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jb1991

Ive been using macs for 11 years, probably half a dozen in that time. Ive never had a problem with crashing. And the usual uptime is months.

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It used to be the same for me, when I started with Tiger until Snow Leopard, I never had crashes. Uptime was months.

Then I started getting some crashes occasionally but still relatively rarely. This increased a bit around Sierra then reduced again with Mojave.

Then Catalina happened and with the new 2019 mbp retina, I started having crashes about once every two weeks. Now, I have an mba m1 running Big Sur, and I think my average uptime is around 2-3 days. Crashes are now something typical, I no longer expect my computer to run for long stretches of time. For a few months, my mba couldn't even go to sleep with crashing, couldn't restart without crashing, this was only solved once I updated to 11.6.1 (I tried reinstalling mac os x before to solve this, it didn't help)

So, yes macs used to be very stable but not anymore, I don't know what happened with Apple's QA but it seems there's now major issues. I didn't change the way I use my mac, if anything now I don't use SIMBL or kernel extensions (which I used to use back when my mac didn't crash) so things should be more stable not less. Yet, despite having ever more control over our machines, being more restrictive over what we can do, Apple somehow is making their system less stable, more flaky than before.

Of course, this is anecdotal, I might be very unlucky but in the past year, I've had quite a few coworkers drop out of calls or be temporarily unavailable, telling me that their mac crashed and they needed to reboot. So, it does seem to be widespread.

Could this be a hardware issue with your M1 Air? I've had one for about 8 months, run it pretty hard (memory pressure is usually in the yellow, lot of applications and server-like processes running for both web dev and media production) and it hasn't crashed once.

Not contesting your experience at all, but if you're having crashes every 2-3 days it might be hardware-related?

> Could this be a hardware issue with your M1 Air?

I don't think so. I've got the same issue as GP. Well maybe not every 2-3 days but at least once a week I'd say.

If it's hardware-related, on basically a brand new machine, it's a quality-control issue.

I was starting to wonder too but then I updated to 11.6.1 and the problem disappeared so it would point to this being a software issue?

It might, but isn't one of the goals of these modern hybrid kernels to capture hardware failures and log it instead of crashing the entire kernel?

Windows manages it (most of the time). Linux and FreeBSD manage it and they're technically still described as monolithic. macOS, on the other hand, throws a hissyfit and everyone then blames the hardware rather than the error handling.

I bet if we were talking about Windows people would take great pleasure in mocking Microsoft so I find it weird that Apple is exempt from the same criticism.

I don't use my M1 device enough to determine if they crash regularly, but I can definitely say that every release after Mojave has been a regression in stability. Me and my boyfriend at the time both upgraded to Catalina and the issues just wouldn't stop piling up. After 2 or 3 completely untraceable crashes, we both restored to Mojave and forgot about updates altogether. I might give Monterey a try soon, but between the space-wasting design language and ARM growing pains, I think I'll be contented with my trusty x86 Linux desktop for quite a few more years.

My Snow Leopard Mac has been up 449 days. (Had to replace the UPS battery.)

> I don't know what happened with Apple's QA

For years I’ve been convinced that they let go majority of the QA and have outsourced QA to the customers/public.

You'd think a company that profitable could hire a few extra QA people. Especially considering their entire brand is "it just works"

I have an M1 machine for a few months and use it daily. Not even a single crash in my case. I guess this is the experience of the large majority of users. But there might be faulty units that have this problem, you should contact Apple.

I have MBA M1 for almost a year and haven't faced any crashes yet. On the other hand, I have some app that just hang infinitely (beach ball of death) and ignored every input of my mouse and keyboard. So I have to do the last resort is to force shutdown on my MBA. And the app went back to normal. So I was wondering perhaps it is something do with the dependencies or the app itself is fighting with the system?

I have a few issues on my Windows 10 that I thought it was Windows issue since it kinda point to Windows that are causing the errors. When I investigate it further, turn out it is the app that are clashing with Windows which led Windows to freak out.

I wonder for this article, could it be the app, libraries or dependencies that are just behaving plain stupid and led macOS to freak out?

