Whether you ’re a veteran Mac user or a macOS Sequoia newbie , you ’ve probably heard that Macs never need to be restart . It ’s a belief that die back to the time when PC and Macs were lay out by different actors and rent me tell you : It ’s a myth .
Now , some of you read this will roll your eyes and say , “ Well , of course . ” But there are mickle of MacBook users who simply close their palpebra at the final stage of the day and reopen it the next morning . The only meter they might consider a restart is when a macOS update forces them to .
I fuck because I was one . I ’ve been a Mac user since 2000 ( Power Mac G4 Gigabit Ethernet ) and have never made a habit of restarting . It was never an takings until I make my first Apple Si Mac . Even though it had 16 GB of RAM , double that of the laptop it replaced , I had constant issues , with retentivity pressure causing regular slowdowns and crashes , and barrage life suffering .
I conceive maybe it was an M1 issue , being a first - generation chip and all , but the problem persisted when I upgraded to an M2 Pro auto a year later ( also with 16 GB of random memory ) . So last twelvemonth I sprung for a MacBook far more adequate to than I call for : an M3 Max MacBook Pro with 36 GB of RAM .
While I utilise my MacBook a wad , I ’m not what you ’d call a threatening user . I use Photoshop , Microsoft 365 apps , and Safari with more or less 20 tabs open at all times . But even on this monster of a machine , which feed very tight most of the time , it struggles to keep up after a twain of hebdomad without a restart . It ’s most detectable with the battery , which can vacillate between hours no matter what I ’m doing .
Foundry
As you’re able to see in the screenshot above , last week my battery screen - on time average out between 7 - 9 hour . This week , that was up to nearly 12 hours . The only remainder ? A restart on Sunday night .
Of course , we all jazz the benefits of a estimable restart . IT multitude have been indicate it as a nostrum for years and with unspoilt reason . It clears out any irregular junk that your motorcar has pull together , gives apps a fortune to readjust , and kill any stuck desktop process . But with Apple atomic number 14 Macs and particularly MacBooks , the best reason to resume is RAM .
While Macs back in the day could go months without a restart and track down just the same , today ’s modern machines are far more complex . For object lesson , the interconnected memory serve both the processor and the GPU so it ’s invariably in use . Even as I write this , almost 30 GB of my system of rules ’s 36 GB of memory is in use . That ’s not a flaw , it ’s the way macOS works with Apple ’s organization architecture . It ’s why everything feels so rapid and smooth , but it ’s also the grounds why thing get bogged down after a while .
And it ’s why arestart my Maconce a week or so will go a recollective fashion . Do n’t worry , I wo n’t tell your PC acquaintance .
