How to determine uptime on a mac computer

Modern computers on a Mac OS are equipped with fast SSDs, which allow you to restart your computer in just a few seconds. Despite this, many users do not restart their computers sometimes for months, sending them to the sleeping mode when they are not needed. This leads to the fact that the memory cache is clogged, and the computer starts to work slower. Sometimes, the user may be surprised finding out for how long he did not restart his computer. There are several ways to view this information on a Mac.

How to determine the running time of a mac computer

There are two ways to see for how long your Mac computer was running without rebooting.

Via system information

The easiest way implies that you are aware that your computer has a section with system detailed information. Finding it yourself is quite difficult, and you need to know where it is located.

Click on the apple icon in the upper left corner of the screen. You are going to see a drop-down menu, listing the main ways to interact with the computer. As you can see, the top line is “About this Mac”.

Hold down the Option (alt) button on the keyboard, and then the “System Information” line will appear instead of the “About this Mac” line. Click it.

You are going to see the section with details about your computer. Here you need to select the “Software” section in the left menu, where the last line indicates the time the computer has been running since the last boot.

VIA TERMINAL

Every Mac has some kind of Windows command line analogue, called the Terminal. It allows you to execute various commands, including requesting system information. If you know appropriate commands, you should be able to get a lot of useful information about your computer through the Terminal.

To start Terminal, press Command + Space, and enter “Terminal” in the search box, and then select the utility found.

In Terminal, use the uptime command to display information about the system activity time. Details will be displayed in a line with timing.

How to determine the total running time on a mac

In some cases, for example, when buying a used computer, it is useful to find out for how long it has worked with the former owner. Often, sellers are silent about this. You can easily find such information through the “Terminal”. To do this, run it and enter the ac –p command.

After that there will be displayed the uptime information. As you can see in the screenshot, it will be displayed separately for each user, as well as the total in the total line. The time is displayed in hours. As you can see at the screenshot the total usage time of our Mac is 2840.01 hours.

How to determine the latest mac reboot dates

Another parameter that may be useful to know in some situations is the dates of the last restarts of your computer. To get this information, you will have to use Terminal again. After calling it, enter the last reboot command in it, and then you are going to see a list of recent Mac OS computer restarts.