Imac not shutting down

I have a newer (well newer to me) imac, about 4-5 months old... I recently upgraded to yosemite... Ever since, when i shut down, the computer goes kinda dark but gives me a spinning wheel and wont "shut down" entirely unless i hard shut down the machine with the button. I have done a disk verification, nothing wrong, permissions verification, got those ok... even did that in depth diagnostics thing upon restart, that came back clean. I make sure all programs are turned off, all disks ejected (external disks and network)... no filevault thing, when it's working it works well, but it doesn't want to stop working. Any advice?

Sounds like you've done some good trouble shooting. Give this a try:

Reset the SMC on your iMac: Shut the iMac down completely. Remove the AC plug from the wall outlet and let the machine set that way for 10 minutes or so. Restart the machine and at the same time reset the PRAM. Follow these directions to reset the PRAM.

I have noticed that my MBP with Yosemite takes longer to shut down. I don't know how long you have been waiting, but it might be worth while to just let it run for a ridiculous time (10-15 minutes if you have to) to see if it finally does shut off. I let mine go until it finally did close down completely and after that the shut down times got slightly better.

With my iMac it's just the opposite Jake. Running Yosemite it shuts down almost immediately whereas before with Mavericks it would take much longer. It also restarts faster.

I have a lot of external drives. If I manually unmount them, Yosemite closes immediately. But if I select shut down with them mounted, it takes a while to unmount them and shut down. I'm NOT finding Yosemite to be a fast boot or shutdown, but it's not much slower than Mavericks. It is snappier in operation, once booted, so I'm ok with that.

swinphoto are you quiting all applications using the Quit command rather than simply hitting the red button which merely shuts the window?

Brand new, out of box iMac not shutting down after updates.

Hi Everyone,

I'm new to Mac computers as I was raised on PC computers all my life. So now almost 30 years later I've bought my first iMac computer and I was very pleased with it until it started updating. Once these updates started, I realized that the "Finder" bar at the top of the screen (and please excuse my ignorance of Mac terminology, like I said "I'm new") would disappear when I would click the option to "restart" the computer. Gone. Nothing. But the computer would not shut down. I gave it time and it still wouldn't shut down and since I couldn't get to the "Finder" bar, I couldn't try again. When I would try to "relaunch" finder like I have read to do in a lot of these forums, it wouldn't happen. I could click that button forever and nothing would happen, so I would have to force shut down the computer and reboot.

Upon rebooting, at the login screen I clicked the option to restart from there and it worked fine, but the updates were not installing and I ran into the same problems again. I tried the whole process again and selected "shut down" at the login screen and it still didn't work.

Then I went into the Applications menu and clicked on the "updates" tab and looked at the one update that needed to be installed. What I did was I clicked on "MORE INFO" at the right of the update and it expanded it to show that there were three updates, not just one. So I clicked on each update individually and installed them that way. When they had all completed and the applications menu said "there are no more updates" I tried to restart the computer one more time from "finder" and BOOM it shut down and restarted normally.

I read a few things like "download Commander One" or something to that effect, but I wasn't too keen on downloading a program that would fix a problem on a computer that was LITERALLY a day out of the box. That might be a good idea for an older model and the OS has been updated recently, but this one was built with El Capitan as the OS, so I wasn't ready to download another program yet. So for anyone out there who is like me, go into your "Applications" menu, click on "Updates" and make sure you can see all of the pending updates and install them individually.

Welcome to the forum, and to the Mac world. Your post has a lot of misused terms, so it is confusing to me, and I suspect, others.

First, the top bar is the top bar, not the Finder bar. Finder is an application that is part of the operating system and appears on the far left of the bottom bar, which is called the Dock. It looks like tow light blue faces, or one two-colored face, depending on how you see it. On the top bar at the far left is an apple logo that looks like this:  Beside that logo is the name of the application that currently has the "focus" (in other words, the keyboard and other actions affect that application. If you change applications the name of the app with the focus is beside the Apple logo.

To restart the computer, you click on the , then in the dropdown menu, Restart... and the machine will shut down, then restart. Depending on your configuration, it can take a few seconds or even minutes to accomplish that action. If there is an application hanging it up, it may never complete, forcing drastic action. To avoid that, before you Restart, it's better to quit all applications completely. The way to see what is running is that on the Dock (at the bottom) just below any icon there may be a little dot. That dot says that that application is currently loaded and running. To close an application it is best to close it from within the application by clicking on the name of the app when it is on the Top Bar (and has the focus), then click on the name of the app on the top bar and the Quit option. Once you have everything quit properly, restart should go much faster.

I have no idea what you mean by

I went into the Applications menu and clicked on the "updates" tab and looked at the one update that needed to be installed

Click to expand...

as there is no "update" program in the Applications folder. I think you meant that you clicked on the , then "App Store" and then on the Updates tab there, but as I said, I'm baffled as to what you actually did.

You really should look at the videos Apple has at the Apple.com website to get some fundamentals on how to navigate through the operating system and how to get things done. You might try calling the Apple store for which you bought your iMac to see if they have any way to train you on the fundamentals. Alternatively, you can look for a "Dummies" book for OS X to accomplish the same thing.

The learning curve isn't that steep, but OS X is definitely NOT Windows, so a little investment in training is well worth the effort.