macOS Big Sur Update Bricking Some Older MacBook Pro Models

[littleredwagen]

So my 2018 Mackbook Pro 15 is bricked. Screen went black and now fan only spins fast for a few moments and goes off. This happens on and off. Tried SMC, NVRAM, hard reset, but nothing.....

 

[harmoniumfarfisa]

6. With these informations I speculate that users who had their devices "bricked", might have had somehow prematurely turn off their devices while it is "flashing" the new BootROM after seeing on black blank sreen "too long" (subjective) not knowing that it is flashing firmware, and thus "bricking" it, as a device with a corrupted firmware can't boot.

If true, Apple should have included a graphic to explain. Then again, I ran into a black screen on install with an older OS, and let it run all night before stopping it. Apple should be requiring updates to be done in store by their technicians if it's really that risky. Or design it so this can't happen. It never was a common problem until Snow Leopard or one of those.

 

[posguy99]

I’ve got a 2015 15” MacBook Pro, Big sur has wiped out 90% of my albums and playlists off the MacBook & my 11 Pro Max and basically anything else that was saved to iCloud including my back ups! This is what happens when profit coming before quality! 😡😡😡🤬😡😡😡

Your Mac was not backed up to iCloud, never has been, Apple does not support backing up a Mac to iCloud.

So, how was the Mac actually backed up? Restore that backup.

 

[seclusion]

Yes, my music library seemed messed and I panicked.
But easy peasy, my music wasn’t logged in.
Logged in and it took a few minutes to sync.
Interesting though, that yet again I had to redownload most of my music.
Ive had to do this countless times, I like to have music on my machine in case I’m away from internet or its down.
im guess it’s never really on my machine.

 

[MacGekko]

It obviously sucks for those facing issues, but my late 2013 13" is working fine after upgrading from Catalina.

I asked this question in the past but I can't find the post in my history, I am one of those people who only upgrade the OS when security update support stops, we are getting close to that situation for my mid-2015 Macbook Pro MacOS High Sierra.

There were numerous people on this board that recommended one over the other in Catalina vs. Mojave, there seemed to be more possible problems with one of them, can anyone offer some guidance on this, thanks.

 

[mo5214]

If true, Apple should have included a graphic to explain. Then again, I ran into a black screen on install with an older OS, and let it run all night before stopping it. Apple should be requiring updates to be done in store by their technicians if it's really that risky. Or design it so this can't happen. It never was a common problem until Snow Leopard or one of those.

Personally I think that Apple has never been very "technical" to end-users, except when it comes to marketing. Usually there might be a "KB - Knowledge base" buried somewhere on the site.

IMO The most they would do is say things along the lines of "Please keep your macbooks plugged in during macOS updates" (They might have this instruction in place already). As pointing this fact (dangers of firmware flashing) might, potentially take away their customers "perception" of "It just works" image that Apple had been cultivating.

 

[MacGekko]

Not sure that's a fair assessment. There has never been an OS release of any platform free of bugs. IMHO Catalina was the buggiest macOS release I've ever seen. It's too early to say that Big Sur will be as bad. Also, A 2013-14 MBP, with it's aging hardware will have many problems trying to run the latest and greatest from Apple.

I've been running the betas on my 2015 13' MBP with only a few minor problems, no deal breakers as of yet. I pre-ordered the Silicon MBA M1 which is due to arrive today or tomorrow so I expect that to run macOS Big Sur with even fewer issues since the hardware and OS have been completely optimized for one another. Everybody's mileage will vary but for me Big Sur is looking pretty stable.

Mid-2015 Macbook Pro running Mac OS High Sierra, security updates might be running out soon, as per my question in my previous post, it was Catalina that seemed to have many problems, Mojave was more stable correct? If Big Sur remains a problem, once High Sierra is officially retired from updates, I would like to graduate to the most stable OS below Big Sur, thanks for your help.

 

[mo5214]

I asked this question in the past but I can't find the post in my history, I am one of those people who only upgrade the OS when security update support stops, we are getting close to that situation for my mid-2015 Macbook Pro MacOS High Sierra.

There were numerous people on this board that recommended one over the other in Catalina vs. Mojave, there seemed to be more possible problems with one of them, can anyone offer some guidance on this, thanks.

This depends on your use-case of course.

Do you need the new features introduced in Catalina and newer? (like screentime, api for watch authentication, new Photos version, etc)

What version of OS X/macOS does the software you run requires.

Can you live with some features lost after Mojave (or even older versions) (like offline speech recognition (arguably better in Mojave than Catalina), 32-bit binary support, or nvidia web driver support on High Sierra)

I think that you would have to see for yourself as to which OS is a better match for your use-case

 

[mknell]

19 pages of comments, and they are all over the place. Common sense says: The hardware and software are constants.

The variable is the user, and what applications/extensions have been user installed.

And then, the nagging feeling that some of the negative reports are from professional negative reporters.

Big Sur is humming along beautifully on my seven-year old MBP. It's been an improvement over Catalina, and Catalina was an improvement over Mojave. For a fact.

Keep up the good work Apple.

Hmm, so because it worked for you and sw and hw are constants, it is the user.
You are oversimplifying.

I am a convinced Apple user since the Mac Mini came on the market.
I still like Apple's products.
I am not a professional negative reporter.

My MBP 13 Mid 2014 has no a not working i/o board.
I had applied the 10.15.7 update the evening before
and just started the 11.0.1 update taking all the care
it needs after checking time machine backup was fresh
and Apple supporting my machine.

