There's really no excuse for this. How is it that Apple wants to tightly integrate their hardware and software but then seemingly miss testing major OS updates on all supported hardware?
Apple needs to fix their QA, and fast. No amount of marketing can undo the damage I've seen over the last few years.
The same way that installer is broken for at least 5 or more years, hitting infinite loops resulting in users rebooting till finally upgrade or install passes through.
Tight integration between OS and hw is mostly used to half-arse firmware interfaces, with huge amounts of "quirks" surfaced by hackintosh enthusiasts.
Apple's unique value proposition is that they control the hardware and software so that things "just work."
It shouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine a room full of older hardware where it's the job of some poor intern to update each device during the alpha/beta phase.
Bricking supported hardware on a software update goes directly against Apple's core business strategy and should have been top of mind for the QA team.
> No amount of QA can ever guarantee 100% success.
You're too quick to let them off the hook.
Compared to the ecosystem of Windows-supported devices, Apple only has to serve updates to relatively few SKUs. If they can afford to buy back a hundred million dollars' worth of stock every year, they can afford to test upgrades on affected older devices before rolling them out.
When an upgrade is supported on an Apple machine, then there should be 100% success -- or at least, as you suggest, a painless way to catch the upgrade failure and roll the device back. They sell the hardware and develop the software, so they have to own the problem. No mumbo-jumbo. No excuses. No passing of the buck to the customer who trusted them at the moment of downloading/installing the upgrade.
If they can't guarantee success for an OS upgrade on a particular machine, then they shouldn't offer it for that SKU -- and they should lower the retail price of the MBP because it doesn't "just work." People who own these machines paid a premium for them over every other comparable laptop.
I have a late-2013 MBP 13 (one of the potentially affected machines), on which I am currently running Mojave because Apple has been guilty of this kind of garbage so many times in the past. Think of how horrible it would be to put your daily driver laptop in the shop for a few days when you have important work to handle. That's the reason why Apple can't just mail it in when rolling out OS upgrades.
I have had similar situations in the past, and you know what the result has always been? I stop buying hardware from the company when it becomes clear that it doesn't give a damn about what happens to the customer. Bose rolled out firmware to the QC35 that nerfed the ANC, and then pretended that nothing happened -- essentially gaslighting the customer. I never bought another pair of Bose ANC headphones after that (I had purchased 5 pairs in the year prior to that, as gifts and for myself). Google rolled out an Android upgrade (Oreo) that immediately sent my Nexus 6P into a Bootloop of Death upon installation, and then passed the buck to Huawei. I swore never again to buy a Google hardware product as a result.
I just bought a MBP 13 a few days ago, because despite all of the BS that Apple has done, they have always turned out to support the customer in the end. But if their defense sounds anything like what you are suggesting -- that there is always some collateral damage when an upgrade is rolled out because QA is not a perfect process -- then I would rethink my purchase decisions in the future.
IIRC while there are no that many official macbook models, there are actually multiple subtle variations released every year - Linux distros found that as users reported a distro working on MacBook 201x but not on a seemingly similar MacBook 201x (same model year). Why they do that is unclear to me (component EOL/cheaper components beclming available ?) but they paper it over in their firmware and OS code, so custo
ers using MacOS don't notice.
All true but given that Apple makes all the hardware too, I'm really curious whether they keep one of every version of the hardware to test OS installs.
Bulletproof is difficult to achieve thanks to hardware failures. Additionally there is a wide range of older hardware out there that may not have been engineered with the necessary support (eg enough space to hold two copies of the firmware).
But putting all that aside: the new sealed system partition is a step in that direction (ROSP was partially about getting clean separation between the system and user files to make snapshot-based updates possible). With snapshots if the update fails you still have the previous snapshot to fall back on - hopefully that will make these kinds of failures less likely in the future.
This type of problem has been around for a decade. Once an Apple product is no longer produced, driver support completely falls by the wayside. There is simply no direct business value to make sure the update works well on all devices. I have a 2020 Intel Macbook Air and I am going to be extremely conservative upgrading to Big Sur, and in fact may not do it at all since Apple seems to support security updates for years on older releases.
There is always business value to support and backwards compatibility. Think of how much goodwill Microsoft has built up for their backwards compatibility. Heck, the story of the version of Doom that runs on DOS->Win3.1->Windows 10 hit the front page today! Now think of how little goodwill Google has, due to their pernicious habit of killing off popular products that don't meet their very high standards for revenue production.
