Is it true MacOS devices w/ SECURITY CHIP (T2) Crash More Often than older machines?

[SuperDuperMan]

Hello everyone,

This is my first MR post and am super excited to finally have created an account after lurking for many months.

I am in the market for an Apple MacOS device and was considering one of the new Mac Minis especially since they are now on the refurbished site but I keep reading that any MacOS device with a security chip (T1, T2) result in frequent crashes of the system and reboot constantly. Is this true and if so is there a remedy for it or are we beholden to waiting for an update from Apple? If that’s the case I may consider getting a cheaper older MBP from 2015 or older Mac Mini to last me 2-3 years.

Any advice on the ammeter is appreciated. Thank you!

 

[upandown]

Hello everyone,

This is my first MR post and am super excited to finally have created an account after lurking for many months.

I am in the market for an Apple MacOS device and was considering one of the new Mac Minis especially since they are now on the refurbished site but I keep reading that any MacOS device with a security chip (T1, T2) result in frequent crashes of the system and reboot constantly. Is this true and if so is there a remedy for it or are we beholden to waiting for an update from Apple? If that’s the case I may consider getting a cheaper older MBP from 2015 or older Mac Mini to last me 2-3 years.

Any advice on the ammeter is appreciated. Thank you!

It’s not very common. Definitely overblown.

 

[SuperDuperMan]

It’s not very common. Definitely overblown.

That’s a relief. Super excited to order a Mac Mini.

 

[giffut]

Every mac with the t2 processor experiences kernel panics; depending on your workload they may not show up immediately. They occure on any subsystem the t2 processor controls: general i/o, encryption, graphics, audio, touchbar, power managment. Basically as a gatekeepter the t2 processor is involved in any ooeration of your mac.

It seems to be solely hardware based, as to date no software/firmware upgrade did solve it permanently. Apple is not able or willing to modify/exchange the underlying hardware yet.

Any mac sold starting with the imac pro 2017 is affected.

 

[tarsins]

I've only seen it once on my 2018 MacBook Pro which I bought in July 2018.

 

[MandiMac]

I have a Mini 2018 (i5/256) - not a single error here. T2 all the way

 

[chrfr]

I bought my 13” in August. It’s never had a panic.

 

[upandown]

2018 13 i7. Zero panics. Like I said overblown. No one can say it happens to every Mac or even give a % that’s worth anything.

 

[SuperDuperMan]

Thank you for the responses. I’m convinced now the mentions of crashing and rebooting are overblown and exaggerated. Now price is what comes to mind and am maybe also considering an older Mac. Still not sure. I’ll keep the community updated. Thank you!!!

 

[chrfr]

Thank you for the responses. I’m convinced now the mentions of crashing and rebooting are overblown and exaggerated. Now price is what comes to mind and am maybe also considering an older Mac. Still not sure. I’ll keep the community updated. Thank you!!!

I'm more concerned about potential keyboard issues than T2 problems with mine. The keyboard has been fine so far, but the computer gets used in "clamshell" mode on my desk most of the time, with an external keyboard.

 

[MandiMac]

Thank you for the responses. I’m convinced now the mentions of crashing and rebooting are overblown and exaggerated. Now price is what comes to mind and am maybe also considering an older Mac. Still not sure. I’ll keep the community updated. Thank you!!!

What will be your use case, anyway?

 

[northernmunky]

I did when I first got my Macbook Pro 2018, but not so much anymore now that I'm on Mojave 10.14.3.
It still causes a false positive message of 'your system restarted due to a problem' - even though it hasn't whenever I boot back into macOS from Windows - its apparently a known bug. No idea when that one will be fixed.

 

[giffut]

Well, good luck to you.

We had to replace two iMac Pros and several Macbook Pros 2018 at work. T2 related kernel panics made working literally impossible. We lost precious time and data and apple support was an additional burden to deal with. We had most crashes related to external storage connections and heavy gpu workloads. We are now forced to adapt our workflow to windows machines - which from the start behave rock solid, although windows 10 is querky.

For us, the world has turned upside down, or hell froze over - call it what you like. It is a burden to switch, for the moment though, but stability is worth it, so crazy. Learning to be more independant software and hardware wise is a great lecture, too. We were mac only from the beginning.

