Should you shut down your Mac every night? Usually not

For most people, no: there is no need to shut down a Mac every night. Letting it sleep is how Apple designs Macs to be used day to day. A sleeping Mac uses very little power and wakes in a moment. Restart it about once a week, and shut it down when you won't use it for several days.

Shutting down every night doesn't harm a modern Mac either, so if you like the ritual, keep it. It just buys you less than most people expect, as you will see once you know what sleep is doing.

What happens when your Mac sleeps

When a Mac goes to sleep, your apps and documents stay open in memory. The display turns off, the processor stops doing your work, and power use drops to a trickle. Open the lid or press a key and everything is where you left it, usually before you have sat down properly.

• A MacBook sleeps when you close the lid. You can also choose Apple menu > Sleep.
• A desktop Mac sleeps from the Apple menu, or on its own after a while without use.
• MacBooks keep a safety copy. By default, most MacBooks also save what is in memory to the disk as they go to sleep. If the battery runs flat overnight, the Mac can restore your session from that copy when you plug in. If you are curious, pmset -g in Terminal lists a line called hibernatemode, and on most MacBooks it reads 3, which is that behavior.
• Some background work carries on. Depending on the Mac and its settings, it can pick up mail and iCloud changes while asleep, and wake briefly if another device on the network needs it.

So sleep is not a lesser version of switching off. It is a deliberate low-power state, built for exactly the gap between one workday and the next.

Is it better to shut down or sleep your Mac?

Each one has a job. Here is how they line up in practice.

For clearing out problems, a restart does everything a shutdown does and more conveniently, because it turns itself back on. How often you should restart your Mac covers the weekly rhythm and the signs it is time.

Does sleeping overnight drain the battery?

A little. A MacBook asleep on the desk with the charger unplugged usually loses some charge overnight, and one that is shut down loses almost none. After a long stretch asleep, many Macs drop into an even deeper low-power state, which is why a MacBook can sit closed for days and still wake with charge left.

If you leave it plugged in, it doesn't matter either way. Charging overnight is fine for the battery, and macOS manages it: on Macs with Optimized Battery Charging, it may hold at 80 percent until it expects you to need the rest.

Neither sleep nor shutdown wears the battery. Heat does, and that is the main practical case for shutting down before travel. A sleeping MacBook in a closed bag can occasionally wake, and a Mac working inside a bag has nowhere to put its heat. If you have ever pulled a warm laptop out of a backpack, that is what happened. A shutdown rules it out.

When the battery drops more than it should

If your MacBook loses a lot of charge overnight while asleep, something may be keeping it awake or waking it up. Two places to look:

• Activity Monitor. Open the Energy tab and look at the Preventing Sleep column. Any app marked Yes is holding the Mac awake.
• Terminal. pmset -g assertions lists what is currently stopping sleep, with the name of each process.

Quitting the culprit before you close the lid usually fixes it. A restart clears the rest.

When shutting down is the better choice

Most nights, sleep wins. A few situations call for a full shutdown:

• Several days away. If the Mac will sit unused over a long weekend or a holiday, shut it down. It saves power and you come back to a fresh start.
• Travel. For the reasons above, a shut-down MacBook is the safest thing to put in a bag.
• Long storage. Apple's advice for storing a Mac laptop for a long time is to leave the battery about half charged and shut it down, rather than storing it full or empty.
• Privacy on the move. With FileVault turned on, a Mac that has been shut down needs your password before anything on its disk can be read. A sleeping Mac is still protected by your login password, but it is already running. If a laptop could be lost or taken on a trip, shutting down first is the stronger choice. To check that FileVault is on, look in System Settings > Privacy & Security.
• Cleaning or moving it. Shut down and unplug before you wipe the screen or carry a desktop Mac to another room.

What about updates at night?

Overnight is a good time for updates, as long as the Mac is asleep rather than off. A Mac that is shut down can't download or install anything.

With automatic updates on (in System Settings > General > Software Update, click the info button next to Automatic Updates), macOS downloads updates in the background and can install some by itself. When an update needs a restart, macOS usually asks first, and in recent versions it may offer to try installing later that night. If you take that option, save your work, leave the Mac asleep rather than shut down, and keep a MacBook plugged in.

Some people prefer to wait a few days before installing big macOS updates. Whether to install macOS updates right away goes through when to wait and when not to.

Does shutting down every night harm a Mac?

No. Modern Macs start up quickly, and there is no good reason to think a daily power cycle wears anything out. It just doesn't help much either.

What you give up is convenience. Every morning starts with logging in and reopening apps, and any work the Mac would have done overnight, such as finishing a download, syncing or installing an update, waits until you are back. If you like a clean start each morning, that trade may be worth it to you. If you don't think about it at all, sleep is the easier habit.

A simple routine

This covers almost every Mac, almost all the time:

1. Every evening: save your work and close the lid, or choose Apple menu > Sleep on a desktop. Leave a MacBook plugged in if you like.
2. Once a week: restart. Monday morning works well, before the day fills up.
3. Before a trip or a long break: shut down.
4. When something misbehaves: restart, don't wait for the weekly one.

The weekly restart is the step people drop, because a Mac that sleeps every night never offers a natural moment for it. Notchpals can notice for you. Of the ten kinds of character that take turns in your Mac's notch, the Tech care ones count how long the Mac has run, and once that passes a week, Gumdrop, a gumball robot, appears during the working day with a suggestion. It never restarts anything itself.

GumdropRestart when it's handy. Fresh start, fresh flavor. I'll wait!

The evening half of the routine is about you more than the Mac. A Sleep character in your crew saves its bedtime visit for nights when the time you set in Notchpals has passed and you are somehow still typing. Nod, a koala who naps most of the day and recommends it, has a fair view of how much ceremony the Mac needs at night.

NodMm. It's past bedtime. Lid down, lights off. I'll walk you to the door.

The Mac will be fine asleep until morning, and so, ideally, will you.