Big Sur bug prevents upgrades to the next version | Hacker News Reader

Big Sur bug prevents upgrades to the next version

micromdm.io

132 pointsgroobongithub40 comments

My 2017 MBP got bricked trying to update to 11.1. Shut down for reboot, and never came back up. None of the troubleshooting steps worked. Apple won't budge since it was out warranty and wants $725 to fix it. They literally told me that maybe I should consider getting a new one. Such a joke.

Really stuck, tbh, as i'm not sure if I should just fix it or forget it and leave the macbook world.

Have you tried installing Linux on it? It's bricked already, worth trying to salvage.

It won't turn on at all. Completely dead.

I'm all for jumping on the Apple hatewaggon, but I wonder if it is completely dead, and it just happened to die while performing an OSX upgrade? Stranger things have happened.

I'm assuming firmware. Assumptions correct, it's BS that Apple won't fix their own mistake.

You can doubt, of course, that is your right.

Ugh, that’s terrible. AppleCare phone support can be hit-or-miss. You could try another rep. If you were up to it, you could book an appointment with a Genius at their store, and calmly but firmly lay out your case. Perhaps they would make it right, considering it’s destroying your satisfaction with their products. Failing that, you may be able to have it repaired less expensively by Louis Rossmann’s shop. (Not a customer, but I know they do these kinds of things.) Definitely reset the SMC and PRAM if you haven’t already, but I suspect the update might have borked the firmware on a chip. I’m just a random user though.

That's what I've been trying to do. Resetting SMC and PRAM did nothing. It's completely dead.

Small claims court.

Leave the Mac behind. Run with great speed in the other direction. Things are SOOOO much better without Apple hardware in my house.

Do you have a recommendation? Although I'm a rookie, I do like using Mac OS as a host, and running VMs for Linux. I am not a big fan of doing any kind of development within Windows.

this idea doesn't really work if you actually like macOS/Apple products.

Also it doesn't work if you stuck with Stockholm syndrome

Strip it for parts and sell those? Not sure if there’s a market.

If it has Touch ID or a T2 chip inside, try DFUing it?

You should definitely call Apple support again. That is not a normal response. They might ask you to bring it into an Apple store, but they should offer some help even outside of warranty.

this is literally a developers worst nightmare ... i experienced this one time when we released an android app. the auto updater broke. so we had to phone the customers to uninstall the app and install a new app. now this was with less than 1,000 users. i can only imagine how this would be like for company like Apple.

They control the entire OS. They'll have a lot more options to fix this.

Your development shouldn't depend on one PC. Code in git, DB in backups. You should be able to restore your dev state very quickly from scratch. You could even use Docker.

Related: "Apple has stopped providing standalone installers for macOS updates" https://eclecticlight.co/2020/12/17/apple-has-stopped-provid...

Very much, yes.

https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment-reference-macos/d...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25458770

> Unfortunately, it is a client-side issue affecting both 11.0.1 and 11.1 clients. So there’s not much Apple can do to provide a fix.

Seems rather unlikely to be true.

Agreed. I wonder how they arrived at this conclusion.

I can't really interpret what "client side" means for a system update. What would be the "server side"?

This would make sense, if you set up remote code execution for apple servers, but I could not imagine something horrible like that.

In this case, client means your mac running macOS — there will be a system update process running on your mac.

The server is the the apple server the update process talks to to figure out what to download (and then to download it).

(I haven’t looked at it but there are probably multiple mac processes, with their own set of relationships, and multiple Apple services involved, but for the purpose of this issue, you can think of the client side being anything running on your mac, and server side as anything running on an Apple server.)

I am fairly sure they will and can solve it remotely.

I'm surprised at the suggestion in the article that Apple won't do something "messy" like push a fix via antivirus, but will instead just leave un-updated Macs around forever unless users (a) find out this a problem somehow, and (b) do a manual update.

A long time ago iOS 6 or 5 had the same issues with updating the iOS.

Their solution was to push an app to App Store which was called "iOS updater" or something. Installing and launching it would allow you install iOS update from Settings app.

I think they will do the same with Mac

Or whatever they did to remove the Zoom vulnerability.

Not to say that Apple doesn’t have other options, but I don’t think they can “push a fix via antivirus”. XProtect can remove software (like Zoom), but I don’t believe it can reconfigure the system.

Is the author sure that it's a bug and not just Apple holding back the new update for the MDM-enrolled machines for a week or so? See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/defer-feature-up... for a native feature in Windows to defer feature updates by X days specifically (quite cleverly, it does not defer security updates, only new feature updates).

Yes, I'm sure. MDM does have a feature to defer updates (which is a mess on its own) but that's not what is happening here. The MDM can see the update, but attempting to install it fails. The logs clearly indicate that the client tries and fails the download.

"Under certain conditions, macOS 11.0.1 and macOS 11.1 hosts are requesting the update server send the 11.0.1 update, instead of requesting the next available one."

What conditions are these?

I can reliably reproduce the issue by asking the MDM to list updates on the client. That puts the device in a bad state until the next reboot.

But even without the MDM taking action, the client can enter this state as long as it's enrolled in the MDM. My guess is there a background download/check that happens at an unspecified interval.

So this is an MDM-specific issue, then? The headline here on HN seems to imply it's an OS-wide issue that would affect all Big Sur users.

Normal companies =>

  //HACK ALERT: Fix Big Sur update problem
  if ProductVersion = "11.1" && 
      RequestedProductVersion = "11.0.1" { 
      RequestedProductVersion = "11.1"
  }

I came across this on my macbook pro. Kept falling even after reboot. Restarting and installing in safe mode got it upgraded for me.

Does anyone know how Apple plans to solve this? I updated to 11.1 yesterday, so this is a concern for me going forward.

Honestly I think it's a "feature" because as it goes, each new version of macOS introduces a bunch of problems that never existed before or should've been resolved during the beta version. The fact that Big Sur prevents from upgrading to future problematic versions is really a good thing :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com