Macs are like any other computer. Sometimes they won’t start up, and sometimes they won’t shut down. If your Mac is refusing to shut off, here’s how to shut it down anyway—and, hopefully, permanently fix the problem.
How to Shut Down Your Mac
Shutting down your Mac is as simple as clicking on the Apple logo on the menu bar at the top of your screen, then choosing “Shut Down…” followed by “Shut Down” in the box that appears. If you’re feeling particularly impatient, you can hold the Option button on your keyboard while clicking the menu option to prevent that confirmation box appearing at all.
Once you’ve started the shutdown process, you need to wait. Even if you leave the box checked to “Reopen windows when logging back in” you’ll still have to wait for your currently-open applications and windows to close before your Mac shuts down.
Assuming your Mac won’t shut down, it’s time to try a few more things.
Software Can Cause Shut Down Issues
Sometimes software can prevent your Mac from shutting down properly. Occasionally your Mac will notify you that “Application blocked shut down” and sometimes you won’t see any errors at all. First, try closing all of your applications by right-clicking (or two-finger clicking) on their icons in the dock, and choosing “Quit.”
You can force quit any apps that aren’t responding or won’t close. Right-click (or two-finger click) the app’s icon, hold the Options key on your keyboard, then click “Force Quit” and the app should close. You can then try shutting down again.
If this doesn’t work, it’s possible that a background process has crashed and is causing the issue. Open up Activity Monitor (hit Command + Spacebar then search for it) and click on the CPU tab. You can order the “% CPU” column by descending order to see if any apps are using a high amount of CPU power. If they are, click on them to highlight them, then click on the “X” at the top left to kill the process.
