macOS Big Sur Update Bricking Some Older MacBook Pro Models
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Apple needs to fix their QA, and fast. No amount of marketing can undo the damage I've seen over the last few years.
Tight integration between OS and hw is mostly used to half-arse firmware interfaces, with huge amounts of "quirks" surfaced by hackintosh enthusiasts.
By the way my HP laptop from 2014 did well with every single Ubuntu LTS from 12.04 (I bought at the beginning of the year) to 20.04.
Learned a hard lesson that day.
By the way, did you ever recover the laptop or your data?
Why does Microsoft dominate the enterprise and not Google? I think the above has almost everything to do with it.
Apple has kind of walked the middle road between Microsoft's extreme backward compatibility and Google's "kill off everything that doesn't earn at least a billion". They support old hardware a lot longer than Google, but they also break a lot of things with their OS updates. Apple also has a pretty legendary track record of successfully shifting CPU architectures without breaking popular apps at the time, something that's pretty much unheard of elsewhere.
Which other SW/HW companies have switched CPU architecture? I am not sure there is a point of comparison here, and there has only been 1 case so far, the M1 is upcoming and we don't know yet how well that will work.
Linux works pretty well with client qemu specified as the architecture handler for non-native binaries too :)
I also said 'architecture change' so by your count that would be 2. But Rosetta was only for PowerPC to x86 wasn't it? There seems to have been emulation for the 68x chips but was it seamless without breaking anything?
I mean any company could change architecture but rely on a customer using an emulator that isn't really not breaking things.
So by my count, 1, but if I am wrong and the 68x translation was equally as seamless and breakless than 2.
But to say it was unheard of you need to reference all the other companies that transitioned architecture and broke stuff. I can't think of another general computing supplier who did that but I might be wrong - can you give an example?
There's also Palm, which successfully switched from Motorola 68000 to ARM, without breaking popular apps at the time.
To me while it's nice, it's not an impossible achievement and often likely uses somebody else's code to get there :)
I think apple receive far too much praise for things they've done which are often not as amazing as they seem and too little praise for other things (e.g. their great work on the 5nm SoC hw) as well as far too little criticism for biz practices.
Trying to set things a little more on an even keel :)
This is the first time I've heard that, and I've never experienced it. If you have a compilation of "driver support disappears" issues, I'd like to read it.
It's very common for folks to be using 5- and 6-year-old Macs with a recent version of macOS. macOS Big Sur supports 7-year-old Macs.
I've done Mac IT for a long time and I've never seen this be the case.
To be honest, I've experienced this a ton of times with Windows, where the only driver available was for an older version of Windows and not the one the customer has.
I have a nearly 10-year old iMac and I never experienced what you're talking about.
Apple has warned developers for several years that support for 32-bit apps (for example) was going away. Same thing with kernel extensions.
What I do find surprising though is that there is no bulletproof rollback mechanism.
It shouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine a room full of older hardware where it's the job of some poor intern to update each device during the alpha/beta phase.
Bricking supported hardware on a software update goes directly against Apple's core business strategy and should have been top of mind for the QA team.
You're too quick to let them off the hook.
Compared to the ecosystem of Windows-supported devices, Apple only has to serve updates to relatively few SKUs. If they can afford to buy back a hundred million dollars' worth of stock every year, they can afford to test upgrades on affected older devices before rolling them out.
When an upgrade is supported on an Apple machine, then there should be 100% success -- or at least, as you suggest, a painless way to catch the upgrade failure and roll the device back. They sell the hardware and develop the software, so they have to own the problem. No mumbo-jumbo. No excuses. No passing of the buck to the customer who trusted them at the moment of downloading/installing the upgrade.
If they can't guarantee success for an OS upgrade on a particular machine, then they shouldn't offer it for that SKU -- and they should lower the retail price of the MBP because it doesn't "just work." People who own these machines paid a premium for them over every other comparable laptop.
I have a late-2013 MBP 13 (one of the potentially affected machines), on which I am currently running Mojave because Apple has been guilty of this kind of garbage so many times in the past. Think of how horrible it would be to put your daily driver laptop in the shop for a few days when you have important work to handle. That's the reason why Apple can't just mail it in when rolling out OS upgrades.
I have had similar situations in the past, and you know what the result has always been? I stop buying hardware from the company when it becomes clear that it doesn't give a damn about what happens to the customer. Bose rolled out firmware to the QC35 that nerfed the ANC, and then pretended that nothing happened -- essentially gaslighting the customer. I never bought another pair of Bose ANC headphones after that (I had purchased 5 pairs in the year prior to that, as gifts and for myself). Google rolled out an Android upgrade (Oreo) that immediately sent my Nexus 6P into a Bootloop of Death upon installation, and then passed the buck to Huawei. I swore never again to buy a Google hardware product as a result.
