Last night, as usual, I stored my MBP asleep and went to work. When I came home, I opened it up, and nothing happened. I noticed that the small light on the edge of the laptop was not on. I tried the start button; I then got a grey screen with a series of little oval bars at the bottom. I tried the power button again, got a black screen. Then the cursor appeared. Then the username/password screen appeared. I was able to type in my password after a short interval, and now it seems to be working normally (except the little power light on the edge is still dark).
What’s going on? Is this a sign of a major problem?
(Possible factor: the ambient room temperature is only 49 degrees F. However, the thermometer I put into the storage bin where I put the laptop overnight still showed a little above 50F. Also, battery shows as almost fully charged.)
MBP is MacBook Plus? My experience is all with PCs, but I wouldn’t worry about it unless it happens repeatedly or develops further symptoms. Computers are… prone to oddities like that.
My only concern about the temperature is that if you take a computer from a colder area to a warmer one condensation can form on the hard drive platters. That can trash the hard drive, so it’s best to wait for the machine to achieve room temperature so the condensation has time to clear before turning it on. (Obviously this doesn’t apply to SSDs.)
Macbook Pro. And the ambient room temp was only about four degrees cooler or so in the room than it was in the storage bin. I had the heater on to warm the room, but obviously that does so gradually.
The laptop ran out of battery, and had to stop sleeping. Normally when your MBP is sleeping the battery keeps the ram filled with data. When it realizes it may not have enough battery to reliably do this anymore, it writes data from ram to the hard drive and “turns itself off” in a way so that when you hit the power button you can restore your session after a couple minutes of transferring the data back from the hard drive to the ram. It’s nothing to worry about, except maybe a sign your batter isn’t doing particularly great. Happens to me a lot.
Ah, I missed that. From your description it was definitely hibernating though. Sounds like a bug rather than something too serious. If the problem continues you may want to try resetting the SMC.