39
votes
Is it bad to keep running a Mac mini for a week?
No, that's not bad in any conventional manner.
I run Mac Minis for months and years without powering them off (except the occasional reset for security updates).
- 75.6k
32
votes
Does the command `reboot` hurt a Mac computer?
It’s not like pulling the power plug because it sends various signals like SIGTERM which closes services and daemons. User applications with unsaved data may get lost, but they’re not arbitrarily ...
- 97.5k
30
votes
Accepted
Is it necessary to shutdown and unplug the power cord of Mac Mini every night?
While there are many opinions on what you should do and when you should do it there is no technical reason why you need to unplug your Mac when shutting it down at night. In fact you don't even need ...
- 22.7k
18
votes
Are OS X shutdown cause and sleep cause numbers listed/explained anywhere?
The precise meaning of the codes is not publicly documented, although according to @grgarside's website for Shutdown Causes, the causes for the ones listed in the question are:
5
Correct Shut Down....
- 12.6k
18
votes
Accepted
MacBook Pro 15" Retina mid 2014 random shutdowns
https://outluch.wixsite.com/rmbp-crash
Disable SIP (csrutil disable from Recovery)
Move AppleThunderboltNHI.kext
sudo mv /System/Library/Extensions/AppleThunderboltNHI.kext \
/System/Library/...
grg♦
- 197k
17
votes
I want to power off multiple Macs everyday at 23:30 (11:30 pm)?
As patrix has pointed out in a comment, you can set up any Mac to start up or wake up, and sleep or shut down at specific times, via the System Preferences -> Energy Saver -> Schedule... settings.
...
- 1,792
16
votes
Is it bad to keep running a Mac mini for a week?
We've been using about 15 Mac Minis as a production servers for 8-10 years.
They regularly kept 60-70% CPU for a good part of the workday and also ran maintenance/backup tasks at night.
None of them ...
- 301
15
votes
Accepted
Catalina crashing at shutdown: "watchdog timeout: no checkins from watchdogd"
You can temporarily make things better by looking for this line:
com.apple.driver.AppleSMC(3.1.9)[EB9D605D-85B1-3506-8B2E-ABD195817A4F]@0xffffff7fa6c9e000->0xffffff7fa6cbcfff
My theory is SMC is ...
- 274
14
votes
Is it necessary to shutdown and unplug the power cord of Mac Mini every night?
As a general rule, you don't need to unplug your computer if your electrical installation and power supply provide power which complies with standard power quality rules.
However, if you have low ...
- 776
13
votes
13
votes
I want to power off multiple Macs everyday at 23:30 (11:30 pm)?
You can use pmset to do this and it will be a "once and done" solution.
Once you issue the pmset command, it will shutdown/startup/wake on the schedule you set; you won't have to create a script that ...
- 97.5k
12
votes
Accepted
Harmful to never put to sleep / shut down a mac?
You can safely leave your Mac powered on all the time.
Safe and Harmless
There is no practical damage or harm that will occur because the Mac is constantly running. Use your Mac as best suits your ...
- 42.9k
12
votes
NO LOGINS: System going down ... stuck and won't shutdown
Go to Finder. In the menu bar click Go, select Go to folder, type /etc/ and press Enter. In the opened window find the "nologin" file and delete it. It's fixed.
- 121
12
votes
Accepted
Shut down system without superuser permission
Using pmset or any system tools to perform shutdown requires sudo.
You can ask macOS to shut down from the user's account by telling System Events using AppleScript. You can run AppleScript from the ...
grg♦
- 197k
10
votes
Are OS X shutdown cause and sleep cause numbers listed/explained anywhere?
So the kbase articles on System Error codes date back to the days of PowerPC processors, which apparently needed a lot more bits to report all of the potential hardware errors that could cause a ...
- 101
10
votes
Accepted
Considering that my Mac is usually on clamshell-mode, should I let it sleep always or should I shut it down?
Considering that my Mac is usually on clamshell-mode, should I let it sleep always or should I shut it down?
Let it sleep.
You will cause no damage to your Mac by allowing it to sleep while in closed-...
- 97.5k
9
votes
Accepted
MacBook Pro black screens and shuts off after a few minutes' use
As discussed on the MacRumors forums thread, Help! Updated to macOS 10.12.4, MBP randomly shuts off, it is likely that AppleThunderboltNHI.kext is the culprit:
So if you disable (move out of /...
- 106
8
votes
Accepted
How to prevent "Do you want to terminate running processes" window when shutting down?
Terminal Preferences → Profiles, select the profile you're using (probably marked Default) in the sidebar on the left, then choose Shell. Under ‘Ask before closing:’, choose Never.
grg♦
- 197k
8
votes
Catalina crashing at shutdown: "watchdog timeout: no checkins from watchdogd"
I finally solved this issue on my M1 and Intel Macs.
It was caused by certain apps installed with home-brew, and interaction with the kernel.
Details here.
TLDR: Running gem installed by brew causes a ...
- 1,316
6
votes
Accepted
iMac randomly shuts down
Chances are this is a bad power supply board.
Shutdown error codes can be negative or positive values; negative being hardware and positive being software.
A "0" code is right there in the middle ...
- 97.5k
6
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between shutdown command and doing shutdown from apple menu?
From the shutdown man page:
Upon shutdown, all running processes are sent a SIGTERM followed by a
SIGKILL. The SIGKILL will follow the SIGTERM by an intentionally inde-
terminate period of time. ...
- 1,737
6
votes
Why won't my new MBP actually shutdown when I click "Shutdown..." in the "apple" menu
According to Apple this is expected behavior on the newest SSD MacBook Pros (mine is an all SSD 2Tb 2018 model, 2.9 GHz Intel Core i9), so don't fight it. By according to Apple I mean during an Apple ...
- 61
6
votes
Catalina crashing at shutdown: "watchdog timeout: no checkins from watchdogd"
I also had this kernel panic on two identical devices running 10.15.5 and it drove me mad.
So I just did a couple of hours of trial and error and kextload und kextunload, plugging and unplugging and ...
- 161
6
votes
Accepted
Prevent SIGTERM & SIGKILL when using shutdown on macos
Instead of shutdown -s you can use one of
pmset sleepnow
osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to sleep'
- 97.1k
5
votes
How would I identify what's causing my Mac to permanently hang on shutdown?
My first response whenever something is broken in Mac OS X is to try a safe boot. Safe boots perform several repair tasks in addition to safe booting your mac without extensions or startup items ...
- 51
5
votes
Accepted
My Mac prompts to shut down randomly
The most likely cause is your keyboard is failing; specifically there is an issue with your power button where it intermittently causes it to stick.
The shutdown dialog box you are seeing is a result ...
- 97.5k
5
votes
Accepted
How graceless is shutdown?
Absolutely prefer shutdown -h to pulling the power cord out of the wall. shutdown provides an opportunity for macOS to cleanly exit important underlying processes and flush file caches to storage.
...
- 42.9k
5
votes
Accepted
Computer shutting down (dirty) randomly
I actually believe I've found a fix for this.
I started greping through all the log files from when this issue started happening looking for a pattern. As it turns out the pattern is that the ...
- 241
5
votes
Accepted
Mac on High Sierra won't shutdown cleanly: black screen with mouse
Restarting in safe mode allowed proper shutdown:
Start your Mac, then immediately press and hold the Shift
key. The Apple logo appears on your display.
Release the Shift key when you see the
...
- 243
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible