The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge

Posted by leephillips 9/7/2025

The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge(twitter.com)

Alts: https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/115159295473019599, https://bsky.app/profile/samhenri.gold/post/3ly7252lx422d

Theremin Mode: https://twitter.com/samhenrigold/status/1964464940049453153

Github: https://github.com/samhenrigold/LidAngleSensor

1023 points | 489 commentspage 6

Despacito2019 9/7/2025|

lol apple

Why does it say it's by Lisa?

I signed up for my developer account when I was a kid, used my mom's name, and now it's stuck that way forever and I can't change it. That's life.

pooper 9/7/2025||

I am thinking about getting a completely different apple id when I get my next iPhone. I don't have a paid developer account. Or do they actively prohibit multiple accounts? I've never tried on Apple before but I have multiple goog.e accounts and it seems fine to have different accounts on different Android devices?

SXX 9/7/2025|||

Moreover on Android you still can have 10 different Google accounts on one phone all from different countries for downloading region-locked apps on Google Play. Though recently Google started to break it by changing account region countries nilly-willy. Yet you can still register as many accounts via Chrome as you wish really without extra gmail accounts just by using own domain redirect via cloudflare or something.

On iOS installed apps are locked into specific Apple ID they been downloaded with, so you might have issues with e.g WhatsApp. Still possible to download region-locked apps with non-primary AppleID, but it will sometimes ask to re-authenticate with said AppleID to keep it updated so it's cant be just throwaway.

mr_toad 9/7/2025|||

You can have up to three IDs per device.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101661

astrange 9/8/2025|||

"Can't change it" means "haven't tried to change it". People's legal names change, so you have to be able to update a record of your legal name.

ghoulishly 9/8/2025||

They told me they would need a notarized letter signed by both me and my mom. I figured at that point I’m just gonna die with this account name.

astrange 9/8/2025||

That's not actually hard or anything. Notaries are all over the place.

amelius 9/7/2025||

That's consumer electronics. They're toys.

userbinator 9/7/2025||

Classic Apple overengineering. Every other laptop I know of just uses a single lid switch. It reminds me of their mouse that has capacitive buttons and a speaker to produce clicking sounds.

methyl 9/7/2025||

I wish more laptop producers overengineered their products the way Apple does.

userbinator 9/8/2025||

Expensive, complex, and difficult to repair?

Do not want.

methyl 9/8/2025||

Reliable (ie. can open after 2 weeks of sleep with full battery)

weebull 9/8/2025|||

My framework 12 has a similar sensor. It tells to UI when to disable the keyboard and track pad because you've got it in tablet mode.

xanderlewis 9/7/2025||

Are you talking about the MacBook trackpad, or something else?

userbinator 9/7/2025||

This mouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Mighty_Mouse

pmarreck 9/7/2025||

[flagged]

tomhow 9/8/2025||

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45159417 and marked it off topic.

Please don't fulminate or post flame bait on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pmarreck 9/8/2025||

Can someone please explain how presenting an evidence-based argument is "flamebait"?

tomhow 9/8/2025||

All kinds of arguments that are “evidence-based” (i.e., have research studies affirming them) are potentially inflammatory when invoked in a given context.

In this case, someone just posted a link to BlueSky and you set off a mini-flamewar. People who act like that offline find their invitations to dinner parties start to dry up. We need people to think about the effect their comments will have on the mood in the thread when commenting here.

wpm 9/7/2025|||

[flagged]

tomhow 9/8/2025||

Please don't comment like this on HN, not matter what you're replying to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

twixfel 9/7/2025||

[flagged]

pmarreck 9/8/2025||

You have an unlimited blocklist there.

Also, not everyone who disagrees with you is a fascist. That word alone is entirely useless in any good-faith rational discussion.

twixfel 9/8/2025||

Where did I say everyone who disagrees with me is a fascist? You are just attacking a strawman, it's much easier to assume that I am some lunatic who thinks anyone even 1cm to the right of me is literally Hitler, than that I'm just a normal person who thinks Twitter is shit and full of some of the worst people on the planet and owned by one of the worst Americans in history (judging by death toll from cuts to USAID).

