Friday, January 13, 2012

Thoughts on 44 days of uptime in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

Decided going into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend I would actually shutdown day job MacBook Pro instead of sleeping it like I had every other day for who knows how long. I only thought of doing this to save a battery charge & discharge cycle.

I wondered: "How long have I been running this instance of OS X 10.7 Lion?"

44 days was the answer Terminal command uptime gave. The MacBook Pro hadn't booted since November 30, 2011, a whole other year ago! Probably the last time I had powered it off because of Thanksgiving break.

I was kind of shocked for two reasons. I'm usually doing every 2 week beta OS updates or standard updates that require reboots. I skipped the current round because I really wanted to run stable after the OS X 10.7 Lion, Xcode 4.x, iOS 5 beta trifecta over the summer & fall. More surprising though, rebooting OS X has been completely deprecated in my mind as a useful activity unless forced to. To be fair of course, I've quit cycled a few heavy use apps (here's looking at you Xcode) over this stretch. But the system has remained perfectly usable and stable. If not for the holiday, I would have just slept the Mac like I had done before.

What a contrast to the issue I have with Windows 7 on my iMac that would have necessitated some task killing after a few hours if I was really using the OS day to day.

What I'm really curios about is iOS device uptime. I don't ever turn off or reboot my iPhone or iPad except to install a software update.

I marvel at the software engineering!