I just bought a MBP 13 a few days ago, because despite all of the BS that Apple has done, they have always turned out to support the customer in the end. But if their defense sounds anything like what you are suggesting -- that there is always some collateral damage when an upgrade is rolled out because QA is not a perfect process -- then I would rethink my purchase decisions in the future.
billion* is what I meant to write.
Well, until one of these sub models gets brucked.
But putting all that aside: the new sealed system partition is a step in that direction (ROSP was partially about getting clean separation between the system and user files to make snapshot-based updates possible). With snapshots if the update fails you still have the previous snapshot to fall back on - hopefully that will make these kinds of failures less likely in the future.
It's disturbing to see an OS update seemingly do something with the BIOS to render the machine completely inoperable. I wonder if the EFI firmware on Macs is just as fragile as some PCs, and something like this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008449
If that was what happened, and you were living in a place like Shenzhen, there's a chance you could simply go to one of the many repair shops around and have the BIOS reflashed in a few minutes while you wait, for <$10USD, and be back to working again.
Of course, Apple is heavily anti-right-to-repair and this might not even be an option in the future... and naturally, the reasons they give are "for security" -- securing their profits, that is.
The other is the overall "opaqueness" of Apple products, which reminds me of this classic Douglas Adams quote: "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
These days, Windows automatically installs firmware updates as well. The old PC status quo, where most users would never receive firmware updates at all, does have the advantage of avoiding issues like this. But it also has many disadvantages, including security risks.
Do you have any references for this? Because that is truly scary. I've heard of isolated instances of the manufacturer-installed crapware silently trying to update the BIOS in the background, failing, and resulting in bricked machines upon the next boot, but that wasn't Microsoft's doing.
including security risks
That is BS, unless you are talking about things like user-hostile "secure" boot, which are firmly in the area of "do not want" anyway.
This happened to me. On a (primarily) Linux PC, I was having trouble with a game via Wine/Proton and thought I'd give Win10 a shot.
Installed Win10 to a separate HDD, activated it, and (completely) disconnected it from the Net. Worked fine for a few days (weeks?) but then one day it announced it was installing a BIOS update. Without asking. And no way to Cancel that or somehow tell it to "DO NOT DO THIS".
Note - At no point had it had an internet connection after it was activated. So the BIOS update must have been downloaded and scheduled at that time.
This totally trashed my main Linux install, which uses full disk encryption and custom MOK certificates for booting.
Not Happy.
That being said, I have reasonable backups. So it was more of an incredulous PITA and reminder that "MS can go fuck themselves", than a data loss event.
Between bugs in the OS itself, bugs in apps, and developers who lag behind on OS support (looking at you DAW and audio plug-in devs) it will probably be a year before I try this upgrade myself.
The update did take longer than indicated. At some points I wondered if both my iMac and mbp were not locked up, but as I was doing other things I just let them take their time. I wonder if those people rebooted mid update or some
I don't think that's the biggest reason to upgrade to a new major (or even minor) version, especially when the previous release(s) are still supported for quite some time.
Catalina, macOS 10.15, for example, didn't stop being supported when Bug Sur, 11.0, was released. In fact, it will still be supported for quite some time. Mojave, 10.14, is supported until late next year and, High Sierra, 10.13, is still supported even today!
Unless there's some new feature that you absolutely just must have, there just really isn't any compelling enough reason for most folks to immediately upgrade to a new .0 release.
In the Windows world, the conventional wisdom -- for probably a decade and a half! -- has been to wait until after SP1 to move to a new major version.
Maybe the younger generation just hasn't been burned (bad) enough (yet) for them to learn not to touch the stove?
Sure can. But that's true only if these machines are part of IT's infrastructure, which is usually the case at large companies.
A lot of places are BYOD and don't have employee Macs on Active Directory.
For $20 bucks, any office or group with a spare Mac can use macOS Server to control this stuff: https://www.apple.com/macos/server/features/
Given some of the horrible security bugs found very shortly after the last few versions of MacOS were released... I strongly disagree.
The saying about known unknowns and unknown unknowns is quite relevant.
Case in point: if you have catalina and you go to system preferences, system updates, you will have the big sur update in big, then some text on the bottom of the window saying something like "there are some other updates..." and then you'll see the security updates for your current OS
https://appuals.com/stop-windows-7-from-upgrading-to-windows...
This is a post about how a major software update from a vendor is breaking their own hardware, and from a company that prides itself on not needing to be a computer expert to use their products.
That’s why I didn’t say that.
I have come to my MacBook Pro and found it on the Enter Password boot screen after it decided to reboot overnight, and then helpfully tells me about the security update it did.
