Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

Logging Out, Shutting Down

If you’re the only person who uses your Mac, finishing up a work session is simple. You can either turn off the machine or simply let it go to sleep, in any of several ways.

Sleep Mode

If you’re still shutting down your Mac after each use, you may be doing a lot more waiting than necessary. Sleep mode consumes very little power, keeps everything you were doing open and available, and wakes up almost immediately when you press a key or click the mouse.

To make your machine sleep, do one of the following:

• Close the lid. (Hint: This tip works primarily on laptops.)

• Choose →Sleep. Or press Option-⌘-.

• Press Control-. In the dialog box shown in Figure 1-4, click Sleep (or type S).

• Press the power button () on your machine. On desktop models, doing so makes it sleep immediately; on laptops, you get the dialog box shown in Figure 1-4.

• Just walk away, confident that the Energy Saver setting in System Preferences will send the machine off to dreamland automatically at the specified time.

Tip

Ordinarily, closing your MacBook’s lid means putting it to sleep. And, ordinarily, putting ...