When should i shut down my macbook air?

Contrary to another reply I would suggest never shut down your mac other than mandatory ones like a software upgrade.

Reason is:

1. When in Sleep, the laptop performs bare minimum tasks which won't hamper the battery in any way. You can check for yourself how much battery degraded overnight in sleep mode.
2. Mac or any other apple product learns how you use any particular app/software and on basis of that it reads/flushes out the memory used by that software. So when you wake up your M1 from sleep it would have some idea which software you might use and load that into memory and keep others running in the background. Now if you shut down your mac every night, in the morning it would load every software you open totally in the background which would require more computing power rather than just loading essential parts.
3. Over time this behavior would restrict your Mac about your usage behavior and limits its capability to load/unload memory efficiently. Do not worry that not shutting down would drown M1 in background tasks, it's is the job of the processor to worry about.

AdriCanti Said:

"When should i shut down my macbook air?: About a month ago I got a MacBook air. (2020, M1 Model, brand new). I use this laptop mainly for school and for streaming (Netflix, Youtube, etc.). I'm unsure of when to shut down my computer and when to just put it to sleep. My computer is typically inactive for about 10-12 hours during the night. If anyone can help me out that would be greatly appreciated"

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What to Do:

To avoid battery troubles, shutdown you Mac when there is no need to use it. Only use sleep if something is running in the background. Whenever you use your Mac, consider using a laptop cooler, including when in sleep mode.

As you see you will get multiple sides of this question. Bottom line is just do what you want and enjoy your MacBook Air.

Also, when the MacBook Air is plugged in, once the battery is charged, it discontinues charging the battery and only supplies power to the Mac. It does not constantly charge the battery once full charge is achieved.

FWIW, I have the M1 MacBook Air and keep it plugged into power the whole time when I am not using it away from my desk and I never "sleep it", I simply enable "Lock Screen" because it draws little power and also allows some background stuff to do its job when the system is idle.

One additional thing, I have a 2011 13" MacBook Pro that aside from Lock Screen (which didn't exist until recently), I followed the same procedure as I am now and actually did shut it down while still connected to power. Currently, it may only get 2-3 hours of battery runtime. but for a 10 year old computer with the original battery, that is pretty darn good.

tbirdvet wrote:

I shut mine down which will clear out caches and other temp files. Also with m1 you do not need any cooler as it generates very little heat

I agree with @tbirdvet.

I have a system monitor app for my M1 MacBook Air and under normal use in an environment 70-80 F, I have never seen any temp go above 100-120F with normal use. When processing my RAW photos, I will see "spikes" jump as high as 160-180F for the CPU but they rapidly drop back to the normal range.

If you were doing any work that would require all CPU cores and GPU cores to max out constantly for extended periods of time, like some serious video processing or extensive 3D rendering, rather than a cooling pad, you should probably get an M1 MacBook Pro instead which has an internal fan.

I shut mine down which will clear out caches and other temp files. Also with m1 you do not need any cooler as it generates very little heat