So you are in a forum and are unwilling to elaborate your point. Got it. Very helpful.
Fine, you want long winded rambling, you can have it. In return I’d like you to do the same and explain your point or lack thereof in detail as so far you’ve given no actual evidence or information to support your case beyond being agitative and irritating.
Hard resetting an iOS device is an often misunderstood feature, many believe that the simple process of hard resetting an iOS device helps with the smooth running of the device, which is of course complete and total nonsense. In fact the opposite of that can be the case, it can however be useful in the fault finding process.
Consider a hard reset to be like pulling the plug out of your computer, every process that is running or held in memory at that point is instantly killed.
So first, lets get the why that can sometimes be a bad idea out of the way.
Simply put there are myriad processes (which you can think of as programs if you like) which are always running, invisibly to the user, in the background of your device. Here’s a little screen I’ve just taken from Xcode to show just how many of these little (and not so little) tasks can be running at any given time and this is not the full list, just a sampling of what’s happening and of course there are also some actual apps in there too.
These “programs” read and write data to and from the RAM and to the permanent storage as well as between each other in order to keep all of the functions, processes and apps on your device functioning normally. When you perform a hard reset all of these processes are abruptly interrupted before they can finish whatever task they were in the middle of performing.
While some of these processes may sometimes seem small and insignificant they all have their part to play and if just one of them becomes corrupted it can cause problems with your device, potentially (though unlikely) even rendering it non-functioning and requiring a complete re-installation of iOS.
Which is why under normal circumstances you should only power cycle your iOS devices by holding the power button and selecting the “slide to power off” option. This gives the operating system time to finish up all of it’s little processes and write any information it needs from RAM into the devices storage, this is then recalled when your device starts up again and your device by and large returns to a state nigh on identical to that which it was pre-shutdown.
So, that’s the bad and if it’s really that big and scary why do we even have the option to hard reset a device.
Well, primarily the hard reset is included in order to provide a way to get a non-functioning, or “frozen”, device to power off and start up again. But there is a secondary use to the hard reset which is the other reason it’s there and that is that it can be a useful tool in the troubleshooting process, one that is used by Apple support themselves when diagnosing a problem.
In what seems like an odd twist of the why you shouldn’t hard reset, the reason you do as part of troubleshooting is precisely the opposite of the safe shutdown process. Thankfully iOS is a pretty robust system, that hard reset option is there and easily accessible because the actual probability of damage as a result of using it is pretty minuscule. Not impossible, just very, very unlikely.
By interrupting the running processes during their execution you are preventing them from writing any of the information currently held in RAM into the permanent storage of the device, they don’t get to finish up any of their tasks and they don’t get to tell the system to return them to the exact same state again when it starts up. This means that when the device starts up again it is doing so to a cleaner state. It is in essence restarting almost everything afresh. Therefore some processes which may have been running and would be restored to that running state during a normal power cycle, are not even started when using the hard reset option.
So if for example there was an app or process causing a memory leak, which would ultimately lead to the system slowing down and becoming unresponsive, a normal power cycle will also restore that rouge element to it’s previous condition. Whereas performing a hard reset bypasses the point where the system would tell the process to restore to it’s previous condition.
That’s why you’ll often see it suggested when people are experiencing issues in, for example Safari, when it’s become unresponsive or apparently won’t connect to or load web pages. I’ve encountered it myself on rare occasions and including the extended group of people who’s systems I maintain when they need it, I have seen it dozens of times. You get a phone call because their iPad is broken and they can’t get onto the internet, they’ve tried closing Safari from the task switcher, they’ve tried switching it off and back on again, they’ve tried switching their router off and on but nothing is working it’s just broken, panic ahhhhhhhh. So you tell them to do a hard reset and as if by magic everything works again when it starts back up.
Or when their device won’t connect to WiFi, even though they’ve done everything it tells them to on the Apple website, but it still isn’t connecting. Is it broken? Maybe it could be, one of the kids dropped it yesterday, they thought it was ok because it was working after that but now it’s not. So, you tell them to do a hard reset before resorting to any more destructive means like resetting network settings. In the majority of cases that one simple task of doing a hard reset will have fixed the problem.
Which is why when you’re going into any diagnostic situation it’s best to start from as clean a state as possible. It doesn’t matter if it’s an iPad an iPhone a media streamer a printer or a Bugatti. You get rid of as many of the rouge elements which can cause issues but aren’t necessarily going to be related to what you’re looking for. As for why in an AirPrint problem, the same reason as you'd reboot the router and printer, to get to the cleanest state possible. I’ve spent decades testing/diagnosing and fixing a wide variety of things from consumer electronics to semiconductor equipment. The last thing I would want to do when looking for the cause of an issue is have the system flooded with potential dead ends. You get that crap out of the way first, makes your life a lot easier.
