macOS Sonoma Boot Failures | Hacker News Reader

macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

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667 points_susn282 comments

See also his twitter for some speculation as to how on earth simply changing refresh rate would cause boot corruption: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111329614147717090

>Why? I can tell you why: because Apple hates display modeset flicker, and switching modes between ProMotion on/off causes a modeset flicker, so of course they made it so that is stored in nvram somewhere and applied when the screen is turned on during early boot, so when macOS boots it doesn't have to flicker again.

>And they didn't test it with older OS bootloaders, so display handoff/init just fails catastrophically with those when this mode is enabled.

Interesting. I wonder why anyone would turn ProMotion off considering that 120Hz massively improves responsiveness. I've only encountered one app that doesn't work with variable refresh rate and that's Genshin on Windows. Even that's probably not an issue with newer monitors that can handle VRR down to 60Hz without my monitor's frame-doubling flicker as it keeps switching been 60Hz and 120Hz

> I wonder why anyone would turn ProMotion off considering that 120Hz massively improves responsiveness.

The first reason that comes to mind is battery life. That's probably the most broadly applicable use case.

But also, if I was still doing e.g. frontend web development, I would want to confirm that my css animations looked nice at 60 hz.

Edit: My first use case is likely wrong, thank you to replies for reminding me Apple uses adaptive refresh down to 1 hz.

Isn't battery life a reason to keep it on? The refresh rate will be down to 24hz most of the time.

macOS is very good at adaptively reducing refresh rate when nothing is happening on screen, with the panel reportedly supporting the full range of 1-120hz so barring badly engineered apps that are permanently pinned at max refresh, the battery impact of keeping ProMotion on is minimal for most use cases.

Oops, thank you, I completely forgot they were doing the adaptive refresh thing!

Which raises the question even more why the refresh rate matters during early bootup - surely you could just start with an apple logo and a 1 Hz refresh rate, and then up the rate later during boot when it's time to do some animation...

Changing the refresh rate makes the screen go blank for a second or so.

GP of this thread links to a post arguing that Apple is going out of their way to avoid just that during the boot sequence.

Except it doesn't... because during use the dynamic refresh rate changes between 1Hz and 120Hz...

Well, I can only tell you what happens when you manually change the resolution from 60 Hz to "ProMotion" in macOS.

Presumably ProMotion is a specific mode that the display/display controller/... first needs to be set to. If you start out in anything other than that and then switch to it later in the boot process, you'd get that blank screen for a second, and Apple avoids that by writing the startup mode to non-volatile memory.

Otherwise they could also just always start out in ProMotion mode – but then you'd get flicker every time you (re)boot into any other mode, like 60 Hz for people who prefer that.

...so this is where I'm confused, and where I think GP is confused. Why is there a separate 60 Hz mode that requires blanking the display? Why not just keep dynamic refresh enabled on the panel, and then lock it to updating 60 times per second (which it can do, since it's dynamic) for people who prefer that for whatever reason? What is the difference?

No idea, but if I'd had to speculate: Probably ProMotion activates a quite different internal rendering mode, and fixed 60 Hz mode offers a way to opt out of that?

Many applications have a way of synchronizing their drawing loop to the monitor refresh rate, for example; ProMotion must be doing something clever to support them, or they'd just force the refresh rate to 120 Hz.

macOS also supports variable refresh rate external monitors these days (via both DisplayPort and HDMI); I'm not sure if that would be labeled "ProMotion" in the display settings, but in any case there are things that can go wrong there, and having a way to opt out of that at the HDMI/DisplayPort signal level (and not just fixing the frame rate at the GPU level while driving the external link under VRR) seems like a good idea.

> Why is there a separate 60 Hz mode that requires blanking the display?

I'm guessing it probably has to do with compliance with the original VESA standard, or whatever the completely basic support of multiple resolutions and refresh rates in all monitors is called.

The bootstrap of booting a system always ends up relying on the most basic supported things to start with (such as 640x480@60Hz using the VESA standard) and then upping it from there.

If I understand correctly, ProMotion is the feature that allows dynamically changing the refresh rate without screen blanking. So the reason refresh rate matters in early bootup is that if ProMotion is not enabled, you get brief screen blanking. Setting the screen to 1 Hz in early bootup and then changing it to the user setting later would require screen blanking.

That's not a modeset though, that's just the display working as intended. Basically a VSYNC that runs at a variable clock rather than a fixed refresh.

Pretty sure VRR is a mode as far as the display (controller) is concerned.

There’s very likely still a scan out rate determined by the maximum refresh rate, just that the source can delay the next frame if it’s not ready yet.

In other words, e.g. 120 Hz and 144 Hz of VRR aren’t the same even when displaying a 60 Hz signal at the moment – the faster signal would have more pauses and a higher signal rate.

VRR is a property, node a mode. A VRR display showing 60hz will be running at 60hz. They can typically clock down in 1hz intervals.

As far as I understand it, nothing "clocks down"; rather, frames are delayed as required to achieve the frame rate desired (or reachable, in the case of gaming) by the source, down to 1 Hz.

So, yes, fixed 120 Hz and 120 Hz with VRR and without any skipped frames might well be the same mode to a GPU, but it also might be a different one, requiring a mode switch. I don't know how Apple has implemented it.

But in any case, for the bug at hand it's irrelevant: Apple's ProMotion uses a refresh rate of 120 Hz, so switching between that and 60 Hz is definitely a mode switch.

Why would 60 FPS CSS animations look bad on high refresh displays?

Well the CSS transition wouldn't run at 60 fps, it would run at 120 fps, no?

An animation that looks slick at 120 fps might look too fast/slow/complex/whatever on a common 60 hz screen. So if I was still doing this sort of development, I'd prefer to be working on a 60 hz monitor.

Aren't CSS animations capped at 60, same as requestAnimationFrame?

I've been advocating (and using) high refresh displays for over two decades and I find your reasoning preposterous. Downgrading to crappy 60 Hz monitor for nothing.

> Aren't CSS animations capped at 60, same as requestAnimationFrame?

Did some quick Googling to make sure I wasn't just out of the loop on this, as far as I can tell they are not the same: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/5025

Can you point me to the part confirming your claim? If anything, it's confirming mine that they both are stuck at 60 Hz.

The link says:

> As such, on their 120hz devices, requestAnimationFrame is throttled to 60hz, whereas CSS animations run at 120hz.

Please let me know if I am misunderstanding, it has been a few years since I've done this type of work.

I just tested this and you are right. Thanks

CSS transitions and animations seem to be declared using expressions that are continuous over time so it would make sense that they are just quantized down to whatever refresh rate the system supports.

I am pretty sure they are synchronized to refresh rate (at least on windows).

I made a small experiment about raf https://codepen.io/mmis1000/pen/qBxqgLr and it always looks uniform regardless I am on a 60, 120, 160 fps screen. (It would blink crazily if you put it in the middle of two screen with different refresh rate, because it can't be in two refresh rate at same time)

Erit: okay, it looks non uniform only in safari. Clap, clap, clap, Apple…

I'm not even sure CSS animations can go above 60fps, and am unsure why you'd think it would be faster / slower on a different refresh rate screen: CSS transitions are defined by time, not frames.

Sorry, I meant the animation might look too fast, psychologically. The frame rate changes how we perceive movement.

To run x64sc at a buttery smooth 50 fps.

Admittedly rather niche use case.

I turn it off because I can’t tell the difference and if it doesn’t improve anything for me, I might as well not have the system wasting battery and other resources on it.

It does the opposite: it goes well below 60Hz when there is no motion on screen.

VRR displays run at 1Hz to save battery when the display is static. Reasoning like yours is why every OS's settings page gets neutered with every update.

I wonder why anyone would turn ProMotion off considering that 120Hz massively improves responsiveness.

