How to Restart a Mac

If your Mac computer suddenly becomes frozen, or begins to act slow and sluggish, restarting your Mac can help clear its memory and process items at a normal speed upon bootup. There are several methods you can use to restart your Mac, which can be useful in the event you are unable to access certain commands or programs as a result of computer issues.

Method 1

Method 1 of 6:

Using the Apple Menu

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Your Mac will restart immediately.^{[1]
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Gonzalo Martinez
Computer & Phone Repair Specialist
Gonzalo Martinez is the President of CleverTech, a tech repair business in San Jose, California founded in 2014. CleverTech LLC specializes in repairing Apple products. CleverTech pursues environmental responsibility by recycling aluminum, display assemblies, and the micro components on motherboards to reuse for future repairs. On average, they save 2 lbs - 3 lbs more electronic waste daily than the average computer repair store.

Gonzalo Martinez
Computer & Phone Repair Specialist

Restart your Mac weekly to save memory. Restarting a Mac once a week is recommended to free up memory on your computer. You can use Activity Monitor to check how much memory is being used by other applications and decide when is a good time to restart the Mac. This way, you can use all of the memory that is actually on the computer.

Method 2

Method 2 of 6:

Using the Shutdown Window

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Your computer will immediately restart itself.

Method 3

Method 3 of 6:

Using Hot Keys

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Your computer will restart instantly without asking you to verify your command.

Method 4

Method 4 of 6:

Using the Terminal Application

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” The Terminal window will display on-screen.
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Type the following command into Terminal: “shutdown -r now”.
- Alternately, you can type the commands, “reboot” or “reboot -q”.
Your Mac will begin the shutdown process and restart immediately.

Method 5

Method 5 of 6:

Performing a Hard Reset

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For example, if you are moving files between a flash drive and the hard drive, wait until the files have finished moving.
This process should take between two and three seconds.

Method 6

Method 6 of 6:

Restarting Using Remote Access

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Open an Internet browser and go to https://google.com.
” Google will display your IP address at the top of search results.
“ssh username@ip_address.”
” Your computer will then restart.

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Tips

If your computer has become completely frozen and will not allow you to access menu items on your Mac, use the hot keys method outlined in method #3 to restart your computer. The hot keys method will not require you to use any menus to confirm that you want to restart your computer.

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Warnings

Do not use the hard reset method outlined in method #5 if you are currently accessing your computer’s hard drive. This method could result in physical damage of your computer’s hard drive.

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Do not use the Terminal method outlined in method #4 to restart your computer on a regular basis. This method does not give any running processes the time they need to quit normally and save settings, which could result in eventual degradation of the operating system.

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