Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Apple Pro M1 16-inch User here.

I went to restart my machine (was plugged into a lightning hub with 3 monitors, I don't ever recall messing with refresh rates) and it went to update. At some point in the loading bar, the screen went black and then flashed an apple logo. When I pressed power, I could sometimes get the apple logo to display on boot, then it went dark. To me it looked like it wasn't booting at all but the machine is pretty quiet even when it's on so it was hard to tell what was happening.

We went to do the firmware revival process using another mac and it would barely recognize the device depending on what we tried. Eventually we were offered the option to do a full system restore, and after many hours battling this, we decided to just lose the data on the machine.

Luckily I keep most major stuff in cloud or in github, but I lost a significant amount of work from the previous 24 hours that ended up delaying a release and causing significant pain. For how much these machines cost, this is completely unacceptable. I know windows machines have their fair share of issues, but in 15 years of working on various windows and mac workstations this is the only time I've lost an entire drive.

Hi, in case you face these challenges again, put the target system into DFU mode and connect the configuring system using the appropriate USB-C port (only one will work).

The DFU key combination is finicky for portable machines: connect a charger (preferably Magsafe so you can watch the power LED) and your configuring system, press and hold power to be sure the system is off (if doing this turned the system on, repeat this step), press left ctrl+option and right shift at the same time as the power button, count ten seconds, let go of everything but power until the device shows up as "DFU" in Configurator (you may be prompted to allow more accessories to connect to your configuring system before it does).

If asked to perform a software update before/during reviving, choose "Quit and update" and start the process again. If you upgraded to 13.6 or 12.5 before facing these issues, you may have to enter recoveryOS instead of booting normally and perform a system upgrade to Sonoma.

If done correctly (without choosing Restore), you will not lose data. If you can't do these steps yourself or think you will have trouble walking a family member through them, the Apple Store can do a revive for you (be explicit that they are only to revive the machine, not restore or replace).

Full details at https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-configurator-mac/reviv...

This sucks, sorry. Things like this are why I tend to wait until downtime (usually Christmas holiday) to upgrade to the latest macOS each year. This gives time for bugs to be discovered and fixed, and if there is a major problem, I have time to fix it.

And, if you can, always wait until X.1 or X.2 at least to upgrade.

Me I just yolo the beta on my daily driver right after the wwdc keynote. If there are any issues I prefer to know straight away. Surprisingly I’ve never run into any major issues, only minor glitches.

Yeah, I always wait until at least X.1. There’s a bunch of people in my company’s Mac users slack group that have been complaining since 14.0 about WiFi/connectivity bugs (often having to reboot to get WiFi to reconnect). It was bad enough for the company to block 14.0 upgrades until 14.1 came out.

but the machine is pretty quiet even when it's on so it was hard to tell what was happening.

This is why I hate the loss of HDD and other activity lights. It's unfortunately not specific to Apple, but they're a leading offender of this "opaqueness" trend.

I admittedly have little Mac experience but it sounds like you weren't able to boot from a USB and copy the files you needed off the drive? That's the usual approach when something like this happens with a PC. I've even done a bit of Hackintoshing and you can certainly boot the macOS installer and use the terminal there. There's currently a gray comment at the bottom of the discussion here lamenting the "smartphonization" of computing, and this is a great example of that. You're expected --- or rather, forced to be --- helpless and treat the machine (or "device") as disposable when something goes wrong, and the same goes for your data; unless you give up some ownership by letting some thirdparty store it for you, that is. (Then again, I own an Android where I can backup and restore the whole eMMC, so it's not a complete characterisation.)

Relevant Douglas Adams quote: "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair."

For MacOS, iStat Menus, the replacement of the older open source MenuMeters is a hard requirement that should really be built into the OS.

This is insane, was there additional software installed by your employer that might have conflicted with the updating process? In my case we have lots of remotely controlled macOS updates that get triggered and supervised by the company I work for.

I wouldn't be surprised if MDM policies caused some funky shit to happen. I couldn't use the migration assistant on one machine because the policy blocked the recovery OS; it just silently failed and booted you back up into your main account.

This is a now well-known bug having to do with multi-monitor setups or changing the refresh rate of the internal panel. MDM policies and other software couldn't write to NVRAM in a way that would cause this issue without the help of a bug in Apple's code.

My 16" M1 MBP was bricked by the Sonoma update and had to be wiped by Apple. Fortunately, I keep most things on external drives. But it's still an egregious QA failure on Apple's part, as witnessed by the increasing number of reports.

And Sonoma appears to be riddled with odd little bugs, manifesting as UI failures. Windows don't come up, or they come up behind others when previously they didn't. For example, disk images, when mounted, open a window as usual but that window appears behind others on the desktop so you're left wondering what happened.

I just had keyboard input rejected with "boink" noises in a dialog raised by Safari, over and over. In the end I couldn't log into the site.

The "About this Mac" item in the Apple menu did nothing, over and over...

and sure enough, I just tried this, and it happened again. But when I started Screenshot to capture it and file a bug, it started working. This is the second day in a row this has happened.

It's looking like a shitty Mac OS release.

I feel like I live in a parallel universe sometimes when I complain about things randomly breaking or never actually working and they say ‘I’ve been using MacBooks for the past ten years and literally nothing bad happened ever’ and here I am just about to break the one year milestone and I just don’t see the mythical Apple level of quality.

The thing is that Apple devices are so widely used, that even if 0.1% of the users encounters an issue, it's still a huge number of people. Added to that, people who run into issues are more likely to complain online than people who don't. So, you don't live in a parallel universe, you're just one of the unlucky 0.1%.

And yes, I have been using Macs for 16 years and have never had a catastrophic issue and neither one of my friends of family. The worst problem was kinda self-inflicted, pre-SIP I was once typing something along the lines onf sudo rm -rf /Library and then accidentally pressed enter. Yay for backups.

> It's looking like a shitty Mac OS release

No this happens every Mac OS release for the last 20+ years.

Sonoma has literally just been released and we only recently had the first major patch. So there will be bugs both known and unknown. Almost all by definition not fixed.

As always if you are doing mission critical work then for any piece of software you should always hold off upgrading until at least a few major patches have been released.

This bug affects Ventura patch as well though.

Some releases are way worse than others. One was truly embarrassing; I can't remember if was Jaguar, Leopard, or some other member of that litter.

>My 16" M1 MB was bricked by the Sonoma update and had to be wiped by Apple.

If it could be restored by wiping the SSD, it’s not bricking. It’s terrible, for sure, but bricking means your device turns into one and you might as well throw it away. If it’s recoverable via software, it’s not bricked.

But what if the SSD contains critical boot components which can't be recovered without the aid of a secondary laptop?

There is no scientific definition of "bricking", and I agree this is a bit of a gray area, but I think it's fair to use the term.

On its own, it was inoperable and unrecoverable. Close enough for me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38107238

Oh, I can reasonably consistently kernel panic sonoma on m1, simply by using fullscreen zoom in accessibility and streaming video.

I think that's my last bug report, as none of my feedback/bug reports, which are very detailed, and some cause data loss/corruption.

0 feedback, 0 fixes. Total waste of time.

I wonder where their software quality and consistency team went to. If you'd release similar buggy software when the AppStore on iPhone became available, your app would simply not pass the quality criteria.

Debian looks awfully nice these days, especially combined with proxmox / passthrough devices

> Windows … come up behind others when previously they didn't.

m1 16" MBP here, this happened to me on the last OS version too. Still happens on Sonoma.

For about 1 year (a few years back) I had an issue where on my three external Samsung monitors (all in portrait orientation) there was a strip about 4cm all across the bottom of all of them, and up the right side of the right monitor where the mouse wouldn't go. Apple couldn't work it out, spent hours talking to them about it. In the end an OS update fixed it.

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