...and I bet that's exactly the attitude Apple had when implementing things, which lead to this mess.

Well then don't allow turning it off in the first place.

I turned it off. The primary reason is that I use ctrl+arrow keys to move between workspaces frequently.

These might seem unrelated, but:

* There's a `defaults set` setting that allows you to speed up the transition animation length from 1 second to 0.5 second, which is huge because that transition is extremely poorly implemented (it leaves the windows on the workspace that you're leaving activated until the transition is complete, so you start typing and it's on the other screen you can't even see any more) and VERY SLOW

* That setting only works if the refresh rate is 60Hz, and it completely fails to do anything if ProMotion is on, because for some reason the animation length isn't programmed to handle the different refresh rates.

So having ProMotion off relieves frustration.

This is exactly the reason why I disabled it when I upgraded to my current M1, and I'm relieved to hear I'm not the only one experiencing this.

Surely I'm not the only one that simply cannot perceive any difference between 60Hz and 120Hz?

Have you done an eye exam recently? With 20/20 vision and no practice you should be able to see input lag up to 1000Hz by dragging any UI element around like the presenter does in this video: https://youtu.be/vOvQCPLkPt4

I definitely see it in the video. But no my computer (like all Macs) does not have a touch screen. So without the aid of directly comparing my finger and the object being manipulated on the screen, I cannot perceive the difference.

What if you just move your cursor in a circle? You can see each frame where the cursor is in a different position. With persistence of vision you should see twice as many cursors on a 120Hz panel compared to 60Hz. I also feel a noticably larger delay in cursor movements when I when I use a 60Hz monitor or phone.

I'm sorry but I cannot see twice as many cursors when I move the cursor in a circle. I see approximately eight of them when I move the cursor as fast as my finger allows me to, regardless of 120Hz or 60Hz.

I do not drag UI elements. I'm still struggling to make my Mac (work notebook) as responsive as my personal i3 notebook.

My perception: current Mac is an oversized iPad without touchscreen

specs?

As someone who regularly switches between a Windows PC and a Mac on the same display, I know what you mean. It doesn't feel as snappy/responsive, I believe probably linked to how rendering is done in macOS (basically something like a PDF composition). There have been a lot of talk about gaming on Macs, but the truth is that to have any chance, Apple needs to fix this laggy feeling. The same game on the same computer just feels way better in Windows than it does in macOS, it is definitely a software problem...

Emulation is one case where specific refresh rates are desirable.

Would be nice if I could force my MBP to run at 100Hz for PAL Amiga/C64 emulation - or even better if emulators could/would change the refresh rate at least when running full-screen.

(Actually, since Sonoma, I can manually set it to 50Hz, but there's no fixed refresh rate options above 60Hz, just 'Pro Motion'. Previously, the refresh rate setting seemed missing entirely on my M1 MBP)

Interesting, that could be a limitation to the internal screen of the MBP.

On Sonoma I can select 24, 25, 30, 50, 60, 100, 120 Hz, in addition to "Variable (40-120 Hz) refresh rates for my LG C2 display. When selecting 50 or 100 Hz, scrolling in (PAL) C64 emulation in VICE becomes much smoother, but not perfect. However, when I enable variable refresh rate and switch to fullscreen mode, VICE can perfectly synchronize the refresh rate and scrolling/animations become butter smooth.

The messiness of resolutions during boot always annoyed me on PCs. It was understandable back in the days of BIOS, but ith the advent of UEFI it seems like it should be possible to run EFI config screens and the like at monitor native rez (or at minimum, native aspect ratio) but I’ve never seen this… it’s always 1024x768 or somesuch stretched to fit a 16:9 monitor which looks awful.

Good UEFI like Surface devices is native resolution so you can have flicker-free boot. My Gigabyte motherboard recently got native resolution with a UEFI update.

Nice to hear that good implementations exist somewhere out in the wild. I hope my AM4 and LGA1700 boards by Asus get similar updates at some point.

I don't understand why modeset causes flicker - fade to black, turn off screen, change resolution, turn on screen, fade to image.

Fancy fade in/out effects this early?

"Fade to black, turn off screen, turn on screen, fade to image" is just slower flicker.

True, but that does look nicer than normal-speed flicker?

And slows boot down by a couple of seconds. As long as the firmware sets a native mode, modern OSes can just inherit that rather than performing a modeset and we just ignore the entire problem anyway.

This summer I went into an apple store, and there was this 2019 Intel Mac Pro tower hooked up to the shiny 6k XDR display. I brought up the System Settings, and set the resolution one notch towards "More Space". It faded to black and never came back.

Because most modeset protocols/implementations aren't atomic, so some frames are drawn halfway through setting the mode.

Turning off the screen can take a long time, but it is possible that putting up a "hot black" screen would be better than flicker if you had to do it.

EFI config screens should be text mode only, full-stop. So they can easily be used over serial console redirection.

Ran into one recently that was high-rez graphical. It needed a USB mouse to change critical settings because the tab order for the onscreen widgets didn't work.

Anyone responsible for creating graphical EFI config screens should stop writing software for the good of humanity.

Even for text-only I’d prefer native rez if possible to reduce scrolling, label truncation, etc.

That said yes, there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a low rez textual fallback.

Then you'd need scaling and all that. Seems a bit overkill for something people rarely use.

scaling? nah, I'd say to just choose at runtime a sane text size (only to avoid using the same pixel size on a 1024x768 as a 5k screen) and set the number of rows and columns to fit the screen. Even if there isn't enough to fill the screen that's fine.

> Seems a bit overkill for something people rarely use.

Okay, but a lot less so than a full GUI with mouse and thousands of colors, like many motherboards have gone to.

The "sane text size" is naturally going to be the 80x25 text mode (720x400) which is what those config screens were originally defined for. Monitors will usually upscale lower resolutions anyway.

I think the rest of the PC industry could use some of the "paint the back of the fence" mentality that apple has; as of right now, many aspects of PCs off of the happy path are ugly as shit

It’s not even that Apple paints the back of the fence. Apple does not have a BIOS or a UEFI or now iBoot screen at all! They made sure not to have a fence at all.

You’re either in macOS or booted in its recovery partition.

Text-only BIOS setup was the norm for a long time before the stupidly bloated EFI graphical stuff became common. Even then, there were the better full-featured TUIs:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Award_BI...

https://liveusb.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/awardbios-firstb...

And the simplified crap with tabs that often came with prebuilt PCs but later seems to have spread to others too:

https://cdn.staticneo.com/a/Intel_Sandy_Bridge_Z68_P67/S%20B...

> Text-only BIOS setup was the norm for a long time

Long-time Thinkpad users scoff at that ... while the figure of a duck suddenly enters their minds..

(Yes: I clearly remember my pre-USB thinkpad having a graphical BIOS with windows, icons, and a duck-shaped mouse cursor).

For those who haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTaNi6uL41s

BIOSes of the time were all written in highly-optimised Asm, and I suspect those little "easter eggs" they added were because the programmers knew they had enough space left over to put some more fun stuff in.

There was also AMI WinBIOS that provided a GUI, but I remember it being much less featureful than other BIOSes of the time with a TUI and didn't like mobos that used it, so in that case they may have sacrificed functionality for appearance.

A 90's TUI that will forever be more productive than Windows 11.

As someone with experience in Turbo Vision and Clipper, I don't miss them, beyond some nostalgia from simpler times.

Somebody missed the memo: https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/

Is there also a term for when you present mangagers or clients with an array of options and intentionally degrade the ones that in your opinion would come out worse? Asking as a graphic who would never ask someone to pick the best of three pitches while alreading harboring a strong preference.

