How can you make a Mac (2015 Yosemite) hibernate? (Hibernate like Windows PC, ie. save state to disk and fully power down) Please note: Whilst the older question (4 years ago) Do MacBooks have a true &quot;Hibernate&quot; option? has answers that show a hibernate option exists for Macs, it doesn't detail how to make your Mac hibernate. Perhaps this is because that answer was sufficient for older machines (Pre-2015 MacBookPro Retina or pre-Yosemite).

I've been a longtime Windows user and was told Apple's Macs were better. I recently bought a MacBookPro Retina 2015 15" OS X 10.10 Yosemite (SSD). I have not been able to make it hibernate.

I have already enabled the hibernate mode number 25 (as can be seen in the settings below).

I was told that the grey screen with the progress bar upon wakeup indicates the machine was hibernating. I managed to get this grey screen to show up after disabling standby. 

sudo pmset -a standby 0


I was also told I could check what state the machine woke from via the following command:

pmset -g log | grep -i "wake from"


I ran the command but it still shows that I have always been waking from Standby. This is the case when waking from both AC and Battery. E.g.


  Wake from Standby [CDNVA] due to EC.PME/User: Using BATT (Charge:92%) 303 secs


I am assuming that if my machine did indeed hibernate then the grep command should show Wake from 'Hibernate' as opposed to 'Standby'.

This makes me wonder if the OS X man pmset command, which brings up the pmset commands manual which is dated 2012 is still valid today. Or perhaps I'm just too new to this.

I have also tried 2 deep sleep apps/widgets. Both end up putting the MBP to Standby instead of Hibernate.

pmset -g shows the following:

Active Profiles:
Battery Power          -1*
AC Power               -1
Currently in use:  
 standbydelay         3  
 standby              0  
 halfdim              1  
 hibernatefile        /var/vm/sleepimage  
 darkwakes            0  
 gpuswitch            2   
 disksleep            10  
 sleep                1  
 autopoweroffdelay    1  
 hibernatemode        25  
 autopoweroff         1  
 ttyskeepawake        1  
 displaysleep         2  
 acwake               0  
 lidwake              1  


PS. Next to sleep it sometimes shows "(sleep prevented by AddressBookSour)"
"Sleep" and "Hibernate" on Macs aren't separately choosable. If you sleep a Mac and then leave it asleep on battery until the battery gets low, it will go into "deep sleep" (Apple's term, it's essentially Hibernate) and save battery. On older Macs that supported this, you could force hibernate by pulling the battery out, but that's not possible anymore.

Here's Apple's documentation on Mac sleep, scroll down to the section on "Special Sleep Modes". It may be that the "standby" indication you are seeing is exactly what you're looking for.