Challenging out-of-box experience

[Baldrake]

Just in case others run into the same issues, I thought I'd document my out of box experience with my new 2016 15" MBP-TB.

TL;DR - experienced multiple issues and many hours of spinning beach ball, but eventually got it working.

• Started software set up - selected language
• Waited with big grey rectangle on screen. Eventually got error message that a critical software update had failed.
• Repeated this process several times, including the retry and shutdown options. Kept getting the same error message until eventually it worked.
• Continued setting up account.
• Got to "Setting up your Mac" screen. Got the spinning beach ball but otherwise no indication that progress was being made.
• After an hour, I started googling, and found conventional wisdom was to wait it out. So I did.
• After approximately 12 hours (!!!), this moved on to a login screen. But the only login option provided was an account I hadn't created and didn't have a password to. I can't remember what it was called, but something like "Setup Account".
• Rebooted in safe mode and got correct account on login page. Rebooted in normal mode and all was fine.

I own a lot of Apple products, and have never seen anything even remotely like this before. But all appears to be working now.

 

[MareLuce]

Thanks for posting this. What's causing that?

 

[Bryan Bowler]

Yuck!

 

[cmaier]

Strange. Mine was different. I got to the wifi setup and screen blanked and i couldn't get it back so i powered off and on (now suspect i accidentally hit screen brightness on the touchbar, but not sure). After that it went smoothly. Did a migration from an external carbon copy cloner clone. It told me iTunes needed to be updated before it could migrate, it downloaded new iTunes, and off to the races. Took 2, maybe 2.5 hours for the migration. After that I had to enter iCloud password and setup touch id, but system came up, completely useable, and a replication of my old system in around 3 hours after I started.

 

[xraydoc]

My out of box experience was completely the opposite. Mine is a non-touchbar model, but I opened the lid, went through the steps, and a few minutes later it presented me with my new desktop and it began downloading my iCloud content (iCloud desktop and documents folder, photos, calendar, etc). Even added my email accounts automatically to Mail.

Certainly did not need to wait 12 hours at all. Maybe 20ish minutes from first boot-up to desktop.

I can't say what the trouble was for the OP (I can hazard to guess - wifi throughput issue, Apple server response, weird Sierra bug... who knows) but fortunately it's not affecting everyone.

 

[Baldrake]

Yes, exactly, I was pretty sure my experience was very unusual, or the forums would be on fire.

My guess is that there was a networking issue causing the first issue, and everything cascaded from there. But the long time for setting up your Mac seems to be known:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204755

That's where I took the advice to just let it run.