Why does Microsoft dominate the enterprise and not Google? I think the above has almost everything to do with it.
Apple has kind of walked the middle road between Microsoft's extreme backward compatibility and Google's "kill off everything that doesn't earn at least a billion". They support old hardware a lot longer than Google, but they also break a lot of things with their OS updates. Apple also has a pretty legendary track record of successfully shifting CPU architectures without breaking popular apps at the time, something that's pretty much unheard of elsewhere.
>Apple also has a pretty legendary track record of successfully shifting CPU architectures without breaking popular apps at the time, something that's pretty much unheard of elsewhere
Which other SW/HW companies have switched CPU architecture? I am not sure there is a point of comparison here, and there has only been 1 case so far, the M1 is upcoming and we don't know yet how well that will work.
Linux works pretty well with client qemu specified as the architecture handler for non-native binaries too :)
To me while it's nice, it's not an impossible achievement and often likely uses somebody else's code to get there :)
I think apple receive far too much praise for things they've done which are often not as amazing as they seem and too little praise for other things (e.g. their great work on the 5nm SoC hw) as well as far too little criticism for biz practices.
Trying to set things a little more on an even keel :)
Only one case so far? Apple has taken the Mac from Motorola 68000-series chips to PowerPC to Intel x86 and now to the ARM-based M1. That’s 4 different architecture in less than 4 decades.
I mentioned M1 and specifically excluded it since it is unreleased. Is that fully released such that I can buy it right now? Apple site says 17th Nov. Can't know if it breaks things until it is released.
I also said 'architecture change' so by your count that would be 2. But Rosetta was only for PowerPC to x86 wasn't it? There seems to have been emulation for the 68x chips but was it seamless without breaking anything?
I mean any company could change architecture but rely on a customer using an emulator that isn't really not breaking things.
So by my count, 1, but if I am wrong and the 68x translation was equally as seamless and breakless than 2.
But to say it was unheard of you need to reference all the other companies that transitioned architecture and broke stuff. I can't think of another general computing supplier who did that but I might be wrong - can you give an example?
Maybe there is no direct business value but maybe indirectly some of the people hit by this problem could wonder if they should buy their next laptop from a different manufacturer or advise their friend to do so.
By the way my HP laptop from 2014 did well with every single Ubuntu LTS from 12.04 (I bought at the beginning of the year) to 20.04.
I always wait at least a few months before upgrading to a new version, to let Canonical and the community sort out bugs and be reasonably sure that nothing breaks or to have workarounds.
By the way, did you ever recover the laptop or your data?
> Once an Apple product is no longer produced, driver support completely falls by the wayside.
This is the first time I've heard that, and I've never experienced it. If you have a compilation of "driver support disappears" issues, I'd like to read it.
It's very common for folks to be using 5- and 6-year-old Macs with a recent version of macOS. macOS Big Sur supports 7-year-old Macs.
Once an Apple product is no longer produced, driver support completely falls by the wayside.
I've done Mac IT for a long time and I've never seen this be the case.
To be honest, I've experienced this a ton of times with Windows, where the only driver available was for an older version of Windows and not the one the customer has.
I have a nearly 10-year old iMac and I never experienced what you're talking about.
It's disturbing to see an OS update seemingly do something with the BIOS to render the machine completely inoperable. I wonder if the EFI firmware on Macs is just as fragile as some PCs, and something like this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008449
If that was what happened, and you were living in a place like Shenzhen, there's a chance you could simply go to one of the many repair shops around and have the BIOS reflashed in a few minutes while you wait, for <$10USD, and be back to working again.
Of course, Apple is heavily anti-right-to-repair and this might not even be an option in the future... and naturally, the reasons they give are "for security" -- securing their profits, that is.
The other is the overall "opaqueness" of Apple products, which reminds me of this classic Douglas Adams quote: "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
It's common for macOS updates to also update EFI and other firmware. My guess is that there's some sort of bug with either the new firmware or the firmware update process… as opposed to EFI state somehow being corrupted while updating unrelated parts of the OS (which is what happened in your link).
These days, Windows automatically installs firmware updates as well. The old PC status quo, where most users would never receive firmware updates at all, does have the advantage of avoiding issues like this. But it also has many disadvantages, including security risks.