> Mac OS is not Windows, it doesn’t install automatically and the prompts are much more reasonable.
It does by default.
If apple fixed a security bug in big sur, I'd like to update sooner rather than find out in a CVE next month that I should have actually upgraded ASAP.
That said, waiting at least a few days to see if any problems shake out is probably a good idea.
[0]: https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/10/guide-automatic-security-...
A huge pet peeve.
As a user I'd expect at the very least it not to systematically fail on a model that is intended to work. Also completely rolling back is much more difficult with the whole closed system issue (which is something users accept in return of simplicity), it's not like getting Ubuntu 18.04 LTS .
A family member was in school and had a few-year-old macbook air that had a black screen. We took it to apple and they told me they could send it away to have it fixed for $700 or we could buy a new one for just a little more. And well, school.
So we decided on the new one.
And in for a penny, in for a pound. We had to keep going.
We needed to upgrade, so we needed dongles. I think thunderbolt 2 cable + thunderbolt3 to tb2 dongle. and of course a tb3 to usb adapter.
So power up the old machine (it still works), connect to new machine, upgrade over firewire and we're good.
I should watch youtube and fix the old one. it has 2 regular usb ports + an sd card reader, so it's more useful.
But I still have a bad taste in my mouth. $700 for a black screen? I think they really do raise the repair price all the way to a new one because they can.
No.
"That's going to be $899+tax. Maybe we should look at some new MBPs instead - this one is two years old."
I'm sometimes able to boot into Internet Recovery mode (Command-Option-G). Unfortunately, it seems like the only option is to reinstall Big Sur, which doesn't fix the problem.
Hopefully once Apple fixes this issue, I will be able to install the updated version and get it working again. If not, this machine is 7 years old and more or less on its last legs, but I'm still somewhat disappointed.
Are you able to boot with Shift-Option-⌘-R into Recovery Mode from an older version?
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204904
What about Thunderbolt disk mode? (hold T at startup). Or booting from an external drive?
There are comments elsewhere that are just victim blaming and victim shaming the people who upgraded on seeing the prompt that comes up. Apple will, in its usual style, never admit to the issue nor offer free repair to the affected (bricking the HDMI chip seems to be the cause, as per some threads on Apple’s discussion forums). Apple has once again dropped the ball, and neither Tim Cook nor Craig Federighi seem eager on solving these problems, and during the current COVID-19 period, this is just unforgivable.
For once, I’d like to see some senior executive in Apple publicly state “We’re sorry we messed up, we will make it right” and then do the right thing. That couldn’t even happen in a dream I suppose.
I’d like to wait until the second ARM cycle before upgrading my 2013 MBP.
I miss being able to pull a CD off the shelf and doing a fresh install.
If you have older hardware (as old as 2007), you can download Yosemite, El Capitan or Sierra from Apple’s website [1] or the App Store. Note that using those images requires access to a working Mac, or at least a Mac with working (Internet) Recovery, although doing it in Recovery is complicated and requires some tricks [2], because Apple can’t just make a simple DMG you could mount (or image a drive with) and install directly.
[0]: https://9to5mac.com/2011/07/20/what-is-os-x-lion-internet-re...
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683
[2]: https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2020/06/03/reinstalling-macos-...
I ran the Big Sur Beta 1 with it on an external SSD drive. Since then, the standby mode on the internally installed macOS 10.11 does not work anymore. At some point, the system freezes while the fans spin on full speed, indefinitely until powering down with a long-press of the eject key.
Maybe this will help; the instructions are for Yosemite though.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-how-to-get-back-o...
An unknown percentage of millions of a particular product have failed, news at 11.
Seriously, I don’t know what anyone is supposed to take out of articles like this.
If you don’t back up your stuff all bets are off, regardless of what device you own or whether you even decide to upgrade the software on it.
Yes I always plan ahead incase the OS becomes corrupted. I just assume that an OS will fail at some stage, and I have prepared so many times setting up a new OS from scratch I could nearly do it blindfolded.
The trick is to 'rehearse' a clean install of an OS repeatedly so that it doesn't feel so harrowing when it does fail (and I've had plenty of actual crashes over the course of my daily computing adventures, covering different OSes like Linux, macOS, Windows).
It is great to have a setup like this, as I am reminded any time someone I know has a hard drive failure and is freaking out about it.
A tool like Ansible, Nix, or Docker Compose is useful in such situations.
> Until it is clear what may be causing the issue and Apple releases a fix, late 2013 and mid 2014 13-inch MacBook Pro may wish to hold off on installing macOS Big Sur .
A backup doesn’t do you much good if the machine is bricked.
Provided you have "a different device", which isn't the case of many.