Comment by Delk

> I’m still at where when I connect external hard drive or SSD via USB, use it and then eject it, I shut down the MacBook Pro completely before I unplug the cable. Just in case.

That sounds... a bit paranoid? At least on Linux (Gnome), if I click to "safely remove drive" it actually powers off the drive and stops external mechanical drives from spinning. No useful syncing is going to happen anyway once a hard drive no longer spins. A modern OS should definitely be reliable enough that it can be trusted to properly unmount a drive.

> For the laptops that I actually carry around and plug and unplug things to etc, normal amount of time between reboots for me is somewhere between every 1 and 3 days. Cold boot is plenty fast anyway, so shutting it down after a day of work or when ejecting an external HDD or SSD doesn’t really cost me any noticeable amount of time.

I personally don't reboot my laptop that often, but it's not because of a boot taking too much time. It's because I like to keep state: open applications, open files, terminal emulator sessions, windows on particular virtual desktops, etc.