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restart

Why did my Mac restart or shut itself down, and where’s the cause code?

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.

April 17, 2025 Macs, Technology

Save and read the panic log

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.

April 15, 2025 Macs, Technology

Cold boot or restart?

Sometimes, a cold boot fixes problems not fixed by a simple restart. Why, and which problems is it better at fixing?

June 9, 2023 Macs, Technology

macOS 13.2.1, authenticated restart and fdesetup

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?

February 20, 2023 Macs, Technology

Solutions for macOS Monterey and Big Sur

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.

January 14, 2022 Macs, Technology

What caused that kernel panic? How to use the log in diagnosis

T T Read More

Step through how to work out when, how and why a kernel panic occurred in the unified log, using Ulbow.

June 17, 2020 Macs, Technology

Did your Mac crash, freeze or panic?

How to tell apart unexpected quits, WindowServer crashes, kernel panics, and more – and what to do about them.

June 6, 2020 Macs, Technology

Did that Mac just restart itself? About kernel panics

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.

November 27, 2019 Macs, Technology

Kickstarting and tearing down with launchctl

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.

August 27, 2019 Macs, Technology

Should you use shutdown or reboot in the command line?

Is shutdown -r now better than reboot? What advantages does Finder’s Restart have over them? The answers are in these logs.

May 14, 2018 Macs, Technology

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