I’ve noticed something new that my MacBook does compared to my previous PowerBook. Often I will use my battery into the ground and OS X will force the notebook into sleep mode. I’ll stick it into my bag until I can charge it.
If I left it in my bag until the battery went empty, the PowerBook would die. I would have to plug it in again and boot it up.
The MacBook does things a bit differently. If you leave it in your bag long enough, it will die. However, once you plug it back in and power it up again, you will see a screen similar to the startup screen, but with a progress bar. Once it’s done in a few seconds, you’ll be back to where you left off. For someone like me that leaves 10 websites open and any number of other files, this is awesome. I don’t lose anything now. I wonder why they didn’t advertise this feature!
Apple calls it the “Safe Sleep” feature. It’s documented in support article 302477. It looks like they added it in the last revision of the PowerBooks.
If you’d like to enable this on a system that doesn’t have it on by default you can try this article by Andrew Escobar.
What a great feature. I am so excited, I cannot wait to try it at home…