Should you leave your Mac running all the time?

“When did your Mac last start up? Mine’s only been running continuously now for nearly ten days, but unless something forces me to, I don’t intend restarting it for another couple of weeks, and only shut it down completely a couple of times a year,” Howard Oakley writes for Eclectic Light Company. “Which is better, then: a daily boot, or leaving your Mac on as long as possible?”
“Traditional arguments about this have been based on the last generation of computers, with internal hard drives. I’ve been leaving my desktop Mac running constantly for many years now, and started doing so largely to reduce the risk of hard drive failure,” Oakley writes. “This iMac Pro no longer has internal storage which spins platters, so it’s time to reassess what I do.”
“Some users even question the value of putting a display to sleep: over the working lifetime of a computer like an iMac, never putting the display to sleep is extremely unlikely to cause any persisting faults in its display,” Oakley writes. “Stories about images becoming ‘etched’ into displays go right back to the days of green screen CRT screens, and even then were probably largely urban myths. For the record, though, my never-sleeping iMac Pro does put its display to sleep, if only to stop the cat from sitting up watching its ‘screensaver’ at night.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: No, that wasn’t an urban myth, green screen CRTs left on static images would etch terribly.
Do you leave your Mac on all the time?
If so, do you use Computer Sleep and/or Display Sleep?
Our Macs are all set to “Never” on Computer Sleep and 5 Minutes on Display Sleep.