These days, Windows automatically installs firmware updates as well.
Do you have any references for this? Because that is truly scary. I've heard of isolated instances of the manufacturer-installed crapware silently trying to update the BIOS in the background, failing, and resulting in bricked machines upon the next boot, but that wasn't Microsoft's doing.
including security risks
That is BS, unless you are talking about things like user-hostile "secure" boot, which are firmly in the area of "do not want" anyway.
> These days, Windows automatically installs firmware updates as well.
This happened to me. On a (primarily) Linux PC, I was having trouble with a game via Wine/Proton and thought I'd give Win10 a shot.
Installed Win10 to a separate HDD, activated it, and (completely) disconnected it from the Net. Worked fine for a few days (weeks?) but then one day it announced it was installing a BIOS update. Without asking. And no way to Cancel that or somehow tell it to "DO NOT DO THIS".
Note - At no point had it had an internet connection after it was activated. So the BIOS update must have been downloaded and scheduled at that time.
This totally trashed my main Linux install, which uses full disk encryption and custom MOK certificates for booting.
Not Happy.
That being said, I have reasonable backups. So it was more of an incredulous PITA and reminder that "MS can go fuck themselves", than a data loss event.
My wife's Dell gaming laptop just installed a BIOS/Firmware update today, straight from Windows Update. Surprised me to see the firmware update after doing a reboot from updates.
This will be an interesting postmortem. Perhaps the EFI firmware contained incompatible firmware for this HDMI chip? Or maybe removing it bypasses a buggy bit of firmware?
I’d assume it’s different in the 15” late 2013 machines, as I upgraded today without issue - although there was about a five minute interlude of a completely black screen, during which I can only assume it was doing whatever it does to the IO board that bricks the 13” models.
The poster says the update somehow broke their IO IC. That seems unlikely. It's more likely that the update includes new firmware for that chip which contains a bug. In theory, when Apple identify the cause they can update their software so this won't happen for future upgrades. In the meantime, I'm sure they can offer compensation to those with bricked devices who can choose to either put that towards a new computer or send it in for repair.
I’m curious, why do people jump onto a new OS release as soon as it becomes available? Especially on machines they are using professionally.
Between bugs in the OS itself, bugs in apps, and developers who lag behind on OS support (looking at you DAW and audio plug-in devs) it will probably be a year before I try this upgrade myself.
Maybe because your computer immediately starts nagging you to do it, and the messaging from the popular tech media is "stay up to date because hackerz"
Since Catalina the "softwareupdate --ignore" command no longer works unless you have an enterprise MDM profile installed, so you can't even work around that anymore.
it's such nonsense, especially if you are even remotely computer literate. I'm working on an article about it, but I used snow leopard for 12 years with no ill effects (until this year!) and only finally left it because of the tyranny of HDCP
That is not true since Mojave. It will always tell you you have a pending update, it will dump a notification to update to Big Sur (already happened to me this morning), and it'll do it's best to confuse you to update.
Case in point: if you have catalina and you go to system preferences, system updates, you will have the big sur update in big, then some text on the bottom of the window saying something like "there are some other updates..." and then you'll see the security updates for your current OS
Saying "windows is worse" doesn't really mean Apple is fine here. This isn't a post about how a forced Windows update is bricking Microsoft-built hardware with no guaranteed rollback or recovery path.
This is a post about how a major software update from a vendor is breaking their own hardware, and from a company that prides itself on not needing to be a computer expert to use their products.
windows also doesn't upgrade windows 8 to windows 10 like this . windows 10 to windows 10 isn't that breaking change so its fair and osx is not better than this since mojave.
Yes it does. I get notifications that there is an update for MacOS and it will be applied tonight unless I hit the notification and tell it not to or apply immediately.
I have come to my MacBook Pro and found it on the Enter Password boot screen after it decided to reboot overnight, and then helpfully tells me about the security update it did.
I use Windows but I jump on every new release. I like new stuff and I have backups. If it goes bad I just reformat and restore. I have only been burned once.
Isn’t security the biggest reason for most?
Also I work for a medium sized company and at least on a windows domain with GPO, they can lock down which windows updates are applied. Does anything like that exist for MacOS shops? Can IT control what is allowed to be applied and what is not?
