The Eclectic Light Company:
When did your Mac last start up? Mine’s only been running continuously now for nearly ten days, but unless something forces me to, I don’t intend restarting it for another couple of weeks, and only shut it down completely a couple of times a year. Which is better, then: a daily boot, or leaving your Mac on as long as possible?
Traditional arguments about this have been based on the last generation of computers, with internal hard drives. I’ve been leaving my desktop Mac running constantly for many years now, and started doing so largely to reduce the risk of hard drive failure. This iMac Pro no longer has internal storage which spins platters, so it’s time to reassess what I do.
This is a question as old as computers. For what it’s worth, my computer only gets shut down when it’s required by a software update.
“For what it’s worth, my computer only gets shut down when it’s required by a software update.”
Dito, been this way for a long long time.
Our team at work ran the uptime command on all our computers last week in response to our IT guy saying we should be shutting down a few times a week. The highest score was 80+ days. Our IT guy was hilariously livid.
I use it as an alarm clock, so yeah, it’s running all the time.
Sleeping computers and devices still consume energy.
Energy comes at a premium in carbon based energy systems. Turn the thing off if you’re not using it.
And, stop all the wireless charging nonsense. As us techies think it’s the coolest thing, it is at least 40% less efficient in charging devices.
green earth my foot.
With modern deep sleep modes, why ever turn anything off?
I don’t.
Did he say why he thought that was a good idea?
(Was this Windows, so long ago that “auto-update and restart” wasn’t a thing? Because THAT almost makes sense, back then.
These days … I can think of NO reason to restart unless an update mandates it or there’s Some Reason To Suspect some sort of deep OS issue has cropped up.)
40% less efficient for 5 watts is a who-cares?
I checked – a 27″ iMac from 2012 uses *one entire watt* of power in sleep mode.
(Other sources say the current iMac Pro uses 6.3 watts in sleep mode, while current non-Pro iMacs might use as much as 2 watts. I’d suspect the difference is keeping more ram refreshed, and possibly more wake hardware to check?)
This is not a green catastrophe, move on.
I’ve been seeing these articles about how it’s better to leave your computer on and awake all the time since before the Internet.
Leaving your computer on and awake all the time was a waste of money and false economy back then and it’s a waste of money and false economy now. There’s no real reason to turn it off, but let it sleep when it’s not being used. Two reasons:
Consumer hard drives for putting into a desktop system are designed to spin down, and have been since the last century. That’s why the ones intended to go into a NAS cost so much more.Keeping them spinning all the time might have been good advice 30 years ago when hard drives were far less reliable.
I’ve had computers set up so that they go to sleep when they are not in use ever since computers could go to sleep. I have never had a computer die on me due to solder joint failure. And I keep my computers for a long time – well over five years per PC, on average. This is really a total non-issue, especially for computers that are going to be retired in under 10 years.
The real culprit in unexpected computer death is overheating. Apple especially prioritizes silence over cool running, causing no end of sudden death in their devices. I always try to ensure that my computers idle around 30-40 degrees instead of 50-60 degrees, whether that’s by using better thermal solutions (in a PC) or by using apps like macs fan control (in a mac) to set a higher floor value for the fan. And no, my Mac does not wail like a banshee. It’s barely audible, instead of completely silent, and that is enough to make sure that it does not overheat at idle and stays within reason under load.
I think some of it is probably a hold over from historical practice, but especially for our development workflow restarting can clear a lot of things up (memory leaks, caches, etc.).
I turn lights off when I leave a room. And unless I’m running an overnight backup or software update, I turn off computers at the end of the day, too.
This. As long as I can remember, I’ve had to run apps like QuarkXpress, InDesign, or Illustrator whose memory demands on the system seemed to start making the OS a bit wonky towards the mid-afternoon. A restart generally cleared the problems.
40% less efficient is likely worth it overall is I need to replace a charge cable less often.