MacBook Air M2 restores state after low battery shutdown

My Macbook Air M2 (13.6") on Tahoe 26.0 shut down because of low battery while I was playing a game called Deltarune, and when it charged back up, I turned it on, and the game was in the exact same state it was in before the laptop had shut down, as well as Chrome, Notes, Steam, and Activity Monitor, like I had done nothing more than shut the lid. I looked at activity monitor, and CPU usage for a very brief moment was at 100%, (idle at 0%). How the HECK is this possible?? It creeped the heck out of me. No "Your mac has shut down because of a problem" errors, just it running as normal. Unfortunately, I didn't take any screenshots, however I was recording my playthrough of the game, so I'll look at that footage.

MacBook Air, macOS 26.0

Posted on Dec 11, 2025 7:59 PM

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Posted on Dec 11, 2025 8:04 PM

That's normal. When your Mac is about to run out of battery power, it writes the current state to a .sleepimage file then shuts down gracefully (not a hard shut off). When you connect to power and boot back up, it restores the state from that .sleepimage file and you can pick up right where you left off.


When I've done this (not often and probably the last time was on Sonoma), I recall that during the wake-up, it showed the current state 'greyed out' on the display until it finished loading.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 11, 2025 8:04 PM in response to t622saA

That's normal. When your Mac is about to run out of battery power, it writes the current state to a .sleepimage file then shuts down gracefully (not a hard shut off). When you connect to power and boot back up, it restores the state from that .sleepimage file and you can pick up right where you left off.


When I've done this (not often and probably the last time was on Sonoma), I recall that during the wake-up, it showed the current state 'greyed out' on the display until it finished loading.

MacBook Air M2 restores state after low battery shutdown

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