Whether you’re a veteran Mac user or a macOS Sequoia newbie, you’ve probably heard that Macs never need to be restarted. It’s a belief that goes back to the time when PC and Macs were represented by different actors and let me tell you: It’s a myth.
Now, some of you reading this will roll your eyes and say, “Well, of course.” But there are plenty of MacBook users who simply close their lid at the end of the day and reopen it the next morning. The only time they might consider a restart is when a macOS update forces them to.
I know 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 issue until I got my first Apple silicon Mac. Even though it had 16GB of RAM, twice that of the laptop it replaced, I had constant issues, with memory pressure causing regular slowdowns and crashes, and battery life suffering.
I thought maybe it was an M1 issue, being a first-generation chip and all, but the problem persisted when I upgraded to an M2 Pro machine a year later (also with 16GB of RAM). So last year I sprung for a MacBook far more capable than I needed: an M3 Max MacBook Pro with 36GB of RAM.
While I use my MacBook a lot, I’m not what you’d call a heavy user. I use Photoshop, Microsoft 365 apps, and Safari with roughly 20 tabs open at all times. But even on this monster of a machine, which runs very fast most of the time, it struggles to keep up after a couple of weeks without a restart. It’s most noticeable with the battery, which can fluctuate between hours no matter what I’m doing.
Foundry
As you can see in the screenshot above, last week my battery screen-on time averaged between 7-9 hours. This week, that was up to nearly 12 hours. The only difference? A restart on Sunday night.
Of course, we all know the benefits of a good restart. IT people have been suggesting it as a panacea for years and with good reason. It clears out any temporary junk that your machine has collected, gives apps a chance to reset, and kills any stuck background processes. But with Apple silicon Macs and especially MacBooks, the best reason to restart is RAM.
While Macs back in the day could go months without a restart and run just the same, today’s modern machines are far more complex. For example, the unified memory serves both the CPU and the GPU so it’s constantly in use. Even as I write this, nearly 30GB of my system’s 36GB of memory is in use. That’s not a flaw, it’s the way macOS works with Apple’s system architecture. It’s why everything feels so speedy and smooth, but it’s also the reason why things get bogged down after a while.
And it’s why a restart once a week or so will go a long way. Don’t worry, I won’t tell your PC friends.
