Chosen Solution
One night, I closed the macbook to put it to sleep and when I opened it a few minutes later, the screen didn’t light up. The status light was pulsating, indicating that it was still in sleep mode. I did a hard shut down and restart, but after the chime, logo, status wheel transitioned into the desktop, the mac went into sleep mode again (x10 times of trying). I ran through resetting the PRAM, and other suggestion for resetting the SMC, tried starting in safe mode, but nothing worked. The only way I can get it to turn on is if I hold the macbook pro upside down when starting it. I’m thinking that it has something to do with the magnetic closure not functioning properly. Any ideas? Thanks in advance! Update Man… I forgot all about this.. Thanks to those who answered! Apple wanted 800.00 to replace the whole case. Yeah, I had my iPad sitting on mine when it happened.. and it even happened with my wife’s recently. Now I just avoid placing anything that has magnets ((iPad!!!)) on it. Thanks again everyone!
This was a “known issue” at the time… seem’s your’s took a little longer to get narcolepsy. As stated in the article it was attributed to The Sudden Motion Sensor, overloaded virtual memory swap files, and an excess of remembered Wi-Fi networks. That your’s starts when inverted might point to the SMS. Once you have it running make a new master user account, set to log in to that. Shut down, then restart your machine. If the problem goes away it’s software, not hardware related. If the problem persists run your Hardware Test disk 2 or 3x (often running it once does not catch a problem). The AHT may give you a more accurate source for your problem. If this answer was helpful please remember to return and mark it Accepted.
It just happened to me… The reason was that I had one MacBook resting on another, and the magnetic strip of the lower tricked the upper into thinking it was closed. The upper therefore booted directly into sleep mode.
Fascinating…. but in my case it was resolved by replacing the main board… thankfully I had a spare already from a another system that died of other causes… Sooo… it looks like each of us have had similar effects but different solutions required in each. Well maybe the next visitor to this discussion can take our results and resolve their own similar dilemma.
This is more common than many people realise. I have had this for a long time on and off with my mid 2009 Macbook Pro 13-inch. Turning it upside down is the only solution I can find. I think Apple have chosen to ignore the issue even though a lot of owners have reported it to them.
If the symptom is that the screen goes dark shortly after the desktop appears, press the ‘increase display brightness’ key to see if the issue is simply that the software that controls the backlight has gotten scrambled and is setting brightness to minimum. If this brings back the display brightness, it will probably be OK through subsequent reboots.
