I was talking to Jeff Butts at Mac Observer yesterday and he mentioned something I hadn’t noticed: macOS Ventura removes the option to schedule an automatic reboot from the graphical interface. I actually went back a version and couldn’t find it there. I guess since I don’t have servers I hadn’t noticed this oversight. Or I guess it’s more emblematic that it’s not an oversight, it’s how the use of the Mac has shifted over the years.
The old power management system preference features are still there – Jeff wrote an article how to use pmset to set the automatic reboot feature at https://www.macobserver.com/tips/how-to/how-to-schedule-your-mac-to-shutdown-or-reboot-in-macos-ventura/.
Around 13 years ago, I wrote an article on pmset to do wake on magic packets (womp). The full list of settings that can be managed (per the man page) includes:
- displaysleep – display sleep timer; replaces ‘dim’ argument in 10.4 (value in minutes, or 0 to disable)
- disksleep – disk spindown timer; replaces ‘spindown’ argument in 10.4 (value in minutes, or 0 to disable)
- sleep – system sleep timer (value in minutes, or 0 to disable)
- womp – wake on ethernet magic packet (value = 0/1). Same as “Wake for network access” in the Energy Saver preferences.
- ring – wake on modem ring (value = 0/1)
- powernap – enable/disable Power Nap on supported machines (value = 0/1)
- proximitywake – On supported systems, this option controls system wake from sleep based on proximity of devices using same iCloud id. (value = 0/1)
- autorestart – automatic restart on power loss (value = 0/1)
- lidwake – wake the machine when the laptop lid (or clamshell) is opened (value = 0/1)
- acwake – wake the machine when power source (AC/battery) is changed (value = 0/1)
- lessbright – slightly turn down display brightness when switching to this power source (value = 0/1)
- halfdim – display sleep will use an intermediate half-brightness state between full brightness and fully off (value = 0/1)
- sms – use Sudden Motion Sensor to park disk heads on sudden changes in G force (value = 0/1)
- hibernatemode – change hibernation mode. Please use caution. (value = integer)
- hibernatefile – change hibernation image file location. Image may only be located on the root volume. Please use caution. (value = path)
- ttyskeepawake – prevent idle system sleep when any tty (e.g. remote login session) is ‘active’. A tty is ‘inactive’ only when its idle time exceeds the system sleep timer. (value = 0/1)
- networkoversleep – this setting affects how OS X networking presents shared network services during system sleep. This setting is not used by all platforms; changing its value is unsupported.
- destroyfvkeyonstandby – Destroy File Vault Key when going to standby mode. By default File vault keys are retained even when system goes to standby. If the keys are destroyed, user will be prompted to enter the password while coming out of standby mode.(value: 1 – Destroy, 0 – Retain)
I think Apple’s right – most of these don’t need to be in System Settings. I mean, imagine if there was a checkbox or slider for the wake on modem ring option. That was useful when some of our Macs ran as a fax machine. Not that most of that stuff ever worked very well in the first place. But it’s worth noting that these still exist. I haven’t tested all of them but the ones I did test do still work. Some I couldn’t test, and some are made pretty irrelevant or are recommended against due to Power Nap, as Rich Trouton points out at https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/power-nap-power-management-settings-and-filevault-2/. To quote Rich: “pmset destroyfvkeyonstandby causes issues on Intel Macs because Power Nap tries to wake up the laptop, the waking process would be interrupted by the fact that the disk was locked, and then a failsafe kicks in to shut the Mac down.”
Point is: ymmv (but fun to remember some of these still exist).
