Retina MacBook Pro “slow” wake time…

Whenever I leave my Retina MacBook Pro alone for an hour or more, it takes longer than desired to wake it up. The reason for this is that the MacBook goes into standby, then the password dialogue box that shows up is really just a screenshot to fake a faster wake up time while the machine is waking itself out of standby behind the scenes. After about 10 seconds or longer, it will then actually be out of standby and will replace the screenshot with the actual password dialogue box and become functional again.

You can totally change the duration in which your MacBook waits before it goes into standby mode. To see the current standby delay, open up terminal and enter the following command:

pmset -g

You should see a bunch of settings, including something like:

standbydelay         4200

The number shown is the time before your computer goes into standby, shown in seconds. To change it, enter the following command:

sudo pmset -a standbydelay 14400

*Obviously, you can enter any number. The above command will wait 4 hours before going into standby. You can make this as short or as long as you want.