Over the years of Mac OS X and macOS releases, Apple has offered a power scheduling feature in Power Saver, Battery, or similar locations in System Preferences. You can set a time of day for your Mac to start up (or wake up, if it’s sleeping) or shut down. This time can be set to every day, every day of the week, every day of the weekend, or on a given day of the week.
With the release of macOS 13 Ventura, the interface for these features is gone. Too few users were using it? Were they irrelevant given the current energy efficiency of modern desktops and displays and the dominance of laptop computer sales? It is unknown.
(If you use a UPS or uninterruptible power supply to provide emergency backup power to your Mac in the event of a power outage and connect it via USB to your Mac, the UPS settings are still available by clicking on Inverter options In System Parameters > Energy saving.)
This removal of Ventura has two conditions for current Mac users:
- If you set a schedule before upgrading to Ventura, it remains in effect but cannot be changed through the new system settings.
- If you have a reason to set a schedule of some sort, there’s no obvious way to do it.
Fortunately, Apple only removed the graphical user interface – it kept the underlying hardware functionality and support in place, accessible via the command line in the Terminal app, which is found in Applications > Utilities. The command is called pmset, and it requires “superuser” privileges to make changes. (You must be logged into a macOS account with active administrator privileges. Terminal prompts you for your account’s administrator password after pressing Return following a superuser command.)
If you want to erase a schedule you set before Ventura, enter the following:
sudo pmset repeat cancel
This may override settings used by applications such as Carbon Copy Cloner and other software that may offer to wake your Mac to perform backups and similar activities. To verify these schedules before running the above command, enter:
pmset -g sched
macOS provides a list of entries that may require interpretation. For example:
[0] wake at 03/06/2023 21:59:40 by ‘com.bombich.ccchelper’[1] wake at 03/07/2023 00:10:40 by ‘com.bombich.ccchelper’[2] wakeorpoweron at 03/06/2023 09:45:22 by ‘com.getchannels.dvr’[3] wakeorpoweron at 03/06/2023 19:26:00 by ‘com.getchannels.dvr’ [4] wakeorpoweron at 03/07/2023 09:48:00 by ‘com.getchannels.dvr’
In the above, the list shows upcoming events associated with low-level files associated with applications. com.bombich.ccchelper is part of Bombich Software’s Carbon Copy Cloner. com.getchannels.dvr is part of the Channels DVR software.
You can also set schedules from the command line. If you want to enable an off schedule, say Tuesday through Saturday at 11:00 p.m.:
sudo pmset repeat shutdown TWRFS 23:00:00
In the above, the days of the week are grouped together and the time must be specified in 24-hour format. (The tool allows you to set the days of the week with the following capital letters: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.)
At the terminal prompt, you can type man pmset (or click this link on a Mac) and read more details for more elaborate times and settings.
This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by igamesnews reader Joseph.
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