Hi Jay,
Well some do and some like the sandisk extreme portable ssd do not. And others have a light that blinks slowly just because it’s connected (not related to writing). My voyager stays blue when there is power and flashes red when writing, so I guess this is unreliable way to check in my opinion.
One thing to think of with a shutdown sound is “how do you define the final split second?”.
This is a much harder question than you might think, the speakers still have to be on, as does the storage. Plus you need something on the OS that can determine that this is the only thing it has left to do, do it, and then shutdown those things needed for the sound. And then you’ll still have that waiting period before the lights finally power off.
One reasons why shutdown and power off sounds fell out of favour is they were misleading—the device wasn’t powered off immediately afterwards, you could still unplug a hard drive that was being used, etc.
Hi RosemaryOrchard - Thanks for the explanation. I was thinking that this would be part of MacOS where apple has the best access to everything internal and that they would be able to know the events and processes that were leading up to the final shutdown, but I am only guessing of course.
So skipping the Audio related issues, then I guess the best way to be sure we are not bricking external SSD’s is tomalmy simple idea to eject drive first or MacGuyMI to use the caps lock. as far as karlnyhus I keep my screen mid brightness so I do not see the change to full black screen.
I keep my 13-inch M1 MacBook Air screen brightness at level 6 or 7 out of 16 and can see the backlight go off.
I will turn mine up to see if I can also tell - thanks
One possible solution is to write an AppleScript that ejects all connected disks and then tells the computer to shut down. Thus instead of using the Shut Down command you would execute this script.
That would work too. 
Well, look at what I found!
That YouTube comment comes straight from a former Microsoft employee who left the company in late 2014.
Sounds like you’re arguing with @RosemaryOrchard. 
She is correct in identifying the difficulty of producing an optional audible shutdown sound that is the actual last gasp of a Mac.
Exactly. Sounds like we are in agreement.
Sorry, I actually agree with her. I just wanted to point out what a Microsoft employee said.
