How to Force Restart a Mac That Has 'Stuck'

mac-frozen

Although Macs are known for how stable they are and for having a very low failure rate compared to those of the competitor's system, the reality is that sometimes there are situations in which the system crashes and the computer is literally "frozen", Come on, neither forwards nor backwards.

In those cases, we have to know how to act to force restart. There are few times that we are going to find that what is completely blocked is the system. Normally the application with the problems is blocked, which we can force to restart individually. However, the completely hung system situation also occurs.

When a Mac computer is totally frozen, you will see that it does not attend to any of the actions, neither keyboard shortcuts nor mouse clicks, so we will have to intervene in a 'brute' way about the team. Now, depending on the type of Mac you have, the button that we must press is located in different places.

In the first MacBooks, the power button was located in the aluminum body of the computers, outside the keyboard, so to forcibly restart this model of computers we must press and hold that power button for more than five seconds until the Mac shuts down completely.

In MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Retina, however, the keyboard has evolved and as these computer models do not have the Superdrive drive, the key that was intended for the drive to remove the discs has now been converted into the power key of the Mac and by consequently the external button to the keyboard is eliminated. In these cases, we must press and hold the key on the keyboard corresponding to the ignition for more than five seconds.

button-macbook

Finally, in the iMac, in the Mac mini and the Mac Pro we have to go to the back of them because they have a power button which must be kept pressed in case you want to forcibly restart the machine.

button-imac

button-mac-mini

It should be noted that this forced shutdown process does not have to happen on a regular basis, since it is very difficult for the OS X system to be completely blocked. With this we want to tell you not to abuse these types of shutdowns because the machines suffer. If you are in a situation and need to force restart a Mac on a regular basis, reinstall the Mac and update it. If the problem persists, take your Mac for service.


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  1.   marisobrador said

    thank you very much, i just need to do this on a mac

  2.   C Pastrana said

    Just what I needed, I just turned my laptop off and on, Thanks

  3.   Ignatius Vargas said

    Good afternoon.
    I have an iMac with OS X El Capitan I am updating the OS and it asks me to Restart I click to restart and it does not relapse in fact when I click to turn off the computer it does not turn it off I always have to turn off with the shutdown button but this way not update ends. How can I correct this problem?
    Thanks and good day.

    Ignacio

    1.    Andrew said

      the same happens to me!!! Did you know what to do? What did you do?
      Thanks and good day

  4.   Michael Bernal said

    Good day,
    Perform the procedure indicated and others that I found on the web but nothing that works, apparently the MacBook is blocked, since the keyboard and the capital letter are lit, but it does not give any video, I press the power button to rescue and it seems that it turns off, but again I press it and it remains the same without giving any video, even though the keyboard is illuminated and the shift key turns on.

    What can be?