When you ask a geek for help because of some issues with your Mac, iPhone, but also printer or internet connection, the first question they throws at you is always the same:
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
But why rebooting a device solves almost, all the problems?
As a software engineer I’m aware that every system has glitches , it is impossible to have a flawless application. And often glitches only occur under certain conditions when specific events happen. If a problem occurred at every startup, it would be resolved immediately.
Occasionally, a certain combination of conditions and events causes the MacBook or iPhone to crash. A process could possibly accumulate RAM space, with a glitch known as
memory leak.
By restarting, the memory resets, execution starts again, the program is reloaded, and the software variables are initialized. The conditions that caused the anomaly no longer exist. They may reoccur by executing the same operations, or the cause may not even appear any longer, since it might be caused by something not directly related to how we used the software.
As for network devices , like routers or switches, some routing tables might be corrupted for some reason. Or the connection to some service might be lost, like a DNS server, whose work is to translate web addresses into IP addresses. In these cases, or in similar cases, restarting the device will clean the internal tables and force a reconnection with the other network components, often resolving the problem.
Lastly, I recommend that you restart your devices once in a while, even if they work. It doesn’t hurt to reboot your iPhone or your Mac every now and then and give it a fresh start!
See also:
How To Force Restart a MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro