Recent MBPs suffering from 'narcolepsy'

I had this same issue on my white MacBook. Phone Tech Support couldn't figure it out...BUT a guy at the local Genius Bar fixed it no problem!
I had made "inactive" the ethernet port. The machine always looks at that for a wakeup call, and it freaks when it's not there. So He just made it active again, and it has never done it since. It was a real problem for me, but good as new now, for about a year.

My mid 2007 Santa Rosa MBP had this exact (ANNOYING) problem for about 6 months after the model came out and it was fixed with a software (maybe firmware) update.

So good luck if you're affected by the problem, I'm sure a fix will be coming soon.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/stats/macbook-pro-core-2-duo-2.4-17-santa-rosa-specs.html

Strange, I experienced similar things on an MBP 2.6 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with Mac OS X 10.5.8. So I don't think it's related to the new MBPs.

Typical symptoms: one closes the lid, moves to a different location, opens the lid and the MBP spins up after a couple of presses on the keyboard, but the screens stays dark. As a matter of fact it is lit, but with brightness turned to minimum. So cranking up the brightness solves this issue for me.

Then there are some different scenarios: same as above, but I connect an external monitor. This time the main screen stays dark and everything is moved to the external screen. It looks like the MBP thinks I want to work in "clamshell" mode. Closing the lid and reopening it solves the problem.

Finally I've got a thirds scenario which often happens with an external monitor. MBP connected to the external screen. I close the lid or the machine goes into sleep. When reopening the lid or awakening the MBP the Display Color Profile for the MBP screen is all wrong. I need to just open the Screen Preferences and the MBP puts it all right.

My conclusion of all this is a timing issue between the speed at which the OS gets out of sleep and the components that come out of sleep (like HDs and the screen) resulting in the OS picking up wrong values for some parameters like screen brightness, active screen and Color Profile. One can easily tell the Mac to reread it, by forcing certain events. I.e. when my Mac claims that my second screen is the active one, I simply close the lid, wait five seconds and reopen it and voila it's set correctly.

Possibly the new MBPs are even more susceptible to this as they are even faster and have more stock memory.

D.

This happens to me all the time. Shift+control+eject a few times and it works for me (no, i didnt read all the comments before posting this)

Just want to say no problems with my 15" i7 machine.

I've had this problem for months now and I've spent over 10 hours of my time trying each and every fix mentioned on the Apple support thread as well as a fixes mentioned slew of other places. I even got Apple to replace the logic board. Nothing has resolved the problem.

This combined with the lack of auto-save in iWork applications has cost me lost work.

This is incredibly frustrating. Honestly, I never thought anything would tempt me back in the Windows direction, but this certainly has. I long for the days of multi-week uptime.

I've had this problem and other sleep problems with my late 2007 MPB. I've had varied success with fixes.

The utility Wireless Sleeper has worked very well on some versions, but after the most recent upgrade to 10.6.3 the sleep problems have been a lot worse. I open the sleeping computer and if I don't hit the release smoothly and open it quickly, the machine is blacked out when open. I have to close the lid, wait for it to cycle through RAM save, and then open it again. On occasion it is non-responsive and I'll have to restart the computer.

I'll try tapping the brightness key, that is a new idea from this thread--but of course just now I haven't been able to replicate the problem on demand : )

This happens to me occasionally on my 2008 MBP. If I unplug the power cord and plug it back in the LED backlight comes on and it works fine without a restart.

Hi,
I found a way to reproduce the error on my MBP 17" mid2009 - and to me, it seems like a hardware issue. Summarized my thoughts on this in the linked forum thread:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11651078#11651078

MBP 13" (late '09) here. Fails to wake properly about 10% of time. PMU reset didn't help. Sometimes the screen is off on wakeup, but after entering the password it logs me in fine. Other times it's just black screen and no response whatsoever. One of solutions found somewhere seems to reduce the problem somewhat (namely, first unplug the power cord and then put it to sleep, and first wake it up and only then connect the power), but the issue won't go away completely.