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You mean like this?

My one-year-old MacBookPro going to standby mode takes longer than that. 10-30 seconds on average. You've got to wait until the front diode blinks, otherwise the disk is still spinning and you may damage it if you move the laptop. It does wake up quick though.

This is because Macs suspend to "safe sleep mode", they do both suspend-to-disk and RAM. That way they can wake up quickly, but if the battery runs dry, you can still resume from the disk after you've restored power.

I don't have a Linux laptop, but my various desktop Linuxes suspend-to-RAM (and resume) in about 2 seconds like you describe.

thats funny, cause i have my iBook overloaded and it sleeps just fine whenever i close it. maybe it's because i did the other hack to enable safe sleep (hybernate). oh wait, it has to work even harder right when i close it while it dumps a full 1.125 gigs onto disk before cutting power!

When he said "Mac laptops," what he really meant was "newer Mac laptops." Both your G4 PowerBook and my G4 iBook predate that, unfortunately.

Yep, Apple's 'Safe Sleep' was added as an 'extension' to OSX and Powerbooks at the end of 2005. Prior to that, when the battery died, you lost all running data.

For non Apple PC users out there, this is probably pretty surprising, since Software Suspend and Hibernate has been a part of OSes and even APM BIOS features since the early 1990s, and something most non-Mac users have taken for granted for a long time.

For the Grandparent post, there is a hack that might let your older powerbook use 'Safe Sleep', check out this link:

http://andrewescobar.com/archive/2005/11/11/how-to -safe-sleep-your-mac/

However, even if it works, some hardware might not wake up properly leaving devices off, but it is worth a shot if you are willing to play around with it.

Have they?

The late-2005 PowerBooks (and many of the older laptops with a simple hack) will automatically hibernate if their battery gets too low to maintain them in sleep mode.

The hack for the older laptops is here. I have no idea if the MacBook Pro will do the same.

My Mac Mini can safe sleep fine, and it was a lot less hassle to set up than suspend2 under Linux.

SuspendNow software is useful too, so you can hibernate on demand.

suspend and hibernation is at least 5 years behind OS X and Windows

I know hibernation exists in Windows, but OS X?

Can you please enlighten me, since I've totally missed this feature in OS X :-/

I hope you're not talking about Safe Sleep, which is only available in the newer Powerbooks and is not the same thing as hibernation (well, it works the same, but only works on the Powerbooks, where as hibernate works on any Windows PC)

I found the choice pretty obvious for Windows: I want to use a computer at home and I don't intend to use it as a media center.

Speaking of which, why does Apple only bundle FrontRow with new machines when it works on existing ones just the same? Isn't that creating a specialized distribution of Mac OS X with crude media center functionality?

Its called Safe Sleep.

I followed these instructions:

http://www.andrewescobar.com/archive/2005/11/11/ho w-to-safe-sleep-your-mac/

Now I can 'boot up' and be surfing in about 30 seconds.

All computers should do this.

Installing Front Row on an unsupported Mac. Enjoy.

Yes it does - Information on how to hibernate on OS X here

Actually Mac OS X does have a "Hibernate" mode, it's called "Safe Sleep"

It's fully enabled on the newest PowerBooks but you need to fiddle around a bit to get it enabled on previous models.

Here's a guide on how to do it: http://www.andrewescobar.com/archive/2005/11/11/ho w-to-safe-sleep-your-mac/

Hibernation, however... that takes almost as long as a boot up on Windows, and I'm not even sure how to activate it for OSX.