
- #HOW TO RESTART A MAC FROM TERMINAL HOW TO#
- #HOW TO RESTART A MAC FROM TERMINAL MAC#
#HOW TO RESTART A MAC FROM TERMINAL MAC#
On the laptop keyboard, press and hold Control-Option-Shift (your Mac might turn on). If this doesn’t reset the SMC, shut down. After a few seconds, press the power button to turn on your Mac. Press and hold the power button for 10 seconds, then release it. Then wait another 5 seconds and turn the Mac back on.
Desktop Macs: Disconnect the power cord (either from the Mac or from the AC outlet). After that, the procedure varies depending on the type of Mac you have. I’ve reset my Macs’ SMCs many times with no apparent ill effects, and on the occasion that did in fact turn out to be the solution to a problem.īefore you can reset your SMC, you must shut down your Mac. However, Apple doesn’t mention any negative consequences of resetting the SMC, nor any way to determine for sure if the SMC is glitchy without resetting it and noticing that the problem went away. (You can see a longer list on this Apple support page.) As with zapping the NVRAM, resetting the SMC to factory defaults may resolve these problems.Īpple says you shouldn’t reset the SMC without first trying other troubleshooting tasks, such as force-quitting problematic apps and restarting your Mac. If your SMC becomes confused, you could experience problems like excessive fan noise, slow performance even though Activity Monitor doesn’t show the CPU being overtaxed, apps that take forever to launch, batteries that don’t charge correctly, problems with sleep or wake, and so on. Yet another component of an Intel Mac’s hardware that stores crucial settings is the System Management Controller (SMC), a circuit that deals with power management, temperature monitoring and fan control, status lights, keyboard backlights, and a few other components.
#HOW TO RESTART A MAC FROM TERMINAL HOW TO#
Apple has the full details on how to revive or restore a Mac with Apple silicon with Apple Configurator 2. You need another Mac with the Apple Configurator 2 app installed, a USB-C cable that supports both power and data (used to connect the two Macs), and an internet connection. It’s a procedure that’s a little more complicated than what you might be used to. If your problems persist, you can try reinstalling the M1 Mac’s firmware. Disconnect all USB devices (except your keyboard, if it’s a wired keyboard), hold the power button down until the Mac shuts off completely, and then press it again and immediately hold down Command-Option-P-R. The most likely cause is that your Mac isn’t registering the key presses due to wonkiness with a USB device. If you hold down Command-Option-P-R at startup and you see nothing but a gray screen that doesn’t change for several minutes-no Apple logo, no progress bar, no second startup chime-don’t panic.
Then check the Startup Disk, Display, and Date & Time panes of System Preferences to make sure they’re set the way you want them. If you have an older Mac that chimes at boot, hold down the keys until you hear a second startup chime. Then let go and allow your Mac to continue starting normally. Keep holding down those keys for about 20 seconds.
Press the power button, and as soon as you power up the laptop, hold down Command-Option-P-R. To reset your NVRAM, you use exactly the same procedure you once used to reset PRAM. If you would like the system to inspect the NVRAM on an M1 Mac, shut it down completely, wait a few seconds, and then power up the Mac. There isn’t a key combination that you hold down while starting up the Mac. On M1 Macs, the NVRAM is tested during the startup process, and if the system detects a need to reset, it will. NVRAM corruption is fairly uncommon, but if your Mac seems to take forever to figure out the correct boot disc, starts up with the wrong screen resolution, or suffers from weird audio problems (like there’s no sound whatsoever or the menu bar’s volume control is grayed out), a reset of the NVRAM might help-and it’s quick and harmless. NVRAM serves approximately the same purpose as PRAM, but instead of storing a dozen or more pieces of information, it now contains just a few: your selected startup disk, speaker volume, screen resolution, time zone, and-if your Mac has crashed recently-details of the last kernel panic.
Modern Macs no longer use PRAM they instead use something called NVRAM (NV for non-volatile). So you could press a key sequence at startup to reset (or “zap”) the PRAM, returning it to default, factory values. If the values in this memory got out of whack for one reason or another, your Mac might not start up correctly or might exhibit any of numerous odd behaviors afterward. The P in PRAM stood for “parameter” (the RAM was just RAM-random access memory), and it referred to a small amount of special, battery-backed memory in every Mac that stored information the computer needed before it loaded the operating system. Back in the day, the standard list of quick fixes for random Mac ailments always included clearing the PRAM.