I miss Openboot firmware that was on SunOS servers and workstations. It was IIRC mostly written in FORTH and we could write forth snippets at the serial console to make mods / query the pre boot environment. I also found the SGI boot firmware similarly functional. Both allowed changing boot settings and allowed to boot from network without any trouble at all. Graphical BIOS that came with the x86 systems was such a downgrade for us especially since you could not interact over serial/remotely with a simple terminal connection. IMHO

> Text-only BIOS setup was the norm for a long time

I've had a GUI BIOS setup on almost every PC I've owned since the first 486 I built back in 1993.

The GUI was rendered in text mode. It's called a TUI (Text-based User Interface)

TIL, I thought TUI meant Terminal UI

Plenty of 486 era machines had the AMI ”WinBIOS” whose setup utility kinda-sorta emulated a Win 3.x look and ran in (EGA 640x350 4bpp?) graphics mode, with mouse support:

https://media.moddb.com/images/groups/1/4/3107/winbios.gif

To my horror, I recently had to visit the UEFI firmware setup of a Lenovo tablet.... That was touch enabled.

I did enjoy my Dell touchscreen-supported firmware setup when there was a menu 15 items long and an incredibly slow mouse speed.

Most gaming laptops' UEFI screens are so "gamer" it's cringe. Dell XPS series have UEFI GUIs that are quite neat and absolutely an improvement over the text screens.

I'm also partial to the Surface devices'. MS put a surprising amount of effort into making them look Windows-y.

And it is to be expected to be able to configure a touchscreen device using the touchscreen.

Real boot loaders have embedded Forth interpreters!

Do Macs still have this?

No, it stopped for the Intel switch, I believe.

Yeah, the Open Firmware preboot Forth console was a PowerPC only thing.

Now Apple’s bootloader is actually a tiny macOS. As much as I don’t like the complexity this brings, I do strongly approve of a boot environment that supports proper input devices and video. My iMac Pro’s (intel, non-macOS-based bootloader) bootloader drops keyboard inputs when typing my long passphrase because I type too fast for it. The Mx macs no longer have this problem.

And the nearly indestructible protection that DFU brings.

Upside though? I was helping a more software-oriented buddy get a PC build up and running that'd been half-finished by some kid he paid to put it together. The GUI on the EFI config was so intense, it was slowing down and completely locking up.

Got into the temps, realized that the CPU fan had been plugged into an AUX fan header instead of the CPU header.

Fan was spinning, wouldn't have thought to check if the EFI wasn't crashing.

I'm completely joking of course. I completely agree with you, I miss text-only mode. The modern Dell one stinks, the Asus one stinks...I have no data, but I'd be shocked if Gigabyte or ASRock were any good... :(

Text UIs don’t actually require different resolution and refresh rates. Even Macs can boot into a text mode, but there’s no jarring mode-change flicker when it switches in and out of it!

Besides, there’s nothing to prevent you having a nice graphical boot configuration while still having a text version as a fallback (which is exactly what Intel Macs do)

You know what's funny?

UEFI actually lets you provide both touchscreen-capable bells&whistles gui, and a text UI for the frankenstein VT-UTF8 standard (essentially, VT-220 compatible with UTF-8, kinda like linux console) - all in mostly one codebase.

There's a standard UI description language which is used to specify menus, options and values (and how they are written into nvram), which is then interpreted by text mode interface driver (enabled when you connect over serial port) and graphic mode interface driver (where you can drop all sorts of graphical bells & whistles).

It's also how you can integrate menus from add-on cards into firmware setup.

Text mode on my 8K monitor at any time, even in boot, is dumb and annoying and anachronistic. It’s 2023.

My old AM3+ motherboard has an option for full screen boot logo, and it starts in full HD, continuing with systemd boot, all in 1080p.

I thought this wasn't really a problem anymore.

This is fine if you have a 1080p monitor. I was impressed when this first happened to me, now on an ultrawide monitor it’s back to being not great.

I do recall my last motherboard had an option for a splash which was centered in a black screen, so you could basically display it at native resolution with no stretching and it would look great and seamless. I wish every motherboard had that splash option now.

Ha, back in the day when I was a student assistant in a campus computer lab, we flashed the BIOS boot screen with a full screen image of Darth Maul. The staff person who oversaw us was not amused. (This was in the Pentium 3 era IIRC)

By the time my Dell monitor finally wakes from sleep, finishes negotiating whatever crap DisplayPort has to negotiate these days, and starts actually displaying frames, the computer has long since finished booting and is already idling at the desktop.

My Amiga in the 1990s seemed to do a pretty good job at boot.

As did pretty much any PC motherboard/CPU/GPU combination from the past 25 years.

At least it works. I find low-res bios screens reassuring... something I can depend on.

Maybe instead of spending effort providing low res fallback options, we should be spending more effort making high res GUI-based options more dependable?

No effort was spent.

i heard these new fangled jibjabs don't even have audible POST beeps.

Ah yes, I almost forgot about the POST bleep bloops, and the clickedy click of the HDD actuator... or if you go back far enough the crunching of a 3.5in floppy - though to be fair that was sometimes more anxiety inducing (not the most reliable medium).

There's a lot going on there. To prevent flicker, you not only have to preserve the screen resolution, but also all the graphics card memory and state and hand it off through stages of boot from efi to the os.

As an analogy this would be sort of like rebooting the OS in place while preserving all the running apps, network state and USB connections without resetting anything.

These kinds of things are possible, but have lots of corner cases.

It's somewhat endearing that a trillion dollar company goes through something similar as I did - fiddling around with rEFInd, my BIOS splash image, plymouth-git & plymout-sddm, "quiet splash" and god knows what else to get a "smooth" boot experience - not only adding several seconds to the boot process but also having to rescue the system multiple times with a boot stick.

I've come to embrace the flicker and the systemd messages. It's just a boot, it's in the order of seconds in this day and age, I can't even tell you what the initial reason for my obsession was.

>Why? I can tell you why: because Apple hates display modeset flicker,

Thank god someone does. Hate how jank plugging monitors in just because some engineers thought “meh, good enough”.

Don’t think I should be seeing things flicker anywhere in my life with the computing power we have today and yet many consider visual nails on a chalkboard as acceptable.

Interestingly I ran into this exact problem with my work MacBook Pro M1 upgrading to Ventura 13.6 and assumed it was a totally isolated incident. I don't have a dual-boot setup either, just a single macOS install.

The computer was connected to a Thunderbolt Display during the update which I assume had the same effect of changing the refresh rate to something other-than-ProMotion that the linked article mentions. I had to do a DFU restore from another Mac and then run the macOS Sonoma installer from USB, which thankfully detected the existing install and did an in-place upgrade, preserving all of my data. Nothing else worked.

I also wasted far too much time trying to get the DFU restore to work before discovering that you cannot use a Thunderbolt cable — it has to be done using a plain USB-C cable, otherwise the Apple Configurator simply won't detect the other Mac.

> I also wasted far too much time trying to get the DFU restore to work before discovering that you cannot use a Thunderbolt cable — it has to be done using a plain USB-C cable, otherwise the Apple Configurator simply won't detect the other Mac.

I would have expected a Thunderbolt cable to be required, if either was. This is quite surprising to me. Usually, the more capable (higher bandwidth) cable works if one isn’t supported. I’ll hope to remember this is I ever find myself reviving a bricked Mac in the future.

I restored my Macbook just one hour ago with crappy USB-C USB-A cable, god bless the libimobiledevice creator.

I am currently restoring an MBP using Configurator and a thunderbolt cable. You definitely can use one, perhaps your TB cable is buggered ?

It's done over USB 2.0 largely because that's simpler than involving newer and faster specs, and partly because that's how the original iPhone did it.

My understanding is that all complaint USB USB-C cables should work for USB 2.0, even USB4/TB4 cables, but active TB3 cables might not hook up the USB 2.0 pins.

