agreement. That is because many honest people will recognize how just about anyone nowadays (guiltily or not) has answered numerous times 'yes' to the question 'have you read and agreed with the terms and conditions' in order to proceed to the use of or involvement with some conditional offering. In some cases this is critical, in most this is just a way to move forward to more useful and meaningful activities.

I may not have read the TC but I can assure you that I have read more than 95pc of the entries to this and a parallel discussion on the same subject, available at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8135104?start=105&tstart=0

While we all may enjoy friendly and relaxing discussions or some suggestions about useful tips and simple solutions as available throughout the numerous discussions on this site, the two threads I am referring to, happen to address a significant (critical it seems for some) performance issue with the HS OS. Although going through the usual customer support channels would be the recommended course of action, it doesn’t take long, reading through the threads, to see that not a single person has mentioned any success from going in this direction. Apple customer support staff have not managed any substantial help or resolution to an apparently persistent and impeding problem. Where do we go from here?

Just like with many community wide problems, people take every possible opportunity to press for a resolution, especially to problems, which are not a matter of convenience or ornamentation, but seriously affect their work and even cause damages. Well, the Apple Support Communities is one such direction.

It is unfortunate that we will never see a response from Apple here, but even with a minimal involvement, they may wish to realise that occasionally it might be beneficial to all concerned to go out of one’s way if this will help significantly a great number of people, especially if there is a possibility to prevent exasperating matters exacerbate.

At this stage I see two logical possibilities. Either Apple knows this is not a macOS High Sierra problem, but would maintain its involvement so minimal that would not do as little as to nudge a higher enough level member into even suggesting it, consequently leaving hundreds of users wondering how come their utterly diverse circumstances cause apparently identical malfunction. Or, Apple knows it is a macOS HS issue and would not acknowledge it, which is a lot more serious matter.

Whichever the case may be, hundreds of Apple users, at least those showing on this and the thread I mentioned above, quite likely many more, have been affected over an extended period of time and this forum becomes as good as any for them to express their expectations from Apple to help resolve the issue.

Here is the daily recurring reason for my plea:

Even with Power Nap turned on, the problem continues. Much less frequent than with it off. Roughly 105 hours since the last spontaneous restart.

Date/Time: 2018-02-27 22:13:14 -0600

OS Version: Mac OS X 10.13.3 (Build 17D102)

Architecture: x86_64h

Report Version: 26

Data Source: Stackshots

Event: Sleep Wake Failure

Duration: 0.10s

Steps: 9

Hardware model: iMac14,2

Active cpus: 4

Time Awake Since Boot: 380000s

Nope, not resolved. I have two 21.5 iMacs on a home network, both running Beta 5, one has the sleep wake problem consistently, the other does not. Both machines have very similar set-ups but they are not identical. One is late 2014 - this has the sleep wake problem, the other is late 2015 and does not have the problem. So far I haven't found whatever difference is causing the issue. None of the "fixes" have helped for me. Given that 1) many people have the problem but many people don't, 2) fixes seem to work for some but not all, 3) machines differ, and 4) installed software must differ a lot across the board, 5) problems started for many people with a change of OS ( the introduction of High Sierra), I believe the issue is probably far more complicated than we think and therefore there is no miracle cure. I'm sure Apple are working on it, and we'll get a result one day!

After updating to 10.13.4 yesterday, I decided to try disabling Power Nap again so that my iMac would actually sleep through the night. When I woke this morning, it did not respond to pressing the keyboard to wake. I had to briefly press the power switch to wake it. It woke, but with the gray screen where it reloads the contents of RAM back from the hard drive. It seems that sometime overnight, it decided that it was low on "battery power" and needed to save RAM contents. This on an iMac always connected to AC power. Sigh.

Hi, Bluetooth made no difference to either of my iMacs in previous tests, whether it was on or off had no effect. However I'm running 10.13.5 beta1 since 5th April, and I've not had any sleep wake issues since. I'm not drawing any conclusions - just making and reporting observations!

Unfortunately, there is no sign of resolution for this dreadful SWF problem. The saga goes on at the expense of so many users. Looks like it has other manifestations, too:

Apple's magical quality engineering strikes again: You may want to hold off that macOS High Sierra update... • The Regis…

With no disrespect to the enormity of the issues associated with such unimaginably complex things like modern computers, it is the disregard of the difficulties experienced by so many people over such a long time that adds insult to the injury.

In case this comment goes through, just as an update on my experience - while some situations with the iMac crashing on the dreaded Sleep Wake Failure appear similar, there is no clearly identifiable pattern of running applications or connected devices.

I spend hours talking to Apple Customer Support over this issue, and they are totally clueless. They will always try to get you to reinstall your OS, which I have done twice now, and although the problem disappears for one to two weeks, the problem always comes back. I took it to a Genious Bar, and the "genius" representative suggested the same. My advice is to live with it until Apple catches up to the issue, is less frustrating than dealing with their customer support.

I've recently being having issues with my late 2012 iMac and this sleep wake failure issues. My iMac is on macOS 10.13.4 and this issues has only been occurring over the last month.

My iMac has also been going into Safe Sleep mode as well when in sleep for over 4hrs which from reading an Apple support document this is normal with all Macs made before 2013 and it should have always been going in to Safe Sleep mode since day one but it has never done this, as I say it only started have these issues with sleep/wake in the last month.

I have been in touch with Apple but they were not much help, all they advised me to do is carry out all the basic stuff like resetting, refreshing and starting my iMac in safe mode and then to wipe and install my macOS again. All this has been carried out, twice, with no change.

I keep finding my iMac has had to restart itself and when I look at the fault report it shows me it just says a sleep wake failure.

I'm currently trying the tips in the last post, hoping this may have an effect.

I set hibernatemode to 3, after which my system kept running fine for quite a few days. Then, a new build of the beta arrived, and I started seeing the problem again. Just now, I went to see how things are set: hibernatemode was back to 0! I set it back to 3, and now we wait...

Just found this thread after suffering for 2+ months.

Constant crashes during sleep on both a brand new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and a brand new iMac.

Both running 10.13.4.

Just saw that 10.13.5 is available. Going to give it a shot now ...