Comments on: Is It Better to Shut Down, Sleep, or Leave a Mac Turned On When Not Being Used?

By: Hide the Sleep, Restart, and Shut Down Buttons at the Login Screen of OS X

Hide the Sleep, Restart, and Shut Down Buttons at the Login Screen of OS X — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 18:37:46 +0000

[...] of power options, including sleep, restart, and shut down. While most home users will want to keep those options available, there are many instances where hiding the power buttons is desired to prevent the Mac [...]

By: Michael Smith

Michael Smith — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:21:11 +0000

My Bottom line on Sleep
After several Nightmares, One becomes paranoid of sleep.

By: Michael Smith

Michael Smith — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:12:39 +0000

Once you loose all your stuff (Murphy is clever:-)….
Good luck
power switch = russian roulette 12 chambers 1 bullet
sleep = russian roulette 6 chambers 2 bullets

Either Way you may never loose.
Experience beats logic many times and loosing drives during power cycles is one “Murphy’s” favorite gut wrenching tools
They usually don’t stop running when they are left on.
(if I just had not put it to sleep) Drives go into comas.

By: Michael Smith

Michael Smith — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:02:11 +0000

Exactly why we NEED girlfriends

By: Michael Smith

Michael Smith — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 11:55:47 +0000

My Comment Exactly but better

During the course of over 20 years, Many of my Many Macs (including mini) and others drives’ died in their sleep
RIP STUFF

and Ironically I rarely ever used sleep, when I decided to and thinking this is cool, one day it won’t wake up. (same cycle multiple times) You change system drives and your original drive is just frozen in a coma.

Leave on – shut down twice a month (just because).

By: Cerebro

Cerebro — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:57:06 +0000

I affiliate myself with the “sleep” camp. I have a mid-2010 MacBook Pro. I’ll put it to sleep every night before bed and every morning before I leave for work. Otherwise, I let it put itself to sleep when not in use. I only shut it down when I have to pack it up to travel somewhere or when I do system updates.

By: yewenyi

yewenyi — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 22:04:28 +0000

I put the mac to sleep mostly. But I am worried. We suffer frequent blackouts where we are. So Hibernate would be better. Now reading the comments above I have an idea as to how to hibernate it.

By: DG

DG — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 09:31:20 +0000

I can see how your failures might occur after a power failure but thats not necessarily due to the fact that you’ve powered it up and down regularly perse.
I’m in the UPS business and with some of our more important customers they are stupid/paranoid enough to avoid shutting down the unit. On those units that have hardware, (fans and contactors), failure usually occurs because of under exercise.
Contactor stick momentarily and the fans excessively wear the bearing race in one area only and when they cool and restart, well they don’t.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 02:08:02 +0000

I’ve just been on the phone with tech support over a fan noise issue that just started about of month ago after a year and a half of silent performance. The tech rep told me that being in sleep mode for extended periods of time was bad. By “extended” I told her that basically I sleep it over night, while I’m at work, etc. She didn’t specify whether the heating/cooling cycles and such were the culprit. I thought this was odd, but she was hinting that coming out of sleep mode might be wearing down the fan. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of other explanation for it. But, I have to admit it does quiet down a bit once it’s been running for a while.

By: Kelvin

Kelvin — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 13:55:15 +0000

Good to know. I guess I will be putting my Air to “Sleep” more than shutting down now.

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 23:09:45 +0000

Just turn off your internet connection

By: Krull

Krull — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 15:05:07 +0000

This is an interesting little topic. I’ll add my 2 cents to keep this comments section alive: I’ve had an iMac for a year now and I quickly learned that sleeping it was just annoying and made no sense, since it disconnected from the network and interrupted stuff like torrent downloads (all legal stuff, I promise). I’d rather keep the drives spinning and the connection active, so I put the Sleep slider to “Never” and I just sleep the display when I step away. I use it every day. On the rare occasion when I leave for a weekend or 5 days or whatever, I just leave it running with the display asleep, same as if I were in the house. I’ve never had any issues with this machine. Time will tell, of course, but so far so good. FWIW, I’ve been known to maintain a lean mean machine in the past: all my PCs and Macs have lasted well beyond their normal shelf life with plenty of fight left in ‘em.

By: Dennis Camera

Dennis Camera — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 08:50:17 +0000

I normally turn off my G5 when I don’t use it.
It’s power cunsumption is far too high to let it on constantly.

For short intervals I put it to sleep. Power consumption is still kinda high but it allows me to continue work where I left off.

And because of the SSD boot up takes less than a minute (which I can wait).

By: Justin

Justin — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 10:32:10 +0000

It’s not the Macro components, it’s the little components, especially capacitors, and IC’s. The heating and cooling of these stresses them like anything made from metal. This isn’t even something that is a revelation – I’ve heard many an engineer from companies (Epson, HP, Canon), all refer to this issue. Would I leave my machine on? No, I use standby to save energy, but anyone with commence knows that heating and cooling is what wears an electronic device out.

By: ben

ben — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:56:54 +0000

your an idiot, Your mac is not an industrial computer that goes through high temp change. It is always good to turn off your computer if your not using it for a long period of time. Especially if your computer is connected to the internet constantly you might want to shut it down. People please use common sense.