Force Quit an App on the Mac

In this tip, I’m going to show you how you can force quit an app on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now you may have experienced this before. You’re working in an app on your Mac, and then that app becomes unresponsive. You can’t do anything. You can’t go under file on the menu bar and quit it. All you get is maybe a spinning rainbow when you move the cursor over the top of that app. So what do you do? Well, what you can do is you can force quit it. When you force quit an app, it forces it to quit. It’s not going to ask you to save any changes. All it’s going to do is just quit it. So how do we do this? We have a couple of different ways. The easiest way is through the Dock.

This is the way that I do it. When I need to force quit an app. If we look here, you’re going to see; I have the music app open. It has a little black dot underneath the icon. This is telling me that this app is open. Let’s say this was locked up. I couldn’t do anything with it. Well, if you click and hold on the cursor, you’re going to see, we have an option for quitting the app.

Well, what that’s going to do is it’s just going to quit the app, but it’s locked up. So it’s not going to quit it. Well, watch what happens when I hold down the option key, I’m going to press the option key, and you’re going to see it turns into Force Quit. So now, if I were to let go of my trackpad, what it’s going to do is it’s going to force quit this app, the music app.

So let’s go ahead and let go. And now we can see we no longer have the black dot again, let’s go over to. Safari here. If I click and hold, we have our quit, but then we have Force Quit when I hold down the option key.

I mentioned there was a couple of ways of doing this. Another way is to go up underneath the Apple menu, and then you’re going to see Force Quit. I rarely use this technique. When you use this technique, when I select Force Quit here, we get a new window that opens up. And from here, I can select which app I want to force quit. So that’s how we can force quit our apps on the Mac. We can force quit it through the Dock. We hold down the option key and then click and hold on the icon of the app that is locked up, and you’re going to see force quit.

And then we can also go up underneath the Apple menu and then go to force quit. We’re going to have a new window that opens up. And from there, we can select which app we want to force quit. And remember, when you force quit an app, it does not ask you to save any changes. So if you’ve made any changes, there’s going to be a chance that you’re going to lose whatever you’ve made changes to.

So that’s how you force quit an app on the Mac.