I've used a Thunderbolt cable as well successfully, but one note is that they're very picky about which port you use. On my Mac mini, I had to use the exact port outlined here or it did not show up: https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-configurator-mac/reviv...

Yes, this is absolutely key. Only one of the USB ports per machine supports this functionality.

From Apple’s support page on how to revive or restore after a failed upgrade [1]:

> A supported USB-C to USB-C charge cable, such as the one sold by Apple (may not be available in all countries or regions) or a supported USB-A to USB-C cable

> The USB-C cable must support both power and data. Thunderbolt 3 cables aren’t supported.

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-configurator-mac/reviv...

Exact same thing happened to me.

What kind of HW?

same specs as OP

This is depressing. They clearly have they ability ($$$) to do the required amount of manual QA, but don't. Or there was QA and someone decided that your case still wasn't enough to hold up the release.

In my mind, when we pay that ridiculous Apple premium on RAM and storage, we pay for excellent quality in SW/HW. They also need to deliver that quality.

Or they did QA but just happened to miss this issue. Most companies would consider "the upgrade sometimes bricks the device" to be a release-stopping bug, I'm betting Apple is among them.

That would be: not delivering while still charging a premium.

Apple still hasn't put up any official page about the issue though, nor does it appear they've pulled the update. Even if it missed QA, why haven't they made any official comment?

You clearly don't know Apple as a company. Last most big companies, they never EVER publicly admit any faults or mistakes with their products (unless forced to by large scale fiascos) because that would damage their perfect brand image. It's why they have comments disabled on all their social media accounts.

> they never EVER publicly admit any faults or mistakes with their products

Of course they do. They’re just secretive in general, and keep communications edited. Compared to the word salad of modern companies on social media, I find it refreshing. Just fix the problem, issue replacements for those affected and move on quietly.

>Of course they do.

Where? Do you have any examples?

> Where? Do you have any examples?

The whole battery gate saga. Touch Bar. The 2013 Mac Pro [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai...

Yeah but that only proves my original point that Apple only admits mistakes when the public scandals are so violent it can't possibly deny them anymore as the shit pile broomed under the carped has grown so large it makes even them trip on it, so then they just enter damage control mode and PR recovery but not out of the kindness of their heart but because of media backlash.

But they never have the common sense to release statements like "hey, the latest MacOS update might brick some systems so we're pulling the updated until we can do further testing and patching, if you've been affected by the bug already go to a Apple store and have it fixed for free".

They have pulled updates [1]. The one person I know who was affected was given a replacement.

I suppose I'm failing to see the need for a public statement if you've fixed the problem and provide service to those affected. Nobody can pull the faulty update anymore. And it's not like someone with a bricked device is more likely to see a PR statement than seek out support.

[1] https://osxdaily.com/2023/07/11/apple-pulls-rapid-response-u...

methinks you're the self-victim of some confirmation bias here, sir.

It's not "refreshing" to hide problems.

> It's not "refreshing" to hide problems

Hiding entails ignoring the problem. They're not doing that. Their track record is to fix it. Not every action needs an accompanying tweet and blog post.

Of course they are not ignoring the problem, internally. The issue issue at hand is that they are not being open about the problem.

It IS refreshing not to be insulted by the usual "You are important to us and we're taking this very seriously" PR fluff.

Maybe because it isn't that big of an issue? Have you heard about this anywhere besides HN? If it were a big deal you know all the websites would be all over it as if the Mac were doomed.

Google this week seems to be going through a similar bug on their flagship Android 14 release, affecting users who have multiple accounts set up. They also seem to be favoring a "minimal" strategy when it comes to PR communication surrounding this issue.

Okay?

Used to be, while Jobs was still around.

These days it's just a bunch of wannabes trying too hard to be him.

"You're updating it wrong." —Steve

> Most companies would consider "the upgrade sometimes bricks the device" to be a release-stopping bug

I've run into such horrific bugs during pretty normal use that I don't think this anymore.

It's a bug...

It's a device bricking bug. For a $2.5-10k device.

Brick usually means unfixable without an EEPROM replacement or data loss.

It's not possible (well, it's very difficult) to do this on an Apple Silicon Mac; once there's an update you can always apply it from another Mac, like the steps on this page do, and your data is still there. With Intel Macs it's possible.

> Brick usually means unfixable without an EEPROM replacement or data loss.

The definition of "bricked" is not set in stone; a lot of what a normal person would consider "bricked" (doesn't turn on, or turns on to an unresponsive black screen, and no magic sequence of button presses can reset it to working order) could be fixed by a power user with the right equipment, software, and knowledge.

In this case, it requires fairly expensive equipment (another $2.5-10k device), somewhat easy to acquire software, and the appropriate set of instructions, to overwrite the device's broken firmware with a working copy; you don't have to open up the device and plug a JTAG adapter, but using the DFU protocol is very similar to that, since in both cases you're writing directly to the firmware under control of an external device. This is not like "BIOS FlashBack" and similar on non-Apple PCs, in which the device can rewrite its firmware by itself from a common USB stick.

(Also, about data loss: a device with removable storage could get bricked without any data loss, and fixed also without any data loss, simply because the data storage is separated from the firmware and from most of the hardware. It's Apple's insistence on non-removable storage which risks losing data when something else makes the device fail to boot.)

> In this case, it requires fairly expensive equipment (another $2.5-10k device)

A few minutes of access to one, not ownership of it, and hardly any system requirements on it.

> It's Apple's insistence on non-removable storage which risks losing data when something else makes the device fail to boot.

That's actually not the reason. All storage is removable if you just desolder it. It's because the storage is encrypted and you can't extract the keys.

But how would they then keep up their profit margins to keep shareholders happy? Their first obligation is to the shareholder, not to the customer.

(I think it is ridiculous that the system works in that way, especially for a company that hasn’t needed investors in over a decade, but it is what it is.)

ya - I cant update my m1 macbook air without going into DFU mode and using configurator to “revive” my macbook. Otherwise it just tells me “Failed to personalize the software update”. Made the mistake of going to the Apple Store where they promptly restored my machine deleting all my data - only to encounter the exact same issue when the next update is shipped. This way you cant even show them that their fix did not actually fixed it permanently.

Also what's with the magic trick of entering DFU mode by pressing the buttons at a very specific time for a very specific number of seconds? Felt like singing a song to some fictional Mac OS gods and hoping for the stars to align for the laptop to show up in the second Mac. Ah, also the port you use for the USB-C cable matters!! Has to be the first from the left? But why?

Anw, I followed a video by Mr. Macintosh and managed to get mine up and running, whew.

Well it’s a mode you really don’t want users going into if they didn’t intend to, so it kind of makes sense to only activate if the user has deliberately done an action that would not happen randomly.

See Also: entering bootloader mode in android devices

I've done this several times with a TB3 cable. Has to be the right port for DFU.

Also with the M1 Pro MacBook, my LG USB-C monitor broke during the upgrade. Black screen, same on another connected USB-C laptop. Tried different cables, unplugging power from the monitor and factory reset on the monitor, no luck. Other inputs like HDMI and DisplayPort still work. I don't think the breakage during the upgrade is a coincidence.

I would really advise against having anything connected to the Macbook during upgrades, except the charger...

The exact same thing happened to me (M2 Pro) and I had to take the exact same steps to fix it! Thankfully my data was also intact after the DFU revival, but I also thought it was an isolated incident—that maybe the battery ran dry before the update finished and something got corrupted. But my spare monitor must've been the culprit.

Today I had to DFU restore my macbook because I wanted to reinstall it, but built-in restore over the web did not work. My base system was 13.2, it downloads all the files for 13.6, it filled bar to 100% and then spewed error.

