Apple working to improve Power Nap feature in latest 10.8.2 beta

"Power nap" sound great but unfortunately with 10.8 my 2008 Mac Pro (and apparently others too) has had constant issues with "Wake from Sleep."  No fun.

Apples needs to do lots of bug squashing.

The most recent developer build of 10.8.2 takes longer to shut down than 10.8.1.  Fix it please.  

Quote:

Originally Posted by NormM 


The slide says MacBook Air (2nd generation) gets Power Nap. The article says mid 2011 Air does. The MacBook Air 1,1 came out in early 2008; 2,1 in late 2008; 3,1 in late 2010; 4,1 in mid 2011 and 5,1 in mid 2012 (accoring to Wikipedia). Does that mean that the MacBook Air 4,1 is the second generation Air? Or has the plan changed?

2nd generation means 2nd gen of the design. So the 2011 model. 

Yeah, when not plugged in it seems to take a while to wake from sleep when power nap is enabled.... Seems to be catching up before it wakes.

I think this is a feature that will go away like iTunes Ping. When my MacBook Pro lid is closed, I want it to do nothing but wake up when I open the lid, not crunching 17 App Store updates.

Quote:

Originally Posted by NormM 


I have the MacBook Air 3,1 (late 2010) and there are no visible differences in the design between it and the 4,1 (mid 2011). The display port connector turned into a thunderbolt connector, and the keyboard went back to being backlit. The screen and the case were completey unchanged. So how is this a different design?

It's a different design because it's a different design. The late 2010 is a different generation of Air than previous. It's that simple. Please know what you own.

Quote:

Originally Posted by NormM 


The article says Power Nap works with mid 2011 and later. As I said, my Air is late 2010, but has the same design as mid-2011 (with only tiny differences). The earlier Airs had a very different design. Does Power Nap work with the 2nd major design (my Air) or with mid-2011 and later (as the article states)? Please answer my actual question.

I think it only works with i5 and i7 MBA?

More info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5394

Quote:

Originally Posted by NormM 


The article says Power Nap works with mid 2011 and later. As I said, my Air is late 2010, but has the same design as mid-2011 (with only tiny differences). The earlier Airs had a very different design. Does Power Nap work with the 2nd major design (my Air) or with mid-2011 and later (as the article states)? Please answer my actual question.

FWIW I have the same model as you Norm, Late 2010 MacBook Air (1.6GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 120GB SSD).  Although Apple may say differently, Power Nap is available after installing Mountain Lion on my MBA.

EDIT: See my note below as to why I have it and why anyone with this model should not.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mrr 

"Power nap" sound great but unfortunately with 10.8 my 2008 Mac Pro (and apparently others too) has had constant issues with "Wake from Sleep."  No fun.

 

Apples needs to do lots of bug squashing.

Your 2008 MacBook doesn't support power nap anyway.

Have you tried disabling the function "wake for network access" from the energy saving settings? If not that's not a bug.

Quote:

Originally Posted by NormM 


The article says Power Nap works with mid 2011 and later. As I said, my Air is late 2010, but has the same design as mid-2011 (with only tiny differences). The earlier Airs had a very different design. Does Power Nap work with the 2nd major design (my Air) or with mid-2011 and later (as the article states)? Please answer my actual question.

You're absolutely right. The generation change was with the Macbook Air 3,1 in October 2010, which is when the 11" model was introduced, they switched to Flash drives, changed the ports and other stuff. ktappe is mistaken.

The late 2010 model supports Power Nap just fine - Apple's marketing page here says "Power Nap requires a Mac notebook with built-in flash storage." which of course includes that model, I don't know why that knowledgebase article doesn't include it.

My late 2010 Macbook Air received the firmware update through software update and has been fine with Power Nap since.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MarkW508 

You're absolutely right. The generation change was with the Macbook Air 3,1 in October 2010, which is when the 11" model was introduced, they switched to Flash drives, changed the ports and other stuff. ktappe is mistaken.

The late 2010 model supports Power Nap just fine - Apple's marketing page here says "Power Nap requires a Mac notebook with built-in flash storage." which of course includes that model, I don't know why that knowledgebase article doesn't include it.
My late 2010 Macbook Air received the firmware update through software update and has been fine with Power Nap since.

I got the late 2010 Air soon after it came out, and I don't have Power Nap under Mountain Lion. The SMC update for the 2011 Air isn't compatible, and I don't see any other update available. I suspect something changed after my Air debuted, so perhaps most 2010 Air's support Power Nap, but not mine :(

[[Update: there was a Mountain Lion developer's beta for the late model 2010 Air SMC that enabled Power Nap.  Those that have it on those machines may have been developers.  There's a thread about this on MacRumors.  Don't try to install the beta SMC firmware packages discussed there on anything other than a late 2010 Air!!  They don't have the usual user-friendly compatibility checks!]]

