GoKawiilYou can finally power on a Mac remotely
Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely, without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction to Mac mini power button complaints.
While I agree the M4 mini's power button is in a really dumb spot, that's not why I care about this feature. The two bigger use cases for me have been a pain for years:
Remote Macs in a lab/CI environment, where I don't need them running 24x7, especially when someone accidentally shuts one down.
Macs mounted in road cases or portable racks. It'd be a godsend for them to turn on automatically as I set up for the event (e.g. at a concert or in live broadcast environments).
Macs gained 'Wake on LAN' support in Mac OS X 10.4, released in 2005. Here's the setting as it appears on my Power Macintosh G4 MDD:
This setting allows you to wake a Mac from sleep remotely, by sending it a magic packet. They also added 'reboot after power failure' in 10.4, which is great if you're okay hard-cutting power to your Mac so it'll boot when you turn power back on. That's fine for emergencies or when your UPS dies, but it's risky since it's not a safe shutdown scenario.
PCs had the ability to boot from power off (regardless of shutdown state) on most systems complying with Intel's ATX standard, since 1995.
Three decades later, with the release of macOS 26.5, Apple caught up: you can finally set your Mac to 'Always' boot whenever power is restored, regardless of how it was shut down.
I tested this feature on my M4 Mac mini, which is in the limited set of Macs supporting this feature:
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