It's obvious that it's some incompatibility between 13.2 base system and 13.6 install. Apple quality is atrocious these days. One would have thought they would test the most basic scenarios before releasing their x.6 software.

And worse of all, there's no official (or even unofficial, at least I wasn't able to find one) way to create USB boot installer without another Mac or to DFU restore Mac without another Mac. Do they think I live in Apple Store? I don't have other Mac. I was able to DFU restore with libimobiledevice, god bless its creator, but it really should not happen. Windows or Linux are so much more transparent compared to macOS.

Yeah the Apple bootloader and restore stuff scares the shit out of me. The network access requirement, firmware on SSD and hardware lock are always lurking waiting for the most inconvenient time to go wonky when I hose something.

Conversely windows, just got a USB stick in the drawer I can boot off.

As a lifelong Mac user, it just now hit me how inconvenient locked down the restore process is.

> Conversely windows, just got a USB stick in the drawer I can boot off.

It goes further than that, on many motherboards even a failed firmware update can be fixed through a random USB stick from the drawer, you just need the right BIOS file to put in it.

And some motherboards even have a backup BIOS if one of them becomes deranged. Now that's luxury.

> Conversely windows, just got a USB stick in the drawer I can boot off.

Linux as well. Will probably work better than windows on older hardware

In the FireWire days, you could firmware boot a Mac into target disk mode and plug it into another mac where it would show up as a disk.

How far we’ve fallen.

Yep, macOS is nice but Apple stuff is mostly locked down luxury garbage nowadays, yet they have more fanboys than ever which infuriates me. Previously everything was open, and it was genuinely nice to work on the various parts of a Mac, now I would rather have to fix 10 PCs than deal with a single modern mac...

Yes same here. I did install then uninstall Avahi Linux a year or so ago, but now I can't upgrade past 12.6.

I'll need to get an external drive, back everything up, then do a DFU restore on my M1 Max MBP to get it upgraded to Sonoma.

I deleted the MacOS installation on my (older) Mac. Linux works well enough

> Do not let them charge you any money for it. This is a problem Apple caused, and purely a software issue. If the technicians claim there is hardware damage, they are wrong.

Good luck with that.

The Apple Store is usually great with this stuff.

If there's a documented problem that affects your hardware model and the given software versions, they're extremely unlikely to try to charge you for anything.

If it's not documented and you have a problem then you are usually shit out of luck. The early days of butterfly keyboards was hell for a lot of people. I managed to get mine back to them for a full refund 3 days after I got it thank fuck.

I got a full MacBook Pro replacement when my MBP had something wrong causing it to charge extremely slowly - completely on Apple's dime. They first sent me an overnight shipping box to send in my MBP, where they then replaced the top case assembly. After that didn't work they overnighted me a brand new in box MBP.

I had to spend 6+ hours on the phone over multiple days with a senior tech support staff to make it happen, but at least it was eventually resolved and I didn't pay anything for it. Obviously it wasn't a documented problem because we troubleshooted everything possible before replacement.

> I didn't pay anything for it

You paid 6+ presumably stressful hours of your time. That sounds like a crazy high price to me that you should be able to bill them for.

I wonder whether they could've done it faster if they were required to reimburse you for the time and nerves you had to spend to get them to fulfill their (assuming you were within warranty) law-mandated responsibility of providing you with a product that works as described.

How did you even get to the point of talking to them on the phone? When I last had a problem (extreme instability up to full crashes when RAM pressure is high, which is apparently a problem with every single ARM Mac out there) they wanted me to come into an authorized store as the first thing.

I eventually caved in and just bought a machine with bigger RAM. My god, I can't imagine spending several hours over several days turning the device off and on, resetting NVRAM and re-installing the system ...

Documented by whom? Are you going to show a marcan post to them and claim it’s an Apple issue?

Marcan's post contains apple ticket numbers... presumably you show them those.

Apple store employees probably may not have access to bug reports that their engineers would be able to access?

In many countries Apple stores aren't run by Apple and won't have access to bug reports.

Uh, what? You mean the actual Apple Stores (which are only available in select countries) are not run by Apple? That would be new.

If you mean various third party resellers then of course, it's just a run of the mill shop that happens to sell Apple products, a completely different experience.

These are licensed shops that serve as effectively local Apple Store (as they are primary contact with Apple for majority of clientele) and then completely 3rd party stores which do not carry Apple branding.

Authorized resellers aren't your "contact with Apple", you can simply buy genuine apple products there. Authorized repair centers can do repair and have access to genuine parts. That's all it is.

Apple Store is a totally different shebang, if those are not owned by Apple it would be a major news story for lots of people.

And if they are owned by apple I don't see why their employees can not see bug reports.

If you are familiar with Apple, you may have heard about their obsession with secrecy. If you haven't, they are obsessive about secrecy. Apple store employees don't get unrestricted access to Radar, their bug tracker, because they don't want their secrets getting out. The text in a bug could accidentally hint at a new feature on there next iphone, and Apple can't have that happening.

As far as general population is involved, "iSpot" in Poland are "apple stores".

Even if what happens is that they are just a favoured franchise.

It's not about genpop, someone here on HN said that Apple Store employees might have access to radar and someone else here on HN claimed that Apple Stores are not owned by Apple. We should know what is an apple store and what is a random shop that paid Apple for logo rights;)

> Authorized resellers aren't your "contact with Apple", you can simply buy genuine apple products there. Authorized repair centers can do repair and have access to genuine parts. That's all it is.

The last time I dared to request a troubleshooting for the terrible lockups (sometimes down to the touchpad click not responding directly) that I now believe are caused by swapping (and are present on every ARM Mac I've used), I was offered by the official Apple website to make an appointment at Gravis, an authorized reseller and then perhaps also authorized repair provider.

Apple does direct you there. But the key is that people there are third parties. They have some arrangement with Apple and access to genuine parts but they are not Apple and they don't put you in touch with anybody at Apple.

But Apple Store I think is owned by Apple and people there actually work at Apple. Also if Apple Store was the same franchise thing as authorized resellers then I don't see why there would be so few Apple Stores around the world.

Also wow. I didn't have this particular touchpad issue with my M1 mac yet. I do have a bunch of gripes with Apple about other issues though. Just a couple days ago noticed notification center was using 100% CPU and draining battery. Only because I wanted to check time in another timezone using world clock widget. Trying to edit the widget and select a different city locked up the entire thing with all the other widgets. Dumpster fire.

Yep, my experience has usually been the opposite. "We normally charge for fixing this, but we're a little embarrassed that this happened so it's free".

I didn't have much trouble. When MacbooksAir 2011 version had those SSD hardware failures, I told multiple classmates of mine about the hardware failure page and they got the repairs for free instead of spending $800.

I don’t know what’s going on with Apple lately. They’ve built one of the world’s best brands after a near-death experience via a ruthless focus on and fanatical commitment to providing a holistically premium experience (for the people who want their version of that) to justify their premium pricing and huge margins. If you like what they do, it Just Works from purchase on. Or did until recently.

Just today I had an experience that was so Kafkaesque it felt like a mean spirited prank, and because they never fuck up this badly, I had no contingency plan for one of the times it matters a lot.

Any advice on how to get the “we fix things for loyal customers by doing what’s required” people on the phone would be appreciated, but based on the runaround, infinite hold Ferris wheel the primary support line apparently is now, I’m not getting my hopes up.

The Apple today is very different from the Apple of 20 years ago. The brand is the same, yes, but the people are all largely different. You see this all the time in the video game industry, ie Blizzard, Bungie, 343 industries.

Maybe the newest group of programmers and engineers are dealing with a very complicated code base? Maybe no one fully understands everything involved until something breaks?

Just my N=1 anectdote, but I’ve been having almost universally great experiences until maybe 2 or 3 months ago.

