[m_st]

I can confirm that various Dell XPS 15 models and Microsoft Surface Book 2 and 3 models are just not usable without the power plug for my software development (and very rare gaming) needs. I also need the power plug for a simple thing like a Microsoft Teams meeting that last longer than one hour.

Compare that to my MacBook Air M1 which runs for a full day easily. Also, standby works.

With Dell I learned it's better to always shut down.

[ubermonkey]

It staggers me that this is still a problem, because *more than 20 years ago* I switched from Win98 on a ThinkPad to a G3 Powerbook partly because of sleep.

I was working almost exclusively in Office docs back then, and the Mac and Win suites were (then as now) file-format compatible. What coding I did was on *nix servers I could SSH to. And I got real, real tired of often-crashing, slow-booting, sleep-sucks Win98 on a laptop.

Then I noticed a colleague who'd come into the consulting group from the design side, and kept his Mac. He could just open it, do something, and close it. And then open it again, and have it wake up normally. It crashed marginally less often than Win98 (this is pre-OS X), but the boot time was MUCH faster, so the crashes were less annoying. I bought a Mac and have been here ever since.

And you're telling me that even today, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty Three, that sleep still doesn't work for shit on big-name Windows laptops? That's bananas.

[justsomehnguy]

Macs have 20 different supported hardware configurations at any current time.

There are bazillion of configurations for Windows compatible laptops.

I had both perfect and awful experience with hardware part of them. Never I misattributed the problems with the hardware to the OS.

[ubermonkey]

>Macs have 20 different supported hardware configurations at any current time.

>There are bazillion of configurations for Windows compatible laptops.

Your point?

[justsomehnguy]

it's easier to make work S3 on 20 configuration than on 20000.

Yes, MS, Dell, HP sucks dicjs not making it work even on a flagship notebook, but that doesn't means what there are no Windows laptops with a working sleep, it just means what you don't hear from the millions the users of thousands of working configurations... and what HP/Dell/MS just suck in the hardware department.

NB there were hundreds of laptops from HP/Dell/Asus/Acer what worked just fine. You just never heard complaints about them, because there were none.

[ubermonkey]

All I know is that sleep eventually fails to work on every Wintel laptop I've ever touched, from the mid-1990s until today. Dell, IBM, Lenovo, HP, you name it.

I think it goes back to the unity of control Apple enjoys. Doesn't mean it CAN'T work for Windows, but the vendors would have to work harder to cooperate, and they clearly can't be arsed to do so.

[wlesieutre]

Sleep mode is really bad. I had a Surface Pro 3 which was the first iteration of "connected standby" and it would run the battery down while sleeping in less than a day.

I was borrowing a newer Surface Pro from work more recently and hoped with the additional years of development they would have managed to fix it. Sadly not.

[wlesieutre]

Should add it was newer but not current, maybe they've got sleep figured out by now.

But it was really surprising to me with the Surface Pro 3 because for years you'd been hearing "Microsoft can't make sleep work as well as Apple because they're stuck dealing with hardware and drivers from 3rd parties" and it turns out 3 generations into their own hardware venture it still sucked just as much. Connected Standby was probably a large step back even.

[PlutoIsAPlanet]

> Compare that to my MacBook Air M1 which runs for a full day easily. Also, standby works.

Huge credit to whoever wrote the standby/sleep code for Darwin for the M1s, I've never had to close my M1 Airs lid and worry about standby not working or it not resuming.

Windows is a mess and unreliable, and Linux is less said the better, it doesn't even work with secure boot on.

[g_p]

Suspend/sleep mode on (recent) Windows laptops seems very hit-or-miss, since everyone started to move away from "proper" S3 sleep, and towards what Linux calls "s2idle" (modern/connected standby on Windows?)

It seems to be a fairly significant regression in terms of functionality, which nobody really asked for, but which results in significant idle drain, coupled with the risk of a laptop deciding to resume and heat up in a bag, etc.

Apple seems to have a (long standing) positive argument here - to point at how when you put a Mac to sleep, you can resume it days later with negligible battery drain. Windows seems to have lost this in the post-S3 sleep era.

[skratlo]

Sure, but how will the MacBook hold when it's as old as your Dell?

[mikestew]

I have no reason to believe my current M1 MBP won’t last as long as my 2012 MBP that’s still running. Why, do you suspect a MacBook isn’t going to last as long as a Dell laptop? I’d love to hear the reasoning for that one.

[goosedragons]

SSD failure. If the SSD dies in a M-series Mac the machine is a brick, can't even boot off an external drive in such a case either because of how they handle the boot process. Meanwhile most every PC laptop uses M.2 socketed SSD and even if it's some weird one that doesn't will still boot off an external drive.

[Tagbert]

goosedragons,

When was the last time you had a problem with SSD failure? While I’m sure it happens, I don’t see a lot of complaints from people about their SSD failing.

[ubermonkey]

In 20 years, my Macs have proven to be as well-built, hardwarewise, as the best Windows machines I had in the 90s (so, IBM-era Thinkpads). I have one in the house in use as a server that's 12 years old. Runs fine. It's slower than the M1 I'm typing on now (& obviously battery life would be awful) but if I had to I could do work on it.

[rabuse]

Is this a joke? Macbook's hold up very well over the years.

[masklinn]

Probably excellently given a brand new Dell does not hold at all.