Ok, I may be missing something, but maybe (just maybe) it's Apple who's missing something...

I can't for the life of me figure out how to consistently put my MBP to sleep while it's connected to an external display and using a bluetooth Apple keyboard and Magic Trackpad.

Turning ON or OFF either BT device will cause the Mac to wake, making it seemingly impossible to power down both devices AND put the Mac to sleep.

One issue is when wanting to carry the Mac elsewhere in the house. If I turn off both inout devices the Mac will wake up as I'm picking it up. If I leave one of the devices on then the Mac will connect/disconnect to/from it from elsewhere in the house repeatedly.

I believe I may be able to get both devices off if I also unplug the display's connectors in the correct order - pulling them in this order can make the system go to sleep. So I can power down the input devices without telling the computer to go to sleep and then cause the sleep with the monitor unplug.

But this doesn't solve the issue for the times I just want to sleep the system and walk away from it - without unplugging anything. Years ago I came up with an elegant solution to solve this and a number of other related tasks with a little application - the problem is I've never had that app developed, even though I see there's still a real need for it.

Anyone have any suggestions? Oh, keeping a USB cabled mouse plugged into the monitor isn't going to cut it.

I have similar issues with my Mac Pro at home. No Bluetooth at all, but even though I've set it to go to sleep on its own, it doesn't. I set an additional timer for it to go to sleep every morning at 9am, and that seems to help as well, but there will be says I come home from work and it's on.

If you want to disable the ability for bluetooth devices to wake the system, the option is in System Preferences, Bluetooth, Advanced.


Is this the only reason you are powering them off? An alternative solution here may be to just leave them on, letting them go into their low power state automatically when the system goes to sleep. And if you then take the laptop elsewhere just within range, but not wanting to use them, click the Bluetooth menu icon, choose the device, and click disconnect. The Mac shouldn't reconnect to them, unless you walk over and press a key/click the trackpad.

If you open the Console.app, and switch to all messages, the kernel will log reasons for sleep and wake. If you manually put it to sleep, and it wakes back up on it's own, the log may help narrow down why. It could be a particular device attached, or it could be Wake on Demand related if "Wake on network access" is checked in the Power system preference. I've had a few cases where I didn't disconnect a file share to the Mac Pro, and a work computer was constantly waking the system back up.

I had a problem with my Mac Pro waking up all the time, I tracked the problem using this line in the Terminal Window...

syslog |grep -i "Wake reason ="

Follow this link to find out what it all means...

http://osxdaily.com/2010/07/17/why-mac-wakes-from-sleep/

I found that an external USB hard drive cabby was waking the machine up for some reason, I swapped it to eSATA and the problem went away!

As for putting the Mac to sleep you can use the keyboard short cut Option-Command-Eject I never turn off my bluetooth Apple keyboard and the batteries last for ages !!! Although I think I misunderstand what your problem is to be honest.

Cheers

Cris.

I don't want to disable that because I do want to be able to wake the system with the keyboard - either by turning it ON or by pressing a key if it's already on (in the case if auto-sleep had kicked in).



That does seem to work - the devices reconnect when they're again physically used. Does Apple specify the low-power battery consumption info on their specs pages? I'm using NIMH batteries, but the less often I have to swap them out, the better.

The low power mode is mentioned in this KB article. As for the rechargeable, I've found that the low battery alert for the trackpad is just really off. I get nearly a month of runtime after OS X warns me the batteries are low. I now only swap them when the device actually dies due to no power, instead of relying on the alerts from the OS. That reminds me, I should go file a bug to see if they will correct the power meter somehow to read the rechargeable properly.

It turns out that the manual "disconnect" solution is workable but not ideal. Every time you wake the Mac from sleep it re-connected to the BT device an you have to manually disconnect it again.