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iMac 5k appears to "restart" after 6+ hours of sleep. Is this happening to anyone else?

Z

zooby

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 2, 2008
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I rarely turn my Macs off, so after working on my iMac, I'll let it sleep at night. Well, after starting it in the morning, I notice it restarts fully. Everything is there again, it's just annoying that it reloads all the safari tabs and programs. Is this normal though?

I already tried resetting the PRAM/NVRAM and starting in safe mode. Only seems to happen after 10.13.4.
 
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zooby said:
I rarely turn my Macs off, so after working on my iMac, I'll let it sleep at night. Well, after starting it in the morning, I notice it restarts fully. Everything is there again, it's just annoying that it reloads all the safari tabs and programs. Is this normal though?

I already tried resetting the PRAM/NVRAM and starting in safe mode. Only seems to happen after 10.13.4.
Click to expand...

Yes, this issue is also happening to my iMac after being upgraded to 10.13.4.
 
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chabig said:
Don’t you mean waking it? How exactly are you doing that?
Click to expand...

Yes, waking it from sleep. I usually just press a key on the keyboard. Now it is completely restarting as if I were to have restarting with the open windows option on.
 
zooby said:
I rarely turn my Macs off, so after working on my iMac, I'll let it sleep at night. Well, after starting it in the morning, I notice it restarts fully. Everything is there again, it's just annoying that it reloads all the safari tabs and programs. Is this normal though?

I already tried resetting the PRAM/NVRAM and starting in safe mode. Only seems to happen after 10.13.4.
Click to expand...
I've had the experience where mine tuns off after several hours of sleep. I don't "catch it" in the act; I just come down in the morning and the Mac is off. I forget which update fixed this.
 
not yet on my base model 2017.. but when installation kinda scary, restart a few times..
 
zooby said:
Yes, waking it from sleep. I usually just press a key on the keyboard. Now it is completely restarting as if I were to have restarting with the open windows option on.
Click to expand...
Pressing a key when the machine is off won’t restart the machine. I’d say your having some kind of wake problem, not a restart problem.
 
Truefan31 said:
Check the ram? Have you ever added any or used 3rd party ram?
Click to expand...

Nope.

chabig said:
Pressing a key when the machine is off won’t restart the machine. I’d say your having some kind of wake problem, not a restart problem.
Click to expand...

My machine isn't off (or supposed to be off) - that's the issue. It's restarting on its own.

Update... I tried to use my AirPods with my MBP and it was previously connected to my iMac, so it "woke" it and I see an orange checkmark with my login. I tried inputting my password in and it doesn't start or do anything. Have to force shut it down... This happens every time, not just with the AirPods.
 
I'm experiencing something similar... except it seems like a full blown crash. If the computer sits for prolonged periods of time it crashes into a fully off state. I'll come back tap the keyboard a few times, wiggle the mouse, and nope... dead.

I then power on the iMac and Chrome will usually be sitting there saying it didn't shut down correctly and ask if I want to reopen tabs. It seems to be okay for a few hours at a time, but it definitely crashes every night. It's a pretty big bummer right now I'm unsure how to diagnose.
 
Had this happen to me twice this week (so far), on a brand new iMac Pro 5K I purchased on Monday. Been shutting down overnight, rather than sleeping, but put it in sleep for a couple of hours tonight while I ate dinner, came back in the room expecting it to wake (on the presence of my Apple Watch), to find it awaiting a full password login (which you'd get after a full restart). Logged in to find the 'your iMac was shut down because of an issue' message, with a log report too complex and long for my limited understanding ... also on 10.13.4. There's no new or different user-installed software on this new machine vs what was on my old 2012 27" iMac, which never had a crash in 6 years. A bit bummed by it, really. Was anticipating 'spectacular' for almost £5,000, and what with this and the minor gripes like self-resetting screen brightness, I'm a bit wary...

UPDATE: Having read this and a couple of other forums on the same topic, I just killed all regular apps (but left background processes etc running), and hit 'sleep' just for the duration of taking a shower. Came back to find the iMac Pro all off; hit a key and had my external LaCie thunderbolt hard drive spin up for 15 seconds, but a black screen on the iMac. Hit the space bar a dozen times, and got the Apple boot logo, then the re-start logon screen, then the 'shut down because of an issue' message again. Other forums have people saying it's an issue on their Macs with Citrix installed. I don't have Citrix on mine - no apps running at all, and it's crashing. Many people talking about this being an issue in the initial and all subsequent versions of High Sierra...
 
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Do you have any external devices connected to the iMAC at all?
Maybe test the iMAC by letting it sleep overnight with no devices connected and no apps running? Just rules out those factors....
 