Most users in the same situation report as I can confirm
for myself that the extraordinary thing is that I had an
SD card(Transcend Jetdrive) in a Card reader; in my case external
as part of a USB hub.
Others also report to have all kinds of SD cards in the internal
Card reader.
Result of running the update for some was that the
installation processes stopped. They report that for them removing the
i/o card connection and rebooting, continuing the installation successfully
and after that replugging the i/o card connection in worked
for them without a damage.
Others like me were more unlucky and the i/o board is broken now
by the sw. The installation process was not finished (were still on Catalina).
No I also needed to unplug the i/o connection, I was able with an external
keyboard and an external mouse to get Catalina recovered.
I am now in the process of installing Big Sur.
After this hopefully has been finished successfully I will need to wait for
my i/o card replacement and thermal paste to arrive to be able
to exchange the toasted/ damaged i/o card by a new one
to have a fully functional Macbook again. All this will be on my own expense.
I have ordered an Apple M1 MBP anyway.
I will also continue to use the Apple ecosystem.
I am also using Windows 10 at work and have Linux VMs running.

But what I think is really not ok from Apple is to delete the findings and
facts of their customers exchanging experiences, evidence, workarounds
and solution on the apple support community.
I also do think it is extraordinary for a OS update to damage Hardware.
I think it is not ok to tell customers to pay whatever amount to exchange
a full logic board if an i/o board has been damaged during a sw installation.

Now people can argue that the customers affected by the bricking were
installing the OS update to early or were not taking the necessary attention.
I think this is silly in the first place.
Secondly it does neither help Apple nor their customers.
Customers that receive an OS update have the right to expect their
hardware not to be damaged while installing it.

I also understand that if Apple did not know of the circumstances
under which the OS could damage the HW, as it has not been reported
during the beta test phase that such an error occurred to be responsible alone
for all these hw defects of customers installing this os.

BUT you know, I saw the hints on how to fix this situation from a user
that was reporting the issue he experienced during installing one of the
recent beta releases and I also so another user mentioning strange
behaviour of the installer during a beta release incl. the use of an SD card
even mentioning that he needed to consult a genius bar to fix the situation
for him during beta installations twice.
Both of these comments can be found on forums in reddit.
I cannot proof that these comments are fully correct or my interpretation
of the full circumstances.
But if any of these forum posts are correct then Apple could have prevented
all this hw damage of hundreds of their customers by either excluding these
older Macs from Big sur updates or by patching the faulty sw before shipping it.
In other words Apple could have done something to avoid all this hw damage.

Of course it is convinient to avoid liability claims and also helpful for hw sales
to tell customers it is their fault or their liability if their notebooks are now
damaged. But in the light of the above potential findings I think it is not
really customer friendly or ok.

Sorry for the long text, but I thought I would like to be a little more
balanced so that I do not hurt anybody's feelings or just blame the poor
guys currently dealing with their not working machines, or the people
at Apple too easily.
I just want this all not to happen again in any of the next release
as we all value Apples HW & SW products incl. the reliability of the
eco system.
Cheers Markus

 

[Maccraig-pro]

I always install day 1 and no issues here.

 

[MacGekko]

This depends on your use-case of course.

Do you need the new features introduced in Catalina and newer? (like screentime, api for watch authentication, new Photos version, etc)

What version of OS X/macOS does the software you run requires.

Can you live with some features lost after Mojave (or even older versions) (like offline speech recognition (arguably better in Mojave than Catalina), 32-bit binary support, or nvidia web driver support on High Sierra)

I think that you would have to see for yourself as to which OS is a better match for your use-case

I generally don't care about the extra features nor do I need them, I'm looking for the version that causes the least amount of problems but still gets Apple security updates.

 

[ginkane]

Mid 2014 MacBook Pro 15.4" here.
I erased the SSD and did a clean install. The booting sequence looked weird and restarting the machine doesn't work and causes weird behaviour just like it was described here:


The OS sometimes (!) is not as responsive as Catalina was. Strange since it is a clean install. Safari often seems frozen and doesn't take clicks or other UI input anymore, having to refresh a website. Chrome shows normal behaviour.

Last but not least... HUGE privacy concerns are popping up!
Apparently trustd and other Apple services and apps will now BYPASS firewall tools like little snitch and even VPNs. This is outrageous and I can confirm it. I had updated to little snitch 5 and it no longer can block any OS services from calling home. However, these Apple servers are constantly connected as indicated by my network firewall. I've now blocked them outside the machine.
This was brought to my attention in this article:

Potential Mac privacy concerns surface after server outages - 9to5Mac

Apple's servers had issues on macOS Big Sur launch day that impacted a variety of services revealing potential Mac privacy and security concerns.

9to5mac.com

outrageous! This sound just like Microsoft's Windows 10 activity to me and should be boycotted by all of us users accordingly!!!

here's Obdev's response (little snitch dev company) regarding these privacy issues. They phrased it rather nicely. What it basically means, apple is whitelisting all their telemetry communication making it so that no 3rd party app or user can prevent let alone detect it. Network firewall rules must now prevent your Macs from telling Apple and others what Apps you run and when and where. Bypassing VPNs.... really... I'm losing it!

Objective Development - Help Center

Get all the help you need for Little Snitch Mini, Little Snitch, LaunchBar and Micro Snitch.

obdev.at

I have Murus installed with a honeypot restrictive ruleset in addition to Vallium