Prior to macOS Ventura, macOS has a wake, sleep, startup, and shutdown scheduling tool built in, located in System Preferences > Energy Saver, or if you are on a MacBook, System Preferences > Battery.
You could easily set up a schedule to make your Mac shut down at night and wake up each morning at a specific time.
Apple only lets you schedule two actions: a time to “Start up or wake,” which brings a Mac back to life whether it’s powered down or in sleep mode; and Sleep, Restart, or Shut Down. You can schedule the action to occur at a specific time each day, on weekdays or weekends, or even on a particular day. Unfortunately, you can’t schedule more elaborate combinations of options, such as restarting every Sunday night and shutting down at 6 p.m. during the week.
We’ll explain how to do that below.
How to make a Mac turn on and off in Monterey?
- Open System Preferences
- Go to Energy SaverOn a Mac BatteriesOn a Mac laptop.
- Locate Schedule (In older macOS versions, the Schedule button was located at the bottom of Energy Saver tab.
- Select your start-up time
- You can choose your sleep time.
Ventura: How do I schedule a Mac that turns off and on?
Do the same in VenturaThis is because Apple removed the scheduling options. It’s a bit more difficult. You may be hunting for them and assuming that it’s just that System Preferences is now System Settings and everything has changed – but the option is no longer there.
All is not lost. You can still schedule your Mac to turn off and on using Terminal. This one is for the professionals.
- Open Terminal
- Use one of the following pmset commands to enter:
pmset –g sched : Check the current schedule.
sudo pmset again wake M 8:00:00: Set your Mac to wake up at 8:00 every Monday.
sudo pmset cancel: Cancel the current schedule. - Press Return.
This article will provide more information on how to do it. Apple’s support page.
We also provide coverage How to set up your Mac to turn off and on separately.
Do you need to turn your Mac off and on?
This is an interesting question that we address here: Do I have to turn off my Mac every night? Our advice is yes you should – it means your Mac’s RAM will clear, among other things. You will save on your electricity bill.
But your Macs will still ‘Sleep’ even if you don’t shut it down. Macs have many features to reduce wear and tear on their internal components when they’re not in active use. Hard drives spin down, components go to sleep—a Mac laptop might even enter a hibernation mode that uses less energy than the normal sleep mode.
Powering down your Mac completely is more efficient and causes less wear, especially for desktop units that need to have a minimal flow of power to wake up from sleep.
Even if you don’t want your Mac to power down, you might want it to sleep without having to invoke that mode if you leave the computer without having it configured to do so in the Power view (Energy Saver preference pane) or Battery and Power Adapter views (Battery preference pane).
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