But yes Twitter is full of the utter scum of the Earth and no I don't want to have to block them all. Thanks, no thanks.

fouronnes3 9/7/2025||

Ok but why?

latexr 9/7/2025|

For fun and whimsy in a world populated by too many exploitative apps. And because the author has a lot of free time (their words).

https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/115159306734992780

fouronnes3 9/7/2025||

I mean why does the laptop need to have that sensor?

amelius 9/7/2025||

Meanwhile, Samsung makes luxury devices that have foldable screens ...

Apple has a _lot_ of catching up to do.

kube-system 9/8/2025||

Yeah, nothing says luxury like a screen as soft as cheese with a big old crease down the middle, that provides absolutely no value. It's like wearing a pair of Prada boots to a job site.

Sometimes, just because you can do something, doesn't mean it's a good idea.

lurking_swe 9/8/2025||

samsung literally develops cutting edge display tech in-house. It would be sad if they were not the best in that “class”, no?

amelius 9/8/2025||

Yes, but what is your point? I'm just saying that this praised feature of a screen hinge sensor is nothing compared to what the competition offers.

ramon156 9/7/2025||

And also it has a magnet to detect the lid being closed. People think this is over engineered, but I've yet to see another brand that has a working closed lid detection

gruez 9/7/2025||

>but I've yet to see another brand that has a working closed lid detection

???

I don't think I've seen a laptop that doesn't have closed lid detection. At the very least it's common enough that windows has a setting specifically for it: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/69762-how-change-default...

Analemma_ 9/7/2025||

With both Windows and Linux, it's always a luck-of-the-draw thing. Sometimes closing the lid works perfectly, sometimes you get a doofus manufacturer with lousy drivers, so 1 in 20 times you pull your laptop out of your bag and it's red hot with a drained battery.

It's maddening that only Apple gets this right 100% of the time, and it's among the things keeping me on Apple's platform for the moment. I can't fathom why this isn't a bigger priority for everyone else: much like "trackpads that don't suck", it's a huge quality-of-life thing which keeps tons of people on Macs because they want it to Just Work without ever thinking about it.

gruez 9/7/2025|||

>sometimes you get a doofus manufacturer with lousy drivers, so 1 in 20 times you pull your laptop out of your bag and it's red hot with a drained battery.

That's due to "connected standby"[1], which is to have laptops behave more like a phone when in sleep. This is in contrast to S3 sleep, which basically halts all activity. Sounds all good in theory, but as soon as you allow code to be run while in sleep, it's easy for some runaway app (OS or third party) to eat through your battery even while your laptop is "sleeping". Worse is that there's no way to force sleep, so your only choice is hibernate, which is even worse than S3 sleep before.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

cosmic_cheese 9/7/2025|||

“Modern standby” is indeed the culprit in many cases, maybe even the primary one these days, but to my understanding it can still be a crapshoot on laptops that support S3 sleep since it’s up to the OS to detect that the lid has been closed and put the machine to sleep. This has been a problem for a very long time, since well before it became cool to pretend to be a smartphone and not actually sleep the machine.

There’s also wake on LAN which if enabled can rouse the machine from sleep after it’s successfully entered a sleep state.

dontlaugh 9/7/2025|||

That feature also works just fine on macs, though.

adrianmonk 9/7/2025|||

Macs have a completely different operating system managing what happens when the laptop is doing its standby stuff, though.

ufmace 9/7/2025||||

It works fine, except for when it doesn't.

Source: My macbook has drained its battery flat while closed in my bag dozens of times. Then it just stopped doing that on an OS update. I still have no idea why.

AuthAuth 9/7/2025|||

On mac it works slightly more reliably than windows. I've had both devices drain in standby.

com2kid 9/7/2025||||

For a long time (years) there was a bug in Firefox that'd prevent a Windows machine from going to sleep if webgl content was loaded in any FF tab.

So anyway that killed one of my laptop's batteries. So much for supporting Internet freedoms...

Windows comes with a utility that'll tell you what process denied a sleep request, super useful.

I've actually ran into MacBooks not sleeping a few times, but it is much rarer.

