Turn off the Mac mini at night or leave it running?

[nod]

Hi,

I would like to know if people shut of their Macs at night. I always left my iMac on. The studio display is what concerns me. I don't want to shorten the life span of the display. FWIW, the display on my 27" iMac was just as good as the studio display.

Thank you

 

[rbpeirce]

I leave my mini running 24 hours but I turn off the display if I'm not using it. Every once in a while it will turn itself back on during the night. I don't know why. I just live with it.

 

[IWT]

I too have the M2 Max Studio Extra coupled with Apple Retina Studio Monitor.

I always leave the Mac powered on, but arrange for the Monitor to go into "sleep" mode after 10 minutes - that's day and night.

All this can be set up in "System Settings".

Ian

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Your Mac doesn't need to be shut off daily. Just leave it running and set the sleep time to something decent and any connected displays will go off after that and that'll be fine.

The only time I shutdown my machines is when I'm going to be away for any extended period of time. And the other scenario is the machines are rebooted for updates.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

Hi,

I would like to know if people shut of their Macs at night. I always left my iMac on. The studio display is what concerns me. I don't want to shorten the life span of the display.

This is one of those questions that has sparked intense debate for decades.

In favor of shutting down your Mac at night:
- saves energy
- if you have a rotating disk hard drive, their lifespan is rated in "mean time before failure" (MTBF).
That's the number of hours that your RDHD is left "on". Leaving your Mac on all night leaves your drive spinning unless you set your Mac to have it spin down.
- Monitors (that aren't set to sleep at night) have an finite life span.
- some Mac models run very hot, and heat is the enemy of magnetic storage media, and possibly solder joints and other components.
- Unlike mainframe computers, personal computers really aren't designed (robustness) to be left running all the time. (This, by the way, was what an Apple representative said when someone from my Macintosh User Group contacted Apple and asked about this.)
- Macs benefit from being restarted occasionally to purge stale RAM caches, and reset certain parameter files.

Points against shutting down your Mac every evening:
- Hot and cold heat cycling can lead to cold (i.e. cracked) solder joints
- Your Mac will be ready to go in seconds when you come back to it
- Mechanical switches can wear out and stop functioning properly

With the demise of rotating disk hard drives, I see it as a wash. You can't go far wrong either way. Just make sure that your display sleeps at night if you leave your Mac on and asleep all night, and make sure to do a full restart occasionally.

 

[Kenney]

Do you have power outages or "Spikes" momentary outages? Even with power strips this can damage computers and monitors. As noted before: heat is the enemy, in a home environment with "Home" usage, again this shouldn't be an issue. Monitor "Burnin" isn't much of a concern with screen savers. Powering off to clear cashes and check for updates is a good idea, how often is up to you. Just remember its your $$$.

 

[Jimmysb]

I leave my Mac mini powered up, but find about once a week I need to power it off due to memory usage from "VTDecoderXPCService". Having been away from home, I powered up yesterday and this is sitting at 395 MB, but in a week this can be as high as 3.2 GB. Having seen what it is for, and closed associated apps, it does not seem to ever go down in usage only up.

 

[ferrarr]

I also leave my Mac Studio on all the time. Restarts or shut downs when needed. My display goes off when not in use.

 

[RadDave]

Do you have power outages or "Spikes" momentary outages? Even with power strips this can damage computers and monitors. As noted before: heat is the enemy, in a home environment with "Home" usage, again this shouldn't be an issue. Monitor "Burnin" isn't much of a concern with screen savers. Powering off to clear cashes and check for updates is a good idea, how often is up to you. Just remember its your $$$.

First, I leave my computer equipment on, of course in 'sleep mode.' Even if we leave on a short 2-4 day trip (rare at our age these days) - have a doorbell cam that requires our Wi-Fi to be on, and which I can monitor from an app on my iPhone. Second, for my expensive computer and AV electronics, I've been using UPSs (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for decades.

The largest one (shown below, 1500 VA) is attached to my iMac and modem-router (separate units) - if a storm hits us, esp. an electric one, the backup power allows me to shutdown the computer and other equipment attached to different UPSs in the house. If we lose power (just a week ago), my modem-router will keep us on internet for 3-4 hours, often adequate for restoration of power. So my recommendation is to forget the cheap power strips and invest in one or more BackUP UPSs for your expensive electronics. Dave
.

 

[Rod]

Never turn mine off either.

 

[Backlighting]

Every night I put my MacMini to sleep and turn off the monitor. I've been doing this for several years.

 

[jpdemers]

The Mini with Apple silicon uses next-to-no power when it's idle. I leave mine on, but with the monitors set to sleep. Memory leaks and other digital detritus do tend to accumulate over time, so an occasional reboot (say once a week) will help keep it humming along.

 

[Groovetube]

The only reason I shut my Mac Studio down is because there’s 4 universal audio racks daisy chained and they run pretty warm with each with quad or octo sharq processors for dsp.
Otherwise, the Mac Studio is cool as a cucumber and quiet itself, so ordinarily I’d likely not shut it down.

 

[chevyboy60013]

I typically do not shut down any of my mac's, basically just letting my iMac and Mac mini go to sleep, and when I am not using my MacBook Pro I just close the lid and let it go to sleep, even when I am done with it for the day and it is plugged in charging. The exception to the rule is if severe weather is forecasted, likely I know better about that than the local tv weather people being involved in severe weather forecasting and storm chasing for my county emergency management agency is I completely shut down my iMac and Mac mini then, and if severe weather is forecast or occurring over night when I am not out chasing, as I use my MacBook Pro for radar and weather data.... if it is not charged it is shut down to conserve remaining battery power or if it is charged it is shut down and left unplugged from the power supply to prevent power surge damages. The only other times they are shut down is when they are needing to be rebooted for an update or to clean their displays.

 

[nickyr]

+1 in the leave it on camp.

my mini is set up as a sort of server, with 4 ssd's attached containing all my media, movies, music, etc so i can access it using any other computer in the house - handy for when i waker up in the small hours and look for something to do!!