We had a candidate come in for interviews, and one of them was a video-conference programming session with a remote interviewer. We set them up with a Macbook (running Windows/Bootcamp) for live-coding.
The candidate hit the Power button, located where DEL used to be. Laptop goes to sleep (candidate said it shut down but it probably just went to sleep). He gets it back up but then it needs a login etc., so he had to go find us non-remote staff to log back in, join VPN etc. Took about 5 minutes out of the interview, partly due to confusion + logging back into the things.
I can't for the life of me understand why so many vendors have put this button on the keyboard. It was so simple and sensible to have it somewhere else.
Edited: Macbook running Windows, probably just went to sleep but disruptive nonetheless, combination of hardware+software to blame.
Nothing about this makes much sense - regardless of which generation macbook you're using hitting the power button accidentally will not turn it off (you can try it right now). Did your interviewee keep pressing on it for like 10 seconds?
Indeed, I'm not even sure that aside from intentionally editing the PowerManagement.plist that you can do this. On my Macbook Air, you have to hold in the power button for a short period to produce the Sleep/Restert/Shutdown pop-up, and the default is cancel, I believe. Apple's own page on the matter says it requires a 1.5 second hold to produce. [0]
I appreciate your over-all sentiment that when the default behavior for power buttons was to take action, but my expectation now is that bumping the power button should ask you what to do, not do something. I'm still surprised that many Windows based laptops have a default action mapped to the power button regardless of the placement of the button, as interrupting the state of the machine just seems like something you'd want a confirmation on - aside from a few outlier "oh crap no one can see this" moments, I'm not sure why you'd need the quick bump to initiate shutdown or any action from the power button at all. Even in the above situation, a shutdown is far slower most times than just a hard shutdown.
Edit: Seeing your follow up, I feel that you should really update your original post to mention that it was running Windows via Bootcamp. macOS and Windows respond very differently to a power button press, and Windows' default is to take a sleep, hibernate, or shutdown action, and at least on our Server 2016 images, the default behavior is to initiate a shutdown. This isn't OS X behavior, it's Windows behavior.
Thanks. Updated, and probably this thread is off-topic enough that I should just delete it.
In my head I had not distinguished between "shutdown" and "sleep", nor decide that the hardware was less to blame than the software. Those details matter, sorry for any confusion.
Hmm, it might be because we run Windows on the macbooks, but you're right -- maybe it didn't fully shut down. Even sleep is pretty disruptive; it takes my machine ~30s of playing-dead before it pops back, and I'm booted from the VPN and all my connections. I run into this accidental-coffee-break every now and then.
We bought a USB keyboard + mouse for the candidates.
Do you realise how ridiculous you sound ? You're blaming a Mac for Windows OS behaviour.
On Mac OS pressing the power button does nothing, it takes seconds to come back from sleep and it never drops VPN unless you are going to sleep for hours.
As I understood it the part where you hit the power button when you don't want is the root of the problem. The horrible Mac keyboard is accidentally also the topic here.
If we're talking about the newest line of MacBooks, how does one accidentally press the power button? Maybe it's just my computer but it takes quite a bit of power to accentuate it compared to the other keys.
Well, as noted though, this behavior is determined by the OS; it's not a hard-coded part of the system or anything. Windows has a control-panel option for what Windows should do when the power button is pressed, and for whatever reason, it defaults to "Shutdown". This is not the behavior on macOS, and as such accidental presses are not a problem on macOS, nor would it on Windows if the user desired.
The topic is not "macOS is ruining my life" but "The new MacBook keyboard is ruining my life".
Besides that, I would consider going on standby accidentally a problem independent of the OS (hitting the power button for a shot time usually gets you in standby also).
I don't think you understand the situation though.
On the older Macbook's the power key is still in the top right corner just like it is on the new ones. If you can't type properly it is still possible to hit it.
Same on macOS, and even then you just get a dialog box asking if you want to shut down. Hold it down for 5-10 seconds and you initiate a force shutdown.
The candidate hit the Power button, located where DEL used to be. Laptop goes to sleep (candidate said it shut down but it probably just went to sleep). He gets it back up but then it needs a login etc., so he had to go find us non-remote staff to log back in, join VPN etc. Took about 5 minutes out of the interview, partly due to confusion + logging back into the things.
I can't for the life of me understand why so many vendors have put this button on the keyboard. It was so simple and sensible to have it somewhere else.
Edited: Macbook running Windows, probably just went to sleep but disruptive nonetheless, combination of hardware+software to blame.