It is unfortunate because back on the mid 2000s windows had the best functioning sleep code, but then they tried to catch up with iPad's # instant on and chasing perfection led to the current mess.

toxik 9/7/2025||

Macs these days wake up regularly as I understand it. My MacBook's battery discharges decently fast even when the lid is shut

monsieurbanana 9/7/2025||||

Ah, I wish. You're just lucky if you never had a MacBook burning your hand when pulling it out of a backpack.

cosmic_cheese 9/7/2025||

The old Intel models were hit or miss, but with the M-series models I’ve never had problems with MacBooks not going to sleep when the lid is shut and staying that way so long as wake on LAN is disabled (or disabled on battery). That setting does need to be off though, with it on I did observe occasional misbehavior.

throwaway290 9/7/2025||

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44745897

bigyabai 9/7/2025||||

Ironically, I had this issue with my Macbook more than my Windows and Linux machines combined.

modeless 9/7/2025||||

This is not a sensor problem, it's a Windows problem.

bakje 9/7/2025||||

To be fair, I’ve had this issue with MacBooks as well in the past, although not yet with my M3 pro

mort96 9/7/2025||||

What makes you think that these issues you describe (which I've experienced too, FWIW) are problems related to the sensor rather than the OS or drivers?

CamouflagedKiwi 9/7/2025|||

I don't think this is about the hardware driver detection of the lid closing. Lid events are a first-class thing in ACPI and I've never seen a laptop that didn't have one, or any real evidence that one didn't do the thing.

Much more likely is that the OS was prevented from going to sleep by some badly behaved process, or got woken up by another thing like allowing USB to wake it from sleep, where even touching the mouse can wake it - with some laptop equivalent like a ghost touchpad touch or whatever.

egypturnash 9/7/2025|||

The magnets also work great as a way to attach a sunshade.

BuildTheRobots 9/7/2025||

The magnets work too well. Having one Thinkpad Yoga sat on top of another closed Yoga tricks the sensor into thinking it's in tablet mode and it disables the keyboard. I only lost 30min or so trying to work out what was happening...

There's decent reasons to over-engineer some of these sensors so they can't be unduly tricked by external influences.

mouse_ 9/7/2025|||

Only ever had a Thinkpad lid close sensor fail once. Found my T60 heating up my backpack. Other than that, never been a problem.

I've never once had a Dell/HP/Acer/Asus with a reliable lid close sensor. You can't trust those things.

trenchpilgrim 9/7/2025|||

If you're talking about laptops waking up inside backpacks- that's due to the terrible implementation of "Windows Modern Standby" that has ruined every laptop except Macbooks and Framework. (Framework still implements legacy S3 standby to improve compatibility with Linux.)

craftkiller 9/7/2025|||

> Framework still implements legacy S3 standby to improve compatibility with Linux.

Just want to warn other readers: Not all framework models have S3 sleep. I've got the 7040 AMD framework laptop and it only does s2idle.

3eb7988a1663 9/7/2025||||

This has been an issue for so long - who is at fault? Is it hardware vendors or software? The spec itself is so bad that all implementations will disagree?

Halting power until an external physical event seems like a simple enough idea. I have never wanted to close my laptop and let it keep number crunching.

numpad0 9/7/2025||

Microsoft. There's ~nothing to be gained by checking in with the Internet while laptop is closed, they implemented it anyway.

cubefox 9/7/2025|||

> If you're talking about laptops waking up inside backups

Presumably he meant the laptop didn't go into standby when closed or woke up from standby while still closed.

zargon 9/7/2025||

That’s what Modern Standby does.

geoffeg 9/7/2025||||

I've also found my work MacBook Pro heating up my backpack sleeve a number of times because it didn't properly go to sleep. Likely culprit is some "security" spyware the company installs.

justin66 9/7/2025|||

It's not generally the lid sensor that causes a Windows laptop to fail to go to sleep, is it?

leephillips 9/7/2025||

The reality distortion field is immortal.

zitterbewegung 9/7/2025|

Yea this is how the new Apple silicon devices will start if they are off. The fingerprint sensor is just used to manually do it or override the current state / put it into recovery mode.