You'll notice the order jumps around a lot. The main window lists all the apps and processes currently running on your Mac. You can find it in the /Applications/Utilities folder. You can also force quit misbehaving Mac apps using Activity Monitor. After selecting the offending app, click on Force Quit to shut it down.Īlternatively, you can open the Force Quit applications interface by pressing Command + Option + Escape all at once.Unresponsive apps will have a 'Not Responding' designation next to them.

Click on the Apple logo in the menu bar.There's a second option for quitting an unresponsive app, and it may be one of the more intuitive solutions. If the app is acting up, hold down the Option key and right-click its icon in the Dock to reveal a Force Quit action in the popup menu. If the beachball stays on the screen for more than a few minutes and you can't interact with the app's interface, this usually indicates the app in question has crashed, which means it's time to force quit it and restart the app to see if you can pick up where you left off in the hope it won't crash again. This does not guarantee that an app will be bug-free, but the chances are better than good since Apple vets all apps on the App Store.Macs aren't infallible, and at some point during your time using them you'll come across a situation in macOS where an app has become unresponsive, leaving you without access to its contents and functions, and only a continually revolving beachball for your troubles. You can reduce situations like this by downloading apps directly from the Mac App Store rather than third-party websites. Unfortunately, not all apps are created equal and some run into bugs that can cause them not to work properly. You might also think about upgrading the RAM on your Mac if this seems to be a consistent problem. If you think this might be your problem, try closing some of your open apps or reboot your Mac to clear the RAM. So if you have many apps open at once, it can slow everything down and, in some cases, cause apps to stop responding as they should. Your computer uses RAM to store your open applications, but you only have a limited amount. RAM stands for Random Access Memory, which is essentially short-term storage. There are many issues that can cause a Mac app to become unresponsive.

Mac shortcut to force quit application