Over the years of Mac OS X and macOS releases, Apple provided a power scheduling feature in the Power Saver, Battery, or similar places in System Preferences. You can set a time for your Mac to start up (or wake up if it’s sleeping) or shut down. That time can be set to any day, any weekday, any weekend day or a specific day of the week.
With the release of macOS 13 Ventura, the interface for those functions is gone. Did too few users use it? Were they irrelevant with the current energy efficiency of modern desktops and displays and the predominance of laptop sales? It is unknown.
(If you are using a UPS or uninterruptible power supply to provide backup power to your Mac in the event of a power outage and have connected it to your Mac via USB, the UPS settings will still be available by clicking UPS options in System settings > Energy saver.)
This Ventura removal results in two conditions for current Mac users:
- If you set a schedule before you upgrade to Ventura, it remains in effect, but cannot be changed through the new system settings.
- If you have a reason to set up some kind of schedule, you don’t have an obvious way to do it.
Fortunately, Apple has only removed the graphical user interface – it has retained the underlying hardware function and support, accessible via the command line in the Terminal app, which is located 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 administrative privileges. Terminal prompts you to enter the administrator password for your account after you hit return after a superuser command.)
To clear a schedule you set before Ventura, enter:
sudo pmset repeat cancel
This can override settings used by apps like Carbon Copy Cloner and other software that may offer to wake your Mac to perform backups and similar activities. To check those schemas before running the command above, enter:
pmset -g sched
macOS provides a list of items that may need to be interpreted. 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 apps. 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. To enable a shutdown schedule, Tuesday through Saturday at 11 p.m. say:
sudo pmset repeat shutdown TWRFS 23:00:00
In the above, the days of the week are clustered and the time must be specified as a 24-hour clock input. (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 a Terminal prompt, you can type man pmset (or click this link on a Mac) and read more details for more detailed schedules and settings.
This Mac 911 article is an answer to a question from Macworld reader Joseph.
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