Ifti said:
Do you have any external devices connected to the iMAC at all?
Maybe test the iMAC by letting it sleep overnight with no devices connected and no apps running? Just rules out those factors....
Click to expand...
yes have

USB C 1 = monitor
USB C 2 = bootable SSD Western Digital

USB 3.0 = Logitech Mouse
USB 3.0 = FAN put below SSD Western Digital
USB 3.0 = just cable for lightning
USB 3.0 = just cable for android phone.

** full port :p
** i'm also using keyboard magic and apple magic 2
IMAC 2017 base line

** no problem sleeping.
 
Ifti said:
Do you have any external devices connected to the iMAC at all?
Maybe test the iMAC by letting it sleep overnight with no devices connected and no apps running? Just rules out those factors....
Click to expand...

I've definitely done this. Absolutely no apps running. No peripherals. I let it sit overnight and it was completely off in the morning. This is a pain and totally disrupts my normal routine. I now have to shut all apps down just to make sure I'm not going to lose any work in the event of a crash.
 
flyingshark said:
I've definitely done this. Absolutely no apps running. No peripherals. I let it sit overnight and it was completely off in the morning. This is a pain and totally disrupts my normal routine. I now have to shut all apps down just to make sure I'm not going to lose any work in the event of a crash.
Click to expand...
to close all app.. i'm pretty lazy.. i just want to open next day and continue work..
 
Was just a suggestion. Seems like its been tried and tested anyways!

Have you tried contacting Apple Support? Let them run some diagnostics and see if they come up with anything?
Guess its just a process of elimination at this point?
 
Had this issue with my 2015 iMac 27" i7. Ran perfectly fine when I got it running El Capitan, but when 10.11.4 update showed up, I started getting spontaneous reboots, usually at night with the machine unattended and sleeping. There were a few threads on Apple support forums at the time and the issue seemed to be limited to high end iMacs with the i7 processor. The only thing reported that was common to all reporting the issue was searching counsel logs for "previous shutdown" and all machines affected reported previous shutdown cause -128, whatever that means.

Apple support forums blamed software, blamed hardware, blamed the machines, blamed everything except the OS. But the solution to the problem turned out to be 10.12.0 Sierra, the successor to El Capitan. After installing it the unexpected spontaneous reboots stopped.

I had some mostly minor but annoying and frequent issues with High Sierra, so I rolled back to Sierra. So can't comment on the latest version, but if the machine was running perfectly fine before the update, then the update is the likely culprit. Hopefully it won't take until the next major release of macOS for Apple to get it sorted, but that's exactly what happened before
 
its not a proper fix to the restart problem, but if you want to try a strange temporary bandaid, if you have a copy of the game Civ VI, try opening it, starting a game, leaving it minimized, and see if your machine restarts.

I have a totally different machine, a 2011 imac which I cant tell if its the graphics card (again), the power supply (favourite), a fan problem (techtool detects one) its definitely not the OS as I fresh installed,

anyway it randomly restarts with no error. I thought the connection was it normally did it when I came in from work and it hadn't been doing anything, often it will restart every 2 or 3 minutes, very annoying.


then it would be fine all night, but I have realized its that I normally play Civ VI, and when that is open it never ever restarts. there is something in Civ VI that stops even screensaver kicking in, and I am guessing whatever it is the mac thinks, for example... fan temperature problem, rules say I should restart, but Civ VI blocks anything like that from happening.

very weird but potentially useful for some.
 
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The latest security update didn’t fix this. So don’t bother with it if you were experiencing crashes before.
 
chabig said:
Pressing a key when the machine is off won’t restart the machine. I’d say your having some kind of wake problem, not a restart problem.
Click to expand...
My iMac Pro has gotten to the point where it shuts down almost immediately after a monitor deactivation or sleep.

As you can imagine, my productivity on this machine has ground to a halt with the latest "update" for High Sierra.

Reinstalling as I write this. NOT HAPPY with what was a 98% functioning machine a month ago.
 
I realize I'm the broken record about this, but the best way to solve "wake from sleep" problems at night is to just shut the computer down, and restart the next morning.

There's nothing that "cleans it out" like a fresh start.
 
You could try "last reboot" and/or "last shutdown" in the Terminal. This should tell you the last date & time your machine restarted.

If this does show your iMac has been shutting down, you could check the Console to see what activity is showing just in the leadup to that time.
 
Fishrrman said:
I realize I'm the broken record about this, but the best way to solve "wake from sleep" problems at night is to just shut the computer down, and restart the next morning.

There's nothing that "cleans it out" like a fresh start.
Click to expand...
I’ve done plenty of cold reboots, and it’s done nothing for this problem. I was literally walking away from the machine to use the bathroom, and finding that it had rebooted in my absence. Leaving all three of my IPS monitors on constantly is a no-go, since that will ruin both the iMac Pro’s screen and $3K worth of external monitors with burn-in very quickly.

Currently running a clean re-install of 10.13.4, and I haven’t seen a sleep reboot... yet (Knocks on wood).
 
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