Same happens occasionally on my mac. And even if it doesn't stay on, it wakes up often enough to drain >50% overnight. My only machine to reliably sleep, wake up and power manage is Linux.

Did you turn off "powernap" in settings? By default, a mac would wake up to download mail, run backups, and do other things in the middle of the night.

Yeah, that's with powernap off.

I've experienced this with Mac laptops that I've got loads of stuff running on, but not on stock configurations, so I suspect it's some piece of software rudely waking it up every so often for its own inscrutable reasons.

My new M1 MBP runs out of battery over a 3 day weekend of sleeping without charge ( the only way to make it sleep is to disconnect the charger, otherwise it refuses, probably due to the external screen connected).

i'll counter your anecdotal data point with mine, my m1 stayed alive in sleep for 3 weeks while i was on holiday and had hours of battery life left when i opened it up.

Maybe we’re all doomed to just power off forever…

I bought a high-end lenovo and the fans would turn on and the machine would get hot when it was in my bag.

But it's not Microsoft's fault. The Surface Book I replaced it with works perfectly.

I had a problem like that a lot with my MBP. Except it would do it while fully closed, in an insulated sleeve, inside my backpack. Roasting hot. Just awful.

Yeah my Dell(s) have done that.

I reach inside and it is like a toaster “oh yeah this guy is dead…”

I've got bad news, I've been extremely unimpressed with my Macbook's so-called smart sleep. Literally the first day I brought it into work I went to go take it out of my bag only to find that it was too hot to touch. Neither selecting "Sleep" nor closing the lid for 30 minutes had convinced the fickle OS to enter a low-power state.

You know what Windows and Linux offer that Mac doesn't? A friggin' Hibernate option. Please, just let me have a button to power off my computer while persisting its state to disk. No, I don't want to have to shut down my computer every time I put it in a bag, that's completely ridiculous and an utter waste of my time having to reset all my tmux panes, vim windows, shell histories... what a UX nightmare. They've made a laptop that's a terror to actually take anywhere with you. Even when the "smart" sleep does (sometimes) finally decide to kick in, it invariably costs 20% of the battery.

When people say that Macs have good power management, what they mean is that Safari is optimized for power consumption relative to Chrome and Firefox.

Macs have a hibernate option that completely powers the machine off after saving the contents of RAM to disk, but you need to set it via the terminal. Find the current hibernate mode via: pmset -g

The default is hibernatemode 3 (RAM stays powered on until battery drops below some threshold, so that wake from sleep is very fast).

The version of “hibernate” you want is mode 25: sudo pmset -a hibernate mode 25

If you routinely keep your computer 'hibernating' for days at a time without plugging it in, you’ll save some battery life this way at the expense of a slower wake-up time because RAM is not kept powered.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pmset for more details.

> Safari is optimized for power consumption relative to Chrome and Firefox

This is a very big difference. Chrome has zero respect for battery life.

You have either a hardware issue (lid sensor), an SMC issue (try an SMC reset, it's painless), or software you run is preventing sleep (which you can find by looking in the Energy tab of Activity Monitor. Google search for "os x sleep prevented") or you have some hardware plugged in (external displays and keyboards can sometimes prevent a lid-shut from triggering sleep; I forget the 'rules' around this.)

Also, you can set the power manager's hibernatemode to your liking (Google search "os x hibernate mode") but there usually no reason to adjust the default (sleep for 3-4 hours, then suspend to disk) given how fast storage is in macs these days.

Macs have been famous for decades for having the best sleep/hibernate functions in the industry and when yours didn't work properly maybe you should have investigated? Or at least not be whinging about Apple over it?

> maybe you should have investigated?

I did / have on multiple devices.

Report a bug in Feedback Assistant.

>not randomly wake up in the middle of the night, in my bag, and just sit there fans at full speed…

At this point I always globally disable wake timers in Windows. They're mostly used for automatic updates. (For more fine-grained control, look at the various wake timers in Task Scheduler.)

My work Mac has certainly turned on in a bag overnight. No escape from that issue there, I'm sorry to say

We’re doomed.