I have my MacBook Air to prompt for password upon awakening. I have noticed that sometimes it prompts me for my password immediately after I wake it...... and other times it takes a while or I have to press a key to make the prompt come up. Why is this?
When it's asleep for long enough it goes into hibernation mode to conserve more battery power. This means saving your session state to the SSD and powering off just about everything. Then when you open it, it powers everything back on, and reads the saved state off the SSD. This takes a little longer than normal wake-up.
I think you can customize this in System Preferences > Energy Saver (not sure, though, since my MacBook Pro doesn't use this feature).
djackmac said:System preferences/security. Under general tab (1st tab) uncheck "require password after sleep or screensaver begins".
jbarley said:Amie, if you want you can revert to the older style simple sleep method and at the same time save yourself a large chunk of disk space (size=your installed memory).
Check out this link one of many, for assistance.