Catalina experience up to patch .6 was a huge fail, especially since it happened during the pandemic and my 2018 MBP was becoming unresponsive during long work hours and meetings and crashing, fully restarting on its own around 2 times per day. Big BT issues also, at some point I had to reinstall the OS to fix them. Big Sur was just fine and Monterey brought back BT issues... For someone jumping to MacOS 3 years ago the experience is just 50% either way which is not good

My 2018 Mac Mini would crash going to sleep every single time after the final Mojave point update. There was a ton of forum posts on the usual Apple sites so it wasn't just me. The "fix" was to upgrade to Catalina which is a pretty crap fix when it requires you dump all 32bit software.

>Ive been using macs for 11 years, probably half a dozen in that time. Ive never had a problem with crashing. And the usual uptime is months.

If I stick to web browsing I can have uptime in months too. But as soon as I start up xcode and run the simulator, then I consider myself exteremly lucky if I don't have to reboot (manually or spontaneously) every other day. And forget trying to run the simulator and any video activity on a browser - that seems to be a recipe for instant browser freezes (at least on this 2019 16" macbook pro).

Using docker, xcode, clang, rust I got uptime in months. My only complaint is that Docker is dog slow when working with files exchange.

The long and short of it seems to be (as it often is) that some people are seeing problems and some aren't, and without any real data, we're all just guessing about how prevalent the issues are.

FWIW, I can't remember the last time I had my Mac crash, either my M1 work machine or my personal Intel. Uptime is regularly measured in weeks.

I only ever experienced that with Linux (uptime in months, current Linux workstation uptime: 37 days, probably was on vacation or something and turned it off before leaving). I'm not saying my Mac do crash as often as Windows 95 did "blue screen" but my new M1 certainly does totally lock up once every x days. I don't know yet what's causing it but we're not all seeing things.

FWIW I'm sitting at a Time since boot of 56 days 16:50 on a 2019 MBP on bigSUR.

I've never had crashes until I switched to an M1 MacBook Air. They are fairly infrequent but enough that I've started to research the reason.

I see sporadic crash on sleep, maybe every 5 days.

The pattern I see is on wake when plugged into an external monitor.

My work 16" intel MBP crashes about 50% of time I connect my thunderbolt dock. My solution? Do it once in the morning and use a caffeine app to prevent the machine from sleeping.

Terrible, but I haven't figured out a better solution.

I agree - macOS Mojave is pretty stable for me (apart from the irritating hiccups when you block some Apple services through firewall). As the headline points out, I think these issues may be particular to the new M1 (Apple Silicon) based macs. There was an HN discussion too a day or two ago on how macOS on M1 seems to be experiencing memory leak and out-of-memory issues.

That's probably how Apple engineers think too. It never crashes when I use it, so there must be no problem.

High Sierra on my MBP 2012 was atrocious. Not only was the Nvidia GPU literally slower than integrated graphics, the driver would crash the kernel sometimes. They did fix this in Mojave which I'm still using right now.

Observation and experience over years has led me to avoid discrete video cards in laptops entirely. They seem to be the cause of a solid 50% of all major problems, across all vendors, including Apple. They were an endless headache on my Windows and Linux laptops of old.

Sucks if you need one, though.

I didn't know any better when I was buying it. I do have an M1 Max on the way though. Apple sure can promptly fix issues with their own software running on their own hardware, can't they?

Same here. MBP 2015 w Catalina - one freeze every six months or so.

+1. I can remember one time I made macOS completely crash by mistakenly doing an intense memory op on a container. Other than that, I can’t say I get much crashing…

I’ve got an HP thunderbolt dock on my desk that will reliably panic a 2019/16”/Intel MBP running 11.6.1 when the dock is unplugged.

Well the HP docks are not even that reliable with HP computers anyway lol. I’ve been deploying the HP docks for a few years at the company I work for and I’ve been through a few different versions by now and I’ve gotten through all kinds of crap like the DisplayPort firmware just disappearing. Or the dock is detected but doesn’t put out video, or audio, or turns on but nothing else happens. They seem to have a lot going on internally in regards of firmware. But at least HP releases updates frequently.

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