On the software side, I tend to tolerate more security risk (within reason) to delay updates until a consensus emerges that they’re robust, because I’m not a high value target to anyone north of “script kiddy” and run a tight ship on the easy stuff, so the EV of an abruptly unusable work machine vs. getting pwned weighs heavily relative to winding up in the crosshairs of anyone sophisticated enough to exploit a recent CVE. My online banking is properly 2-fac’d, if anyone wants to read my browser history or email and cares enough to go ti that trouble, I’ll want them that I’m not important enough for it to be worth the trouble.

This would clearly change if my work went back to having demanding security requirements, but it doesn’t just now.

It’s really the customer service, fulfillment, Apple Store experience (it used to feel like stepping into the least stressful room in the mall and now it’s a zoo).

It's likely not a single person understands the entire MacOS stack anymore, at least since Mavericks, all the pre-1985 old guard engineers having retired by then.

Interesting take given that a Mac today has virtually nothing in common with a Mac of the late 1990s, let alone 1984.

Says who?

Mac OS X is a descendant of NeXTStep. It shares no code in common with classic Mac OS.

How is Mac OS Classic sharing lines of code, or not, even relevant to the question?

By definition. If they used the same code, they would be similar.

Yes but the opposite is not true, zero line of code shared does NOT necessarily imply zero or near zero similarity. Which is the case under discussion.

Only affects Apple silicon chips (intel unaffected) with ProMotion display. Just a quick Exit clause for people with older machines.

Only one of the two bugs listed requires a ProMotion display. The other one can occur on all Apple silicon machines.

Not sure if related, but my 2020 M1 macbook air bricked a week or so after upgrading to Sonoma. I was suspicious if this was related to the update. Luckily the logic board was replaced for free under warranty laws here, though it put me off switching to iphone which I was a day away from doing.

Upgrades bricking hardware seems to be a common failure mode for macOS. For example Big Sur bricked a bunch of 2013 and 2014 MBPs: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/macos-big-sur-update-br...

I was affected by this and like many users the problem was fixed after replacing the I/O board. In my case, I did it myself using a $10 part from Ebay since the machine was well out of warranty at that point.

From comments #736 and #747 attached to the forum post you kindly shared, it sounds like simply disconnecting and reconnecting the I/O board may be sufficient (found those comments linked in #831):

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-big-sur-update-br...

And this is why there will never be a Year of the Linux Desktop -- no-one wants to have to depend on forum posts to fix these kind of issues.

/troll

Why the "/troll"? You're 100% right non-ironically: the problem being that on Linux the need to consult forum posts to fix these kind of issues is way more frequent than in macOS.

On Linux it's as rare as on MacOS, if you buy preinstalled.

As long as you don't do anything with it on your own.

So essentially, the situation you'd have if you'd bought a Mac?

If we want to compare apples to apples, then we compare:

Mac with macOS updates installed regularly, and only those provided by Apple. Non-Apple apps get dropped in /Applications like they should be. If there's an installer that asks for root access, you might get boned.

Linux preinstalled with OS updates installed regularly, and only those provided by the vendor. Apps that don't come with the OS's package manager should be installed somewhere under $HOME, and never installed systemwide as root.

Sure, if you have a Mac and disable SIP (or whatever it's called nowadays) and start mucking around with files in /System or whatever, because you want to install some mod that does something cool, you might have a bad time. Same as if you decide that screwing around in /lib on a Linux machine is a good idea.

But if we actually compare these two apples, I suspect the Linux one would have fewer problems.

>So essentially, the situation you'd have if you'd bought a Mac?

No, worse, with more device incompatibilities, manual fiddling, arcane settings, and so on to make things work.

>Sure, if you have a Mac and disable SIP (or whatever it's called nowadays) and start mucking around with files in /System or whatever, because you want to install some mod that does something cool, you might have a bad time.

Sure, but I'm not talking about that. With Linux you often have a bad time trying to make basic, but not distro configured, functionality to work.

> with more device incompatibilities, manual fiddling

Did you read what I wrote above? "if you buy preinstalled"

If you install Linux on an ordinary "Windows-certified" computer, you will have problems. If you install an alternative OS on a Macbook, you will have exactly the same problems.

>Did you read what I wrote above? "if you buy preinstalled"

And did you understand my point? Buying preinstalled isn't a cure-all, only ensures that the bundled hardware drivers are compatible and configured. That's a pretty low bar.

It doesn't cover doing stuff with third party devices (which on the Mac 99% of the time it works every time).

Not to mention even the bundled-hardware doesn't always work even if you buy pre-installed (like the laptop not sleeping properly for example).

> Not to mention even the bundled-hardware doesn't always work even if you buy pre-installed (like the laptop not sleeping properly for example).

I agree that this is not tolerable. However my devices from Purism have a reliable sleep and other functionality out of the box.

> third party devices

Check Linux compatibility before buying and they will work reliably. Works for me.

By the standard of "do you ever need to consult forum posts to solve a problem", sure, Linux is worse than macOS. By the standard of "do you ever need to consult forum posts to fix hardware that has apparently been bricked by a software update", macOS seems to be considerably worse. At least, that's my experience. I've never had hardware damaged by Linux, which I've run almost exclusively. On the other hand the one Apple device I've ever owned got bricked by their software update.

I can't say I've heard of that happening to people on Linux at all other than maybe early days of Xorg. Damage (reversible or otherwise) to hardware is extraordinarily rare on Linux, I can only think of it happening during the very early days of EFI and only under very specific conditions.

> I've never had hardware damaged by Linux, which I've run almost exclusively. [...] I can't say I've heard of that happening to people on Linux at all other than maybe early days of Xorg.

There was that LG CD-ROM drive which treated a CD-RW command (which it should ignore or reject since it's not a CD-RW drive) as a firmware upload command. When a newer Linux kernel started using that command, these drives got bricked (source: https://lwn.net/Articles/55537/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20041204072839/http://www.mandra...).

More recently there was "rm -rf /" wiping efivars and bricking some motherboards with shitty uefi implementations thanks to systemd mounting efivars rw by default (and shitty motherboard firmware). The kernel "fixed" this by mounting unknown efivars as (mostly) immutable.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/UEFI-rm-root-directory

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/efivarfs....

There were also some motherboards with shitty UEFI implementations which got bricked when the efivars storage did not have enough free space to do the garbage collection. The kernel "fixed" this by not allowing more than half of the efivars storage to be used (https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...).

Right, this is what I meant by the EFI brick in my comment. And in my comment "I can't say I've heard of that happening", I meant bricking a device on a system update. That's the specific thing which seems to happen on occasion with macOS, but that I've not seen with Linux. I do grant that there have been some (very rare) instances like this where hardware can be bricked by a command run on a Linux system.

> macOS seems to be considerably worse

Most users will just take their machine in to the Apple Store when this kind of thing happens, rather than try to fix it themselves.

Sure, doesn't make this any less inconvenient though. I would much prefer to finish whatever I want to finish today (even if I spend a few hours trying to fix an issue) than wait whatever amount of days waiting until my hardware is fixed.

> doesn't make this any less inconvenient though

You're right that it's not ideal, but it certainly makes it a lot _less_ inconvenient than being completely stuck forever (as most non-highly-technical people would be if they had to follow instructions on forums to fix Linux).

Sure, but that's when they get told "you need to replace the logic board, that'll be $500 since it's out of warranty". That's not a theoretical problem either, people were literally told to do this back when the Big Sur brick happened to my model (2014 MBP). Eventually users figured out on their own that you could just replace the I/O board (not the mainboard / "logic board"). Apparently (going by that forum thread) disconnecting and then reconnecting the I/O board fixes it as well for some people (I don't remember whether I tested this), but this isn't something that Apple happily figured out and did for everyone who walked into one of their stores. We had to fix it ourselves.