Professionally, with all our recent experiences, the mac is no longer a viable platform to deal with.

 

[redpandadev]

Hello everyone,

This is my first MR post and am super excited to finally have created an account after lurking for many months.

I am in the market for an Apple MacOS device and was considering one of the new Mac Minis especially since they are now on the refurbished site but I keep reading that any MacOS device with a security chip (T1, T2) result in frequent crashes of the system and reboot constantly. Is this true and if so is there a remedy for it or are we beholden to waiting for an update from Apple? If that’s the case I may consider getting a cheaper older MBP from 2015 or older Mac Mini to last me 2-3 years.

Any advice on the ammeter is appreciated. Thank you!

I have had a 2018 MBP (with T2 chip) since they were released in July 2018. Hasn't crashed or rebooted randomly a single time.

 

[allanmulwee]

Just curious if you had updated to APFS or started with a clean slate? I've seen a lot of issues related to that.

Well, good luck to you.

We had to replace two iMac Pros and several Macbook Pros 2018 at work. T2 related kernel panics made working literally impossible. We lost precious time and data and apple support was an additional burden to deal with. We had most crashes related to external storage connections and heavy gpu workloads. We are now forced to adapt our workflow to windows machines - which from the start behave rock solid, although windows 10 is querky.

For us, the world has turned upside down, or hell froze over - call it what you like. It is a burden to switch, for the moment though, but stability is worth it, so crazy. Learning to be more independant software and hardware wise is a great lecture, too. We were mac only from the beginning.

Professionally, with all our recent experiences, the mac is no longer a viable platform to deal with.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Every mac with the t2 processor experiences kernel panics; depending on your workload they may not show up immediately. They occure on any subsystem the t2 processor controls: general i/o, encryption, graphics, audio, touchbar, power managment. Basically as a gatekeepter the t2 processor is involved in any ooeration of your mac.

It seems to be solely hardware based, as to date no software/firmware upgrade did solve it permanently. Apple is not able or willing to modify/exchange the underlying hardware yet.

Any mac sold starting with the imac pro 2017 is affected.

Every Mac with T2 does not experience a kernel panic.

 

[kwikdeth]

im personally of an opinion that tying a bunch of critical systems into a single point of failure is NEVER a good idea, but hey im just one guy.

 

[giffut]

We started with clean installs on any mac, than installing the necessary third party software. The data corruptions certainly were where our most concerns developed. They seem to be related to instabilites with the bridge os/t2 processors ability to function reliable under load, like many crashes for us happened when the hardware was running at least at 60% regarding their maximum potential. This may also be thermally induced because of inadequate cooling of those machines, especially the t2 bridge processors may be suffering from thermal overload. But we saw crashes happening in idle state, too. Lots of problems developed with external monitor connections dropping set resolutions, flickering, inconsistent cable performance from apple and third party adapters.

We did not experience any of those things in this intensity at all with apple computers from before 2016, with almost identical third party hardware still in use with us. We only updated our computers, not our peripherials. For us its clear the new machines are not reliable anymore, neither hardware nor software wise.

They keyboards failed several times on the macbooks and failures where directly related to thermal performances. The hotter the machine worked, the faster the keyboard failed. This was consistent with key positions - especially the "e" "d" keys were prone to go south first.

As we troubleshooted with apple support we had to perform to many reinstalls of macos and the new security enclave model gave us so much more work to do compared to standard filevault encrpytion. Especially carbon copy cloner backup strategies we had found reliable for us, as was cloning of system drives turned out to be much more hassle and too much of a burden. It was easy and absolutely secure before, it is now very complicated and inconsitent. I don´t see the value of t2 based encryption in addition to filevault, especially with soldered on storage.

I still use a macbook pro 2011 model privately, but I needed to hack it as apple didn´t fix the gpu failure at all and I needed community support for disabling the dgpu on the logic board and enabling egpu mode for thunderbolt 1/2 ports. This machine runs almost as good as a new one, maxed with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD and an amd rx560 gpu. it stay on macos sierra, though. 10.13ff brought instabilites I couldn´t explain nor remedy.

But your experiences may be different and that´s fine with me.