How to set the power scheduler that disappeared in macOS Ventura

Across years of releases of Mac OS X and macOS, Apple offered a power-scheduling feature in the Energy Saver, Battery, or similar places across System Preferences. You could set a time of day for your Mac to start up (or wake, if sleeping) or shut down. That time could be set to every day, every weekday, every weekend day, or a given day of the week.

With the release of macOS 13 Ventura, the interface to those features disappeared. Were too few users making use of them? Were they irrelevant with the current energy efficiency of modern desktops and displays and the predominance of laptop sales? It’s unknown.

(If you use a UPS, or uninterruptible power supply, to provide emergency backup power to your Mac in the event of a power outage and have it connected via USB to your Mac, the UPS settings remain 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 upgrading to Ventura, it remains in effect but can’t be modified through the new System Settings.
• If you have a reason to set a schedule of some kind, you have no obvious way to do so.

Apple fortunately only removed the graphical user interface–it kept the underlying hardware feature and support in place, accessible through the command line in the Terminal app, which is in Applications > Utilities. The command is called pmset, and it requires “superuser” privileges to make changes. (You must be logged in to a macOS account that has administrator privileges active. Terminal prompts you to enter the administrator password for your account after hitting Return following a superuser command.)

If you want to clear out a schedule you set before Ventura, enter the following:

sudo pmset repeat cancel

This may cancel settings used by apps like Carbon Copy Cloner and other software that can offer to wake your Mac to perform backups and similar activities. To check those schedules before running the above command, enter:

pmset -g sched

macOS provides a list of entries that may require interpretation. 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 set schedules from the command line, too. If you want to enable a shutdown schedule, say Tuesday to Saturday at 11 pm:

sudo pmset repeat shutdown TWRFS 23:00:00

In the above, the days of the week are clustered, and the time has to be specified as a 24-hour clock entry. (The tool has you set 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 further details for more elaborate schedules and settings.

This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Joseph.

We also address this issue in How to set the power scheduler that disappeared in macOS Ventura.

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