If an app is hanging on your Mac or has stopped responding, you can also close it by clicking on its Dock icon. You can also open the Force Quit window by going to the Apple logo in the top left of your screen and selecting Force Quit. Notice that this even works for quitting Finder which is the main file management system on your Mac and if unresponsive, can sometimes be the reason your Mac is frozen or you see the dreaded spinning beach ball of death. Then just select the applications you want to close and click Force Quit. Press the Command+Option+Esc keys together to bring up the Force Quit window. The closest equivalent to Ctrl-Alt-Delete on a Mac is the keyboard shortcut ⌘+Option+Esc.

Here then are 5 alternatives to Control+Alt+Delete which will force quit apps on a Mac and stop the spinning beach ball of death.

What Happens When Force Quit Doesn’t Work on a Mac?.

We strongly recommend always backing up your data to an external hard drive to prevent data loss through force quitting on a Mac. Note that force quitting an application will lose any information or editing you’ve done since the last save you did although many applications auto-save at regular intervals automatically nowadays.

The most common apps that freeze on a Mac are browsers such as Safari, Firefox and Chrome, Microsoft Office crashes or word processing applications such as Microsoft Word.

There are various equivalents to Ctrl-Alt-Delete on a Mac and here we show you all the ways to easily terminate apps that are hanging, have locked-up macOS or are making your Mac run slow.Īll of these solutions work to force quit on all types of MacBook too including MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. If you’re on a deadline with a work or school assignment or are worried that you’ve broken your parent’s computer, don’t panic if your Mac has frozen. If you’ve just switched to a Mac from Windows then you may be wondering what’s the equivalent of control alt delete on a Mac to force quit an application that has crashed.

Ard to close all windows on mac