Mac mini thunderbolt port stopped working - the fix was easy

[Ben J.]

I've been using the M4 pro in my signature everyday, running it 24/7 for the last 18 months, and this is the first time it's happened; one of the TB4/5 ports simply died. I tried different enclosures, cables, configurations, and finally determined that it was this one port that had stopped working.

A quick web search, and I tried a restart - and voila, it was back up. In fact, I did a 'cold start', shutting down, waiting 10-15 seconds an turning it back on, like the old 'SMC reset' procedure, but a simple restart might have been sufficient. IDK.

You learn something new everyday.

I'm an optimist; I'm assuming this a rare thing. I just thought I'd mention it and maybe save people couple of hours of troubleshooting, should this happen to them.

 

[benwiggy]

like the old 'SMC reset' procedure,

Apple states in its documentation that SMC resets on Apple Silicon are performed by restarting.

If in doubt -- turn it off and on again!

 

[Alameda]

Wow. 18 months of 24/7 operation until it needed a reboot. That’s incredible.

Under Systems 6 and 7, we rebooted many times a day.

 

[Ben J.]

Wow. 18 months of 24/7 operation until it needed a reboot. That’s incredible.

I didn't say I never restarted during those 18 months.

I'm happy that I didn't immediately restart, and instead troubleshooted a bit and found that it was not a NVMe chip, a cable, an enclosure, or the OS Thunderbolt failing, but one single port not talking to the mac. That is what I meant by 'learned something'.

 

[Ben J.]

Apple states in its documentation that SMC resets on Apple Silicon are performed by restarting.

If in doubt -- turn it off and on again!

Thanks.

There's a guy out there with the funniest username I've seen:
"Will kicking it help?"

 

[Ben J.]

Under Systems 6 and 7, we rebooted many times a day.

I remember mac os 6. And then came 'Multifinder' - wow, we could suddenly run more than one more than one program at a time. And virtual memory! Fantastic.

 

[Alameda]

I remember mac os 6. And then came 'Multifinder' - wow, we could suddenly run more than one more than one program at a time. And virtual memory! Fantastic.

In college in 1987, I had a one MB Mac SE with two 800kb floppies. Someone had given me a modem.

There was no Multifinder yet; I had an app called Switcher.

I would load up a terminal emulator, log into the campus mainframe, and start a Fortran program. Then I loaded Cricket Graph, then MS Word.

Each Fortran program took 5 or 10 minutes. I’d get my data, copy it, start a new Fortran program, switch to Cricket Graph, create a chart, copy the chart, and paste it into MS Word, and continue writing my paper. This was pretty advanced at the time. Otherwise, I would have to run all the Fortran programs on campus, take the printouts home and type the data in by hand.

It was very unstable and in particular, if I did not save my data before switching from one app to another, the Mac would always crash and I would have to reboot and start everything all over. Back then, any piece of software could write to any memory address, so crashes were extremely common.