Curiously, PowerNap has been around since 10.7, except it was called "Dark Wake". We often install Macs to run exhibits in museums and require them to Wake-On-LAN, we found Dark Wake interfered with this as the WOL packet would trigger this dark wake state, whereby some system services would run (yes, including some of those services mentioned above), but not the entire computer. Our only solution was to disable Dark Wake so we could regain control of properly waking the Mac.

Quote:

Originally Posted by NormM 

I got the late 2010 Air soon after it came out, and I don't have Power Nap under Mountain Lion. The SMC update for the 2011 Air isn't compatible, and I don't see any other update available. I suspect something changed after my Air debuted, so perhaps most 2010 Air's support Power Nap, but not mine :(

 

[[Update: there was a Mountain Lion developer's beta for the late model 2010 Air SMC that enabled Power Nap.  Those that have it on those machines may have been developers.  There's a thread about this on MacRumors.  Don't try to install the beta SMC firmware packages discussed there on anything other than a late 2010 Air!!  They don't have the usual user-friendly compatibility checks!]]

Bingo!  I have a dev installation of 10.8 on my late 2010 11" MacBook Air.  That explains why I have the Power Nap feature (and shouldn't).

The downside is that my SMC was flashed/updated to the current version for mid 2011 through 2012 models.  I say "downside" because this has caused my MBA to suffer from severe battery drain, even after disabling Power Nap.  Where I generally enjoyed 5 to 6 hours of use I now am lucky to get 3.  Unfortunately my SMC version cannot be easily flashed back to what it should be, and I didn't renew my dev license so I'm either going to have to wait for v10.8.2 which includes a modification to Power Nap...and hopefully the SMC...or visit my Apple store to see if they can put things back to normal.

It's clear that, at least for my model of MBA, the SMC version that supports Power Nap is not currently viable.

FWIW as Norm mentions, there is a thread on another forum that links to a download package that allows Power Nap to be activated on non-supported machines, specifically late 2010 11" and 13" MacBook Airs.  I'd highly caution against doing that based on the battery issues many of us are encountering due to the SMC change.  More here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by richsadams 

 

Bingo!  I have a dev installation of 10.8 on my late 2010 11" MacBook Air.  That explains why I have the Power Nap feature (and shouldn't).

 

The downside is that my SMC was flashed/updated to the current version for mid 2011 through 2012 models.  I say "downside" because this has caused my MBA to suffer from severe battery drain, even after disabling Power Nap.  Where I generally enjoyed 5 to 6 hours of use I now am lucky to get 3.  Unfortunately my SMC version cannot be easily flashed back to what it should be, and I didn't renew my dev license so I'm either going to have to wait for v10.8.2 which includes a modification to Power Nap...and hopefully the SMC...or visit my Apple store to see if they can put things back to normal.

 

It's clear that, at least for my model of MBA, the SMC version that supports Power Nap is not currently viable.

 

FWIW as Norm mentions, there is a thread on another forum that links to a download package that allows Power Nap to be activated on non-supported machines, specifically late 2010 11" and 13" MacBook Airs.  I'd highly caution against doing that based on the battery issues many of us are encountering due to the SMC change.  More here.

I installed the SMC change before I saw Rich's warning above, so I tried an experiment.  With WiFi on and brightness at 1/3 max (and display sleep set to never), I played an mp4 video fullscreen in a loop.  Battery life was just over 4 hours.  I'm not sure how that compares to normal.  Walt Mossberg got over 6 hours in his review of this machine at 100% brightness, but that was with just a loop of music playing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by NormM 

I installed the SMC change before I saw Rich's warning above, so I tried an experiment.  With WiFi on and brightness at 1/3 max (and display sleep set to never), I played an mp4 video fullscreen in a loop.  Battery life was just over 4 hours.  I'm not sure how that compares to normal.  Walt Mossberg got over 6 hours in his review of this machine at 100% brightness, but that was with just a loop of music playing.

For our late 2010 MBA I'd say 4 hours is pretty good.  50% screen brightness is about as low as I can go...but anything less than 100% makes a lot of difference.

I ended up performing a clean install of Mountain Lion and (as expected) the SMC version remained the same, but I gained some additional battery stability and use.  A clean install is what Apple support has often recommended to folks suffering from unusual battery drain.

I'm going to sit tight and wait for 10.8.2 which will have some Power Nap tweaks...which I interpret as an adjustment to power settings, likely even for the MBA models like ours that won't be running it.

Can someone with a stock 11" MacBook Air running Lion post their SMC version number?  (Found in: Apple > Preferences > About this Mac > More Info > System Report > SMC Version (system).  Mine is 1.67f6 (on ML) but I'm not sure what it was with Lion.  

TIA!