This is anecdotal, but my last “corporate job” was the closest to thing to shrink-wrapped software, even though it was a SaaS. Every release was meticulously documented. Any public facing UI or API change was approved the appropriate teams.

This is similar to macOS, Windows, or even FreeBSD releases. I haven’t seen any Linux distribution that has such comprehensively coordinated releases. Between systemd and the Linux kernel, I’m not sure it would be possible.

Many distros have good documentation, but, in my experience, far too often the bulk of it is in out of date wikis or forums. Perhaps this is out of date thinking and I’ve missed the train in the past 10 years.

As a counterpoint, OpenWRT has been good, but their main “product”, imho, is LuCI. Lower level issues often require vendor specific forums.

This issue in GP is unrelated to Linux, it happens on single-boot macOS.

That's the point, I think - Linux gets derided because people say it just breaks at random and you have to wade through forums to find arcane incantations to fix it, either implying or outright stating that their favorite proprietary OS would never just blow up in your face and force you to resort to exotic troubleshooting steps. So when macos, the poster child for "user friendly", proceeds to brick the machine and require elaborate rituals to fix, it invites a certain level of snark from users pointing out that the high and mighty proprietary OSs might be just as bad as Linux after all.

Of course, whether that's valid is at minimum a question of actual frequency of problems and relative impact and effort to fix, but from a perspective of optics and emotions I understand the reaction.

I concur, the amount of times I had to Google dozens of minutes for issues happening in my work-issued Macbook Pro, and never finding answers because things are supposed to "just work" is maddening.

For one example on top of my head, sometimes I can't adjust the brightness of the monitor in the Macbook using the Notification Center (it is grayed out), but if I open the "Settings -> Displays" I can do it. Never found a solution for it after searching for a while, so I just gave up.

Or the fact that I can't enable retina or font smoothing in my 1440p monitor, so the fonts looks ugly (I got used eventually, but they still looks worse than Windows or Linux in the same monitor). I used a workaround in the past using "Better Display" to create a 4k framebuffer that was downscaled to 1440p, but this was so slow and also prone of other issues so eventually I just got used to the ugly fonts.

Another one: I have a TouchBar Macbook (again, this is a work-issued laptop), but I just want it to work as a normal keyboard: show the Function keys, if I press Fn show the shortcuts. Yep, doesn't work: while you can do this, pressing Fn while pressing some of the shortcuts in the TouchBar doesn't work. This is especially infuriating because one of the shortcuts that doesn't work is the brightness one. Go back to the first issue and you can see why this drive me mad sometimes.

Seems like a weird rationale. Any manufacturer is going to have its share of software and hardware issues.

The logic Board failed in my 2020 M1 Air as well. Opened the lid one day, and it wouldn't power on. I have AppleCare on it, otherwise it would have been a $500 repair.

About two weeks ago I'm sitting in a hotel room with the air on bed with the lid open. I grab it by the screen to slide it closer to me and the screen shatters from the light pressure of my finger.

There are instances of both these things happening to the Air all over the internet. At first I really liked the M1 Air, but it has now proven too unreliable for me.

My 2020 M1 Air generally requires a hard reboot if left closed and on a charger overnight, but that's been the worst of it until now (besides the rapidly degrading battery that seems calibrated to hit 79% a month after my AppleCare+ expires, while my 2015 Air's is still going strong).

Premium™

My wife is still rocking a 2012 Mac air and uses it regularly. Apart from never rebooting it - WHAT ABUT MY TABS - its a sturdy little fellow.

Shame to hear the build quality in the latest is so poor.

FWIW I have been using iPhones for 10+ years and not once has an update ever failed or had any issues.

But my Google Pixel phone used to brick itself all the time, I think twice in the two years I had it.

In the same period, 10-12 years ago, both androids and iPhones bricked themselves if there was no storage left on the device. Both needed somes bytes on boot and if they couldn't write on disk, they failed to boot.

I've never had an Android phone brick itself in 13 years of owning them. I have friends whose iPhones have gotten bad updates. Not sure if they were bricked, though, or if they "only" needed a factory reset to get things going again.

Phones are Apple's main business. At this point, Macs are second-tier. With Google, I suspect it's their engineering practice. Google doesn't like to make engineering mistakes.

Reading many of the comments here… I wonder if a lot of hacker news commenters have actually met real, everyday users of technology. Not other nerds and grognards, but like, the lady sitting over in a cubical, who only knows enough about computers to do their job.

Do you really think users want graphic mode selection on boot? What percent of Mac users have alternate bootloaders or even know what that means.

A lot of commenters need to do some time in the proverbial trenches and support a fleet of devices at a large company. See if users really care about the things you think they do.

From the submission:

> Once System Firmware is updated to the macOS Sonoma version, if the display is configured to a refresh rate other than ProMotion, that system will no longer be able to boot into older macOS installs nor Asahi Linux correctly. This includes recovery mode when those systems are set as the default boot OS, and also System Recovery at least until the next subsequent OS upgrade.

That can and will absolutely affect regular users, even if they don't 'care' about it or 'know what it means'.

> that system will no longer be able to boot into older macOS installs

No, that seems pretty super-user to me. The average user goes forward in versions, not back, and rarely has two at the same time.

On the contrary all normal users have two at the same time, that's the system recovery one mentioned.

Normal people don't care about it, talk about it, or think about it, but may come to rely on it - or have it used by a 'Genius' when something stops working. It affects them.

> No, that seems pretty super-user to me.

Here's a play-by-play scenario.

1) Grandma is prompted to update to Sonoma, and so she does.

2) But note that the installer does not update the recovery partition.

3) Laptop reboots, and grandma sees an Apple logo for exactly 2 seconds, and then the screen goes black. Manually rebooting results in the same thing, every time.

4) Grandma now tries to roll up her sleeves and see if she can fix it. She googles around, and discovers that the she should be able to get into the Recovery OS and maybe fix things there... but when she tries to do that, same thing: apple logo for 2 seconds and then black screen.

How did I come up with this play-by-play? Well, because today I was said grandma.

Where does this involve the average user going back in versions of their on volition? That's the whole point of why this bug is horrible: you get no say in the matter. You upgrade to Sonoma, and depending on your refresh rate, you can't boot into your OS. Wanna use the Recovery OS? Too bad: that's too old to know to use a functioning refresh rate settings (because the installer left the old Recovery OS version in place), and instead it uses whatever was set in NVRAM (or similar) from when you last configured the refresh rate.

Wasted today using another MacBook to update the Recovery OS via DFU (using Apple Configurator), and now I'm reinstalling Sonoma from that recovery, and praying that this will unbrick my laptop for work tomorrow.

If you met an everyday user of technology you'd see that he/she is completely fine simply remembering what to click on a cryptic screen which no one understands or has time to spend looking up. Just think of all the notifications and alerts about various security stuff while you need to get things done. Muscle memory. Except unlike security warnings, dismissing which can pwn you, in this case it could one day save your system/work so I don't see how it's not worthwhile.

This issue can occur to any user who wants to have two macOS versions for whatever reason. Not that extraordinary especially between creative professionals

TL;DR: Recent macOS Sonoma and 13.6 Ventura have upgrade bugs that brick some macs and make recoveryOS unusable, causing a black screen that requires a DFU revive.

Issues on Sonoma appear most often on dual-booting macs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208891

Ventura upgrades can also bite you if your display refresh rate is set to anything other than ProMotion, for unclear reasons.

The doc is on the Asahi Linux wiki because their developers discovered this issue, but it's not unique to Asahi. In fact, running the Asahi Linux installer can detect whether your mac will be affected by this issue, even if you ultimately choose not to install Asahi Linux. See the article for details.