I don't think that's the biggest reason to upgrade to a new major (or even minor) version, especially when the previous release(s) are still supported for quite some time.
Catalina, macOS 10.15, for example, didn't stop being supported when Bug Sur, 11.0, was released. In fact, it will still be supported for quite some time. Mojave, 10.14, is supported until late next year and, High Sierra, 10.13, is still supported even today!
Unless there's some new feature that you absolutely just must have, there just really isn't any compelling enough reason for most folks to immediately upgrade to a new .0 release.
In the Windows world, the conventional wisdom -- for probably a decade and a half! -- has been to wait until after SP1 to move to a new major version.
Maybe the younger generation just hasn't been burned (bad) enough (yet) for them to learn not to touch the stove?
But in every other world you can always boot from a recovery USB and fix it, nothing is usually "bricked". Not so with newer Mac's so the risk has intensified.
The update did take longer than indicated. At some points I wondered if both my iMac and mbp were not locked up, but as I was doing other things I just let them take their time. I wonder if those people rebooted mid update or some
When I updated my old MBP to Catalina it was pretty ugly as well. There were a couple of points where I thought it was stalled, or it would reboot multiple times back into the same exact screen and it seemed to be failing, but it did eventually succeed. I had to keep myself from messing with it.
Average time between when a security bug is introduced in the linux kernel and when it detected is 5 years. [0] But because people don't update their shit, 99.9% of exploits in the wild involve bugs that were patched over a year ago. [0]
If apple fixed a security bug in big sur, I'd like to update sooner rather than find out in a CVE next month that I should have actually upgraded ASAP.
That said, waiting at least a few days to see if any problems shake out is probably a good idea.
Now I sort of regret an apple store visit a year or two ago.
A family member was in school and had a few-year-old macbook air that had a black screen. We took it to apple and they told me they could send it away to have it fixed for $700 or we could buy a new one for just a little more. And well, school.
So we decided on the new one.
And in for a penny, in for a pound. We had to keep going.
We needed to upgrade, so we needed dongles. I think thunderbolt 2 cable + thunderbolt3 to tb2 dongle. and of course a tb3 to usb adapter.
So power up the old machine (it still works), connect to new machine, upgrade over firewire and we're good.
I should watch youtube and fix the old one. it has 2 regular usb ports + an sd card reader, so it's more useful.
But I still have a bad taste in my mouth. $700 for a black screen? I think they really do raise the repair price all the way to a new one because they can.
Yup. Had water damage (known, understood, expected a charge to repair) to an MBP. It worked still, just fine. Battery health was 99% though charge was at zero. So a charging circuit. Okay, I think. Maybe $300ish with parts, labor, etc.
No.
"That's going to be $899+tax. Maybe we should look at some new MBPs instead - this one is two years old."
I appreciate good snark. However, you get bonus points if you add something substantial to the discussion. For example, my advice is to avoid upgrading to a new OS without a backup that can be easily re-installed when the installation goes south.
True, you should back up to avoid some strange edge case, but Apple markets itself as the company that makes using computers simpler and claims it works with the model.
As a user I'd expect at the very least it not to systematically fail on a model that is intended to work. Also completely rolling back is much more difficult with the whole closed system issue (which is something users accept in return of simplicity), it's not like getting Ubuntu 18.04 LTS .
I have a late 2013 Macbook Pro. This update bricked it. I have a tendency to install most Apple releases when they are first available, even though there are often problems that are usually fixed with a few updates.
I'm sometimes able to boot into Internet Recovery mode (Command-Option-G). Unfortunately, it seems like the only option is to reinstall Big Sur, which doesn't fix the problem.
Hopefully once Apple fixes this issue, I will be able to install the updated version and get it working again. If not, this machine is 7 years old and more or less on its last legs, but I'm still somewhat disappointed.
I'm so sorry to hear it's bricked; thank you for warning me not to install the update on mine. Is yours a 13" model? I'd like to know if it breaks 15" models too.
Are you able to boot with Shift-Option-⌘-R into Recovery Mode from an older version?
I know that every release of Mac OS X/OS X/macOS has had issues, but the last decade or so seems to be a huge downturn on the Mac hardware and the Mac OS by Apple. The Mac OS has truly become like Windows of the past, where upgrading to a new version is recommended only after SP1 (or even SP2).
