I’ve done a lot of searching and from what I can discover the prior command “sudo nvram AutoBoot=%00” apparently no longer works and in some cases it has reportedly “bricked” the machine.
I bought the new M3 Pro MBP to reenter the Mac laptop world and I’m still working on my “re-education” but having the laptop auto start when the lid opens is non-intuitive and is an issue when I’m asked to demonstrate the laptop is “off” but it starts when I open the lid.
Has anyone resolved this issue? Perhaps there is a nifty utility that toggles it off and on?
I guess that if it starts on opening to show it is off, you’ll have to hold the power button depressed for ten seconds to interrupt the startup. Hopefully, someone will know how to prevent that.
I have read a lot of complaints about this on the Apple Community. One person noted that AutoBoot is no longer a setting in nvram, but auto-boot is present, and is set to true. It was suggested that sudo nvram auto-boot=false might work, but there were no replies saying it had worked. Given the old nvram command can brick a machine I’m reluctant to try it out.
Wonder what leads them to suggest people use the shell and sudo to do what could also have just as well been an option in Settings (like so many others related to power settings).
I agree with you, that this should be a system setting. But that having been said…
I suspect they don’t actually want users to have this choice, but they were receiving enough complaints that they felt they had to do something. This allows those who insist on (or may require) the feature to enable it, without exposing it to the rest of the customer base who (they presume) don’t care that much.
Alternatively, this option might have been present for a while (at least since the release of Sequoia), and someone in support posted the information in order to help their own staff more easily deal with questions/complaints from users. Which might imply that a settings panel will be coming soon and this note is just a stopgap while that setting gets developed, tested and added to the next release.
I’m sure there are other possibilities, but these are the two that come to mind at the moment.
I was excited to see the Support Note, and I immediately set the BootPreference on my M1 MacBook Air to 01 (prevent startup only when opening the lid).
It worked as advertised, though not quite as expected. It did, indeed, prevent the machine from starting up when opening the lid. However, pressing any key on the keyboard will power up the machine. I was hoping that only the “power” key would power up the machine so that it would be easier to clean the keyboard.
I see that a post to the Michael Tsai blog shares a workaround that works on some, but not all Apple Silicon laptops.
A magic shutdown keyboard sequence that disables boot-on-keystroke for a single shutdown. No good for daily usage, but may be good for keyboard cleaning or to keep it off for servicing while you’re opening the case before the battery is disconnected.
The sequence is:
Press and hold the left-Ctrl, left-Cmd and right-Shift keys for at least 7 seconds.
While holding them, now press the power button and hold for 7 seconds until the computer shuts down.
At this point, you will need to press the power button or close/open the lid for the next startup.
This allegedly works for a 16" M1 MacBook Pro, but not on an M3 MacBook Air.
Personally, I don’t like this because it appears to be a force-power-off sequence, which would prevent macOS from flushing its caches to the file system.
Keyboard cleaning can be done without shutting down and disabling any-key startup: use KeyboardCleanTool from folivora.ai - Great Tools for your Mac!. It’s free and works a treat.