If your Mac is currently frozen, take note of what caused your Mac to freeze before you continue. You can look into the cause later and find out if there’s step you can take to avoid it reoccurring. In the mean time, work through the following processes and hopefully get back up and running!
Most of the time a MacBook will freeze because of a slight malfunction that cannot be replicated. A software fault that needs to be updated or because the hardware in your computer is being pushed to the max. If you were using a few big applications like Photoshop, Logic, or downloading/uploading data, this may have pushed it too far.
Force Quit
Press Command + Alt + Escape on your keyboard to open your Macs Application Manager. Select the App that has caused the issue (usually has a ‘not responding’ label) and then hit force quit at the bottom of the window. You will loose any unsaved data but should not corrupt any files or apps in the process.
Hard Restart
If you cannot get to your Apple Menu in the top left of your screen, try a hard restart by holding Command + Control + Power button. If your Mac fails to boot normally, try starting your Mac in Safe Mode.
Start Mac in Safe Mode
As your Mac turns on, once you hear the Start up sound immediately press and hold the shift key to start the Mac in safe mode. This will verify your start up disk and try to repair any issues it can find with the system code, prevents apps and processes from starting automatically upon login and deletes system cache files. After you have logged in and are happy it’s working fine, shut the Mac down through the Apple Menu then reboot normally to see if your problem is resolved.
If you cannot boot your Mac normally after this you may have incompatible log in items. To find these, click the Apple logo in the top right in safe mode, system preferences < Users & Groups. Select the log in tab at the top of the window and view your log in items. Selecting each of these items and hitting the – button below will stop the item from opening on log in. After this, try booting normally.
If your MacBook switches off but will not turn back on, please see our post on ‘my Mac won’t turn on‘.
