Are you waiting for your Macbook to shut down? Are you facing the circling rainbow wheel on your screen? It isn't delightful when you have to wait for a long time for your Mac to shut down so you can turn it on again and get back to your work. Well, it's a sign that you must now take action into your hands.
Suppose you see a significant delay for your Mac to turn off. You can, fortunately, Force shut down your Mac manually to get back at your work soon. The wheel on the waiting screen is also called Mac's wait cursor, and it indicates that while shutting down the application, the application might have crashed. Any work you were doing, if not saved, would disappear after the Force quit the application. Force quitting the application can fix the unresponsive application behavior.
However, while unresponsive, a regular quit of the application won't do. You will have to force quit the application.
You can figure out which app isn't working simply by going through all the opened applications and checking them. You won't be able to use the frozen apps. This article discusses different solutions on how to force quit on Mac.
How to Force Quit on Mac From Apple Menu
- Firstly, click on the Apple icon at the top left corner of the menubar.
- From the menu, select the Force Quit option. A prompt will appear on your screen with the list of all opened and running applications on your Mac.
- From the list, look for the apps that have (not responding) along with their titles. These are the apps that are causing problems, unresponsive and frozen. Select the not responding app that you want to force quit and click on the Force Quit button.
- Click on the Force quit button again to confirm that you want to quit the app; shortly, the app will close.
How to Force Quit on Mac From the Dock
- Click through all the opened apps from the dock and find the app that is causing issues. Right-click on the app and press the Control key on your keyboard while right-clicking.
- Then press and select the Option key. The menu will appear on the doc. There click on the Force Quit option to close the problematic application.
How to Force Quit on Mac Using Keyboard Shortcut
Suppose your whole Macbook is frozen and unresponsive. You are unable to use the mouse cursor to open up the Force Quit option. Then you can utilize the keyboard shortcut to force quit the frozen application. Follow the steps mentioned below to know-how:
- Press the Command key and the Esc key on your keyboard at the same time. This keyboard shortcut is similar to Windows's Ctrl+Alt+Delete function.
- Shortly after the keypress, the Force Quit Applications will open up. There select the frozen app from the list and click on the Force Quit button.
- Another pop-up will appear on your screen asking you if you want to force quit the application. Click on the Force Quit button again to confirm and close the application.
How to Force Quit on Mac Using Activity Monitor
Activity Monitor is a Macbook utility to monitor all the running processes on your Macbook and other details such as CPU, Memory, Disk Usage and Network. You can also utilize the Activity Monitor utility to force quit the unresponsive applications on your Mac. to do so, follow the steps we have mentioned below:
- Firstly, click on the magnifying glass icon from the top right of the menubar to open up Mac Spotlight Search.
- Now type for Activity Monitor in the spotlight search tool and press enter to open the Activity Monitor application.
- On the Activity Monitor application, ensure that you are on the CPU tab, and then from the list of the running process, find the frozen and unresponsive processes, click on the app to select the app.
- After selecting the app, you want to close, click on the Close Button, which has an X icon located at the top right of the window to force quit the desired application. If there are multiple unresponsive apps, you can select various apps from the list by pressing the Command key and selecting the apps by a right-click from a mouse.
Conclusion
If you are stuck with a frozen or unresponsive app on your Mac, it is best to quit the application and open the app again. However, the standard way of closing the app might not work sometimes. Well, you can force quit an app using a Command + Esc keypress on your keyboard. Moreover, you can bring up the application menu from Apple menubar or the dock and Force Quit the application.
