Power on via keyboard?

[Varmann]

I know my previous wired Mac keyboards had a nice power on button. Is that something that is possible to map on a (wired) third party keyboard. I got a Keycron Q6 max, I tried using their mapping feature to map two available functions called "Power" and "PowerOSX" to the keyboard without luck.

Yes, I know a lot of people never turn off their Mac. My reason for it is 1) I want to turn off a several external devices when not using the Mac. 2) I have two cats that might wake the Mac and do weird things walking on the keyboard. I even have had one of them send an email once. 3) I do not often have power outages, but it happens maybe once a year or so. Sometimes for hours and my small UPS do not handle that.

 

[Chancha]

Those "Power" and "PowerOSX" are keycodes that simulates what used to happen when you press the power button a 2010's era MacBook *** while the Mac is on and running ***. It pops up menu window that has 4 buttons to click, like sleep / restart / shutdown / cancel. The same keycode is also used in some hotkey combos, interchanging with the eject keycode, such as the one for "sleep display" is "control + shift + power" or "control + shift + eject".

The problem is that once a Mac is turned off (hard shutdown), it requires physically pressing the power on machine to initiate the boot sequence, particularly the Macs with T2 chips and then Apple Silicon. I think the last keyboard Apple made with a functioning power button was on ADB, ever since the move to USB on the translucent USB keyboards the key was replaced with eject).

So no, you cannot do this directly. I myself was interested in this matter since I saw some remote button for PC that uses a PCIe card and was thinking if that could work on a Mac. It in in theory not impossible but you need lots of indirect hacks, with other electronic and even mechanical tricks (like actually a shaft pushing into the Mac Studio power button lol).