There are comments elsewhere that are just victim blaming and victim shaming the people who upgraded on seeing the prompt that comes up. Apple will, in its usual style, never admit to the issue nor offer free repair to the affected (bricking the HDMI chip seems to be the cause, as per some threads on Apple’s discussion forums). Apple has once again dropped the ball, and neither Tim Cook nor Craig Federighi seem eager on solving these problems, and during the current COVID-19 period, this is just unforgivable.
For once, I’d like to see some senior executive in Apple publicly state “We’re sorry we messed up, we will make it right” and then do the right thing. That couldn’t even happen in a dream I suppose.
What’s more you can setup multiple versions of the installer on one drive and it’ll show you the installer icon for each one at the boot select screen (I can’t say I’ve added Big Sur to my installer drive but the previous three work this way)
How vintage is vintage? Internet Recovery was added in 2011 [0] — although it doesn’t work in all cases.
If you have older hardware (as old as 2007), you can download Yosemite, El Capitan or Sierra from Apple’s website [1] or the App Store. Note that using those images requires access to a working Mac, or at least a Mac with working (Internet) Recovery, although doing it in Recovery is complicated and requires some tricks [2], because Apple can’t just make a simple DMG you could mount (or image a drive with) and install directly.
Reading here about bricked MBPs. Could someone clarify for me. If one swaps out the SSD with the current OS and puts in a blank replacement and then do the update. If it fails will the MBP be bricked or can one just swap in the other SSD to get it operational with the older OS. Or can the update really brick it because hardware is flashed? If that's the case could that be re-flashed by someone with the right equipment and knowledge. Some people have upgraded to Big Sur on their 2011 and mid 2012 MBPs. What is the risk of bricking then?
I managed to install Big Sur on an "unsupported" 15" retina 2012 using Patched-Sur.dmg without any issues, perhaps that's the way for 2013/14 ones as well now?
Does anyone know how to downgrade the firmware of my Macbook Pro 15" (2014)?
I ran the Big Sur Beta 1 with it on an external SSD drive. Since then, the standby mode on the internally installed macOS 10.11 does not work anymore. At some point, the system freezes while the fans spin on full speed, indefinitely until powering down with a long-press of the eject key.
Thank you so much for warning me: I have the same model (2014 MBP 15"), and would very likely have tested booting an external drive with another OS, not expecting it to cause harm to my hardware.
Maybe this will help; the instructions are for Yosemite though.
One of my current machines is a late 2013 13-inch MBP. No problems so far with Big Sur. Of course, my anecdata are no better or worse than anyone else’s.
my late-2013 15" mbp upgraded with no issues, but I do recall reading prior to I stalling and noting that any older, or smaller model of that age was not supported. most of the reports I've read seem ti concern the smaller model and I'm left wondering what did they expect?
this is pitty, because as users might blame apple now. the outcome may be, apple dropping support for older device much earlier. which is bad for everybody.
The article literally tells you what to take away from it:
> Until it is clear what may be causing the issue and Apple releases a fix, late 2013 and mid 2014 13-inch MacBook Pro may wish to hold off on installing macOS Big Sur .
A backup doesn’t do you much good if the machine is bricked.
> If you don’t back up your stuff all bets are off
Yes I always plan ahead incase the OS becomes corrupted. I just assume that an OS will fail at some stage, and I have prepared so many times setting up a new OS from scratch I could nearly do it blindfolded.
The trick is to 'rehearse' a clean install of an OS repeatedly so that it doesn't feel so harrowing when it does fail (and I've had plenty of actual crashes over the course of my daily computing adventures, covering different OSes like Linux, macOS, Windows).
Despite the downvote, I 100% agree with you. I reinstall my OS every couple years it seems like. Because of this practice, I can have my laptop destroyed at any time and it won't matter to me at all, besides the cost of the hardware. The only thing I would lose at all is any unpushed code, which is only a couple hours of work at most.
It is great to have a setup like this, as I am reminded any time someone I know has a hard drive failure and is freaking out about it.
> The trick is to 'rehearse' a clean install of an OS repeatedly so that it doesn't feel so harrowing when it does fail (and I've had plenty of actual crashes over the course of my daily computing adventures, covering different OSes like Linux, macOS, Windows).
A tool like Ansible, Nix, or Docker Compose is useful in such situations.
Apple needs to fix their QA, and fast. No amount of marketing can undo the damage I've seen over the last few years.