I’ve always made a habit of restarting my devices each week. In fact, I have a recurring weekly reminder to reboot all of my devices: MBP, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. This may not be necessary, but my devices run fast, and I seldom run into any issues.
Necessary? Perhaps not, but it does no harm either.
Hm, very questionable article. Me? I never restart my MacBook, only for OS updates. Then you can say: ‘But then you can’t tell if there’s a difference or not.’ That’s maybe true, although after a restart my machine works exactly the same as before.
I arguably say the opposite as the article describes. It’s just BECAUSE the transition to M-chips that the Mac became like the iOS-devices, who never really need a restart; just sleep and wake.
Nevertheless, if you think you find it beneficial, then you should keep doing what you do.
Yes, but I don’t do it every week.
I treat my devices the same. Just let them run, and they never feels sluggish or “in need of a re-boot”. Sometimes, I DO have to kill a few apps on iOS/iPadOS and a few heavy Mac software packages can get stuck on something requiring 150% CPU and 95% of the RAM. However, once the process is killed, there is no re-boot required.
So it’s just a matter of time before Apple will reboot our Macs for us? 
Finally! 
20 characters…
Unfortunately, this article just proves that someone can be a Mac user since 2000 and yet know so very little about how operating systems work. I almost feel embarrassed for the author to be honest.
I have never restarted my macs on any regular basis…until recently. I have heard several recommendations to do so (e.g., from the MGG guys), so I have started rebooting my 2019 iMac once a month (which seems like plenty to me). I don’t have any visible evidence that it improves things but it is plausible that over time resources get stranded in various ways that could, over time, affect performance (e.g., memory) and rebooting once a month isn’t that big a deal.
Interestingly, I haven’t started doing this with my M-series MBP – mostly because I use it so much less (i.e., mostly when I am away from home).
Both my wife & I have been rebooting our devices weekly for a few years now.
I don’t think it does any harm at all to reboot your Macs every week and in some edge cases it may even be beneficial. I also think that there’s the possibility of a psychological “clean slate” boost that some might benefit from.
I stopped rebooting my Macs around the M1 era began and have never looked back, but to each their own 
However this,
“Even as I write this, nearly 30GB of my system’s 36GB of memory is in use. That’s not a flaw, it’s the way macOS works with Apple’s system architecture. It’s why everything feels so speedy and smooth, but it’s also the reason why things get bogged down after a while.”
really perpetuates one of the most persistent myths out there. Your RAM should always be nearly 100% in use. Memory pressure is a different story, and what RAM is being used for is important, but the mere fact that your RAM usage is showing as being high is a good, not a bad thing, and has nothing to do with a computer, “… getting bogged down after a while.”
Speaking of which, I seem to be in good shape:
Question, why is this true: “Your RAM should always be nearly 100% in use. Memory pressure is a different story, and what RAM is being used for is important, but the mere fact that your RAM usage is showing as being high is a good, not a bad thing…”?
I’m not challenging you. I’m not a technical expert, so I’m genuinely curious. 
I don’t like to slip into using swap space but, with only 16GB of internal memory and running multiple apps along with image developing software, I often find myself doing just that and a quick reboot clears the swap.
But I have a new m4 Mac mini with 32GB of memory arriving for pickup in a week at my Apple Store. So. I’ll see if that’s enough to keep me from spilling out of internal memory.
I use my machine and let my machine help me to make my life easier, not the opposite.
The suggestion in the article is like we are going back to those Windows PC…
I take it that you do not run iStat Menus on your Mac? When I understand and pay attention to what’s going on in my Mac, I can often get better performance and longer service life. But that’s just me.
I restart my iPhone and Mac right after I restart my dialup modem, fax machine and mimeograph machine. Everything runs great afterwards.
I would only proactively restart if I had to use some unstable app that might mess up the computer at a bad time.
Imagine you have a secretary. Your secretary’s desk is always full of paperwork, but her performance doesn’t suffer. In fact, she’s incredibly efficient - and she always seems to have the most current documents right at hand, instantly, because they’re on her desk.
Now imagine you implement a “clean desk rule” that mandates your secretary put away each and every document immediately after it’s used. This yields a clean desk, but her performance drops because the most current stuff isn’t directly at-hand and has to be retrieved from the file cabinet.
The first scenario is RAM 100% utilized. The desk surface is already there - it doesn’t hurt to use it. The second scenario is what happens when people try to manage their RAM so that they have a bunch of it free. Sure, the desk is empty - but it’s not efficient.
Incidentally, I probably reboot once a week or so - but it’s not scheduled or anything. I periodically have glitches with random things that reboots seem to clear up.
Most recently, my Mac would just fill the hard drive. No idea what with, but the space was used, undetectable by DaisyDisk, and not recoverable without a reboot - at which time it all just vanished. It got to the point where I installed a Keyboard Maestro alarm to let me know when disk utilization spiked, so I could reboot to clear it up.
In my ideal world, I wouldn’t reboot more than once every month or two. I have *NIX servers that have uptimes of well over a year, and there’s no technical reason macOS should be any different.
+1
When a Novell NetWare server booted it would read the location of every file and directory on the drives into ram for this same reason. This meant that every time we added storage to the server we also had to increase the ram.
