You’re sometimes advised to shut your Mac down, wait a while, and start it up again, instead of restarting it. Are they different, and if so when should you use them?
restart
You discover your Mac has either restarted itself and is waiting for you to log in, or has simply shut itself down. How to find out why this happened, in Intel and Apple silicon.
How to save the panic log safely. Looking up the immediate cause of the panic, getting OS details, what to see in a memory leak, what task resulted in the panic, and 3rd party kernel extensions.
Sometimes, a cold boot fixes problems not fixed by a simple restart. Why, and which problems is it better at fixing?
Did your Mac take a brief trip into Recovery after the 13.2.1 update? What is authenticated restart, and how could you use it? What does fdesetup do?
From killing a process, through a regular restart, to Recovery and a bootable external recovery disk, all you need to know about fixing your Mac in macOS 11 and 12.
Step through how to work out when, how and why a kernel panic occurred in the unified log, using Ulbow.
How to tell apart unexpected quits, WindowServer crashes, kernel panics, and more – and what to do about them.
What they are, how they’ve changed, how to work out what went wrong, and how to deal with them. No Mac should ever experience a single panic.
What’s the quickest way to tear down all user apps and services? Or to force a restart? The answer is in the command tool launchctl.
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