dr_lha said:
More like, nice work Apple for finally implementing this. My old Sony Vaio VX505 had this back in 2000, and Windows has it built in, "Hibernation" they call it. I've even used Linux distributions that have "Suspend-to-disk" built in. Apple were behind the curve on this one I'm afraid.
I haven't seen safe sleep on a Mac yet, but it appears that the difference is that the Apple implementation collapses hibernation and sleep into one mode, where the RAM contents are saved to disk, but the computer goes to sleep (instead of hibernation), and the disk copy of the RAM is only used if the computer runs out of power, so that wakeup is faster in the remaining instances.
So the plus of this is that, in the Windows implementation, as I understand it, if you choose to put the computer to sleep / standby (and not hibernation) and run out of power, you are out of luck, whereas on powerbooks, you get the benefit automatically. And if you always hibernate in Windows, then you have to wait for the slower re-start from disk, even if you have the battery power to sleep.
On the minus side is that there is no way to force hibernation in the Mac implementation, so you cannot use this feature to reduce "sleeping" power consumption.
