Is Force Restarting a Mac bad for it?

Generally, yes.

You are cutting the power while it is in the middle of processing, saving, etc. You never know what you might be interrupting.

 

Glad you asked this because I've had to do it twice.

 

You might notice issues with apps that were running at the time, but overall, it shouldn't have affected much.

Why have you needed to force shutdown.

 

Really depend on what you were doing and what the system was doing. If it doing anything really important and then that you force shut up, you will likely corrupt something somewhere. At last that's what happened on my PC. As far as I know, there's a closing button on the apple menu, you're safer to just use it instead.

 

Its generally accepted to be a "bad" thing to do, especially if the computer was reading/writing something to the HDD at the time.

If it was just idle and frozen, I've had to do it many times, windows and mac, never had a negative effect. Maybe I've just gotten lucky.

 

When I did it, a cookie monster came and eated me

 

What means "Eated"?

 

you know very well my friend.

 

I've had to do that more times than I can remember. Not that it is a good thing, I'm sure it is not.

Every time it happens, I just swear a bit, wait about 30 seconds after it shuts off, and restart. It's probably a good idea to do a disk verification afterwards, at least that is what I always do. Sometimes it may be that the drive heading needs fixed or something.

 

Officially it is bad to do that on any machine in the middle of an operation, in some cases a core task might be working that should not be shut down.

I was generally always afraid to do it, as any Windows PC I tried that on normally resulted in a re-install of Windows and OS corruption.

However, OS X uses HFS Journaling on the drive which means it is very unlikely that a sudden power off will result in corruption. I have always been amazed at never having to do a re-install or any problems at all really after a having to force power off.

(Touch wood).

 

OSX has crashed on me several times since buying my mac last october. not happy about that.

but most crashes involved safari, finalcut express. formatted in twice, but still consists. having to force shut down is annoying.