Whether you are a veteran Mac user or a MacOS Sequoia beginner, you have probably heard that Macs never need to be restarted. It is a belief that dates back to the time when PCs and Macs were represented by different actors and let me tell you: it is a myth.
Now, some of you who read this roll your eyes and say: “Well, of course.” But there are a lot of MacBook users who just close their lid at the end of the day and reopens it the next morning. The only time they could consider restarting is when a macOS update forces them.
I know because I was one. I have been a Mac user since 2000 (Power Mac G4 Gigabit Ethernet) and I never got into the habit of restarting. It was never a problem before having obtained my first Mac Apple Silicon. Even if he had 16 GB of RAM, twice that of the laptop she replaced, I had constant problems, with memory pressure causing slowdowns and regular accidents and a lifespan of life The battery.
I thought it may be an M1 problem, being a first generation chip and everything, but the problem persisted when I went to a M2 Pro machine a year later (also with 16 GB of RAM). Last year, I arrived for a much more capable MacBook than I needed: an M3 Max MacBook Pro with 36 GB of RAM.
Although I use my MacBook a lot, I'm not what you call a heavy user. I use Photoshop, Microsoft 365 and safari applications with around 20 tabs open at all times. But even on this monster of a machine, which works very quickly most of the time, it has trouble following after a few weeks without restart. It is very visible with the battery, which can fluctuate between the hours, no matter what I do.
Foundry
As you can see in the screenshot above, last week, my battery screen time was on average 7 to 9 hours. This week, it was up to almost 12 hours. The only difference? A restart on Sunday evening.
Although Mac at the time could spend months without restart and run all the same, today's modern machines are much more complex. For example, the unified memory serves both the CPU and the GPU, so it is constantly used. Even if I write this, almost 30 GB of 36 GB of my system memory are used. This is not a defect, it is the way MacOS works with the architecture of the Apple system. This is why everything is so fast and smooth, but that is also the reason why things get bogged down after a while.
And that is why a restart once a week will go a long way. Don't worry, I won't tell your PC's friends.