Erg, I ran into this on my mac twice when I upgraded. I have two bootable OSX partitions and it hit on both upgrades. I'm not really a mac guy and it took a _lot_ of messing around (and learning that DFU exists and what it does) to sort out. Just lucky that my daughter has a mac so that I could even use DFU without having to take the thing into an apple store.

I am somewhat glad that there is a 3rd party that actively helps finding macOS issues.

I am so terrified of this upgrade that I think I'll wait a whole year. That's not a good thing.

I pretty much always wait 6 months or so for Mac upgrades on whatever machine is important to me. There seems to pretty consistently be regular bugfix updates for the few months following a release.

Its realistically what you should be doing unless your machine is a test host itself.

Unless you aren’t doing anything important on your Mac that’s always good advice.

this happened to my work macbook while I was trying to upgrade to ventura, a 1 year old macos version

That’s probably wise. I wish I had waited. Since upgrading to Sonoma, I have recurring issues with the system file dialog. Sometimes the dialog will open, but not allow me to save, other times it will just fail to open altogether.

Any time I start a new video project now, I save it instantly because Command+S still works, but if it opens the Save As dialog then it frequently won’t.

I wonder if this is behind a failed Sonoma upgrade I saw on eBay today; Mac Mini M2 Pro sold as-is for a very decent price, about $300-$400 off despite from this year. :) Seller didn't know what was wrong with the Mac, only that it happened during Sonoma upgrade and this sounds mighty suspicious for such a new machine if it's widespread.

in 30 years we have gone from the idea that your computer could accidentally brick your monitor, to the idea that your monitor could accidentally brick your computer.

https://trixter.oldskool.org/2006/02/02/computing-myth-1-sof...

When I saw the upgrade to Sonoma appear in my Settings I had a feeling the first version of this new OS would be buggy so I held off on it. Now extra glad I did! Gonna stick with Ventura for a while! Haha ! :)

Agreed

This seems like a very unusual bug by Apple standards. Makes me consider upgrading to new macbooks...

At this point it’s kind of common knowledge to wait a while before upgrading macOS to latest major version. I don’t remember a major update that didn’t come with its own set of problems.

I don’t know, it’s pretty high there on the list of their complete fuckups, like allowing anyone to log in as root from the login dialog…

> macOS Ventura 13.6

Well dang, I just upgraded yesterday, too. Fingers crossed that nothing breaks...

Had another weird refresh rate bug with 14.1 - external display doesn’t have a HDR option in settings at 120hz anymore - only works with HDR if I change the refresh rate 100hz or lower. Was fine in earlier MacOS

Man, I had a rough week last week. Shipped two regressions. Seeing this story, as awful as it must be for the responsible eng, has really made me feel much better. Not schadenfreude. Just commiseration.

Can something be done using VoiceOver boot mode? I've already recovered macs stuck on 0 brightness after an upgrade with that... Can't find the documentation now, but it definitely exists.

This is exactly why I lag one major version behind the latest.

Well, this also affects the previous major version, macOS Ventura 13.6

This is exactly why I lag two or three versions behind the latest.

This is why I'm still using RHEL 7.

Just don't upgrade to any version ending in 0.

13.6.1 is also affected.

Need to wait for 13.6.1.1

If that is the case, why does the OP label it as a Sonoma issue?

This is why I'm still on Big Sur-- it mostly works!

One of my machines is still on Mojave- my 32-bit games still work!

Picasa will only run on 32 bit as well.

The Sonoma update bricked my M1 MBP and Apple had to wipe the whole thing.

Something stinks in this thing.

I had this exact thing happen to me when I tried to reset a Mac and wipe it clean. Would not start up and went into this doom loop when booting with the apple logo and a black screen. No amount of key combinations worked. I had to drop into DFU, which is a huge pain to get into to begin with and then use another Mac to recover.

does anyone have info if this is fixed in ventura 13.6.1? https://support.apple.com/de-at/HT213985

I just installed 13.6.1 on an M1 MacBook Pro and am now facing the boot issue, so I'm guessing it's not fixed :). To make matters worse, the specific USB port required for the DFU revive fix is broken as well, which was never an issue as the other two worked... oof.

FYI the Asahi Linux installer says “please upgrade that should help” but bumping 13.6 -> Sonoma 14.1 did not help, the SystemRecovery still shows up as 13.5

Or does that mean wait for 14.2?

First I've heard of any issues.. I have done a couple upgrades already with no issue. I'm sure there are some scenarios where it fails, but Sonoma has been out a while with millions of users being prompted constantly to upgrade. Feels like less than a "you're holding it wrong" problem. HN is obv going to bring out the edge cases, but it doesn't seem like the world is on fire with "Sonoma Bricks" by any means.

Do you dual boot? I've got two bootable OSX partitions on my mac and this hit me when I updated.

I use a lot of Apple products but this attitude you're expressing has always annoyed me (because I see it most frequently when it comes to Apple's software and hardware quality). These bugs affect people all the time and are indicative of poor QA. 5 users at a company we provide some software support for (note: we don't control their machines) decided to upgrade their machines and somehow became unbootable just yesterday. Please don't be in denial about Apple's increasingly worse QA. An intern with a checklist could have uncovered these issues.

We have a fleet of several hundred Macs, most are M1/2 at this point. I heard reports of several Macs coming in for support that booted to a black screen after Sonoma's .0 landed. So many that the JAMF team blocked Sonoma until the .1 landed.

Definitely shoddy QA on Apple's part. Also, your sample size is too small. Everyone works differently and it takes a certain set of settings/workflows to trigger this compatibility issue.

On a much more minor note the .0 version of the upgrade also has a big that pops up a contacts window every few minutes and steals keyboard focus.

there's something fundamentally wrong at apple theses days, macos just doesn't work like it used to

This is why I am not so quick with upgrading to next major version anymore.

I'm not a Mac or Asahi user (though I think it is an amazing project).

However, this is such a great write up, very thorough with root cause, mitigations etc.

Keep up the good work!

Tangentially related, ever since upgrading to Sonoma my computer reboots when I put it to sleep. I’ve heard the same from other users.

Holy fuck, thanks for the warning! I'm just glad I didn't upgrade to 13.6 yet. And installing Sonoma on a second volume to try it out is also out of the picture for the foreseeable future. Apple's OSs seem to get worse with every turn. Maybe I shouldn't touch Sonoma at all. What's the point on an Intel Mac anyway?

I’m an apple fanboy and let me be the first to say their SDLC since the pandemic has been AWFUL. I have never had so many bugs with apple devices. And I’m not talking about giant catastrophic bugs you would expect with windows or Linux. I mean little things, like random phone reboots, overheating, my mac restarting when I wake up from sleep, internet issues, etc. They need a shake up and to stop focusing on all these features NO ONE uses. Can one person tell me they use the features they just announced? Nobody even knows you can edit an iMessage still.

I agree, I started buying some Macbooks for work and was horrified when the Launchpad just wouldn't open on a brand new Mac.

Like, you press Launchpad, and it just ... doesn't open. sometimes. This kind of rancid stuff you would expect on Windows (i.e. after upgrade to Windows 11, half our laptops can't right click on the desktop sometimes) but it never used to happen on OS X.

" . . . The new version - it's not there to fix bugs. That's not the reason we come up with a new version. " - Bill Gates

http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html

Abstraction Layers.

We've gotten to point with the huge number of abstraction layers (and now AI as well) that troubleshooting what causes system to do what it did, has become so unwieldily difficult to diagnosis.

This doesn’t seem to be the problem here? It’s an issue of having a combinatorial number of versions to test when upgrading software and firmware.

Lost a workstation to this last week. infuriating.

I think my 2014 MacBook on MacOS 12.5 was affected by this too.

I had Ubuntu installed in a second partition and it refuses to boot ever since I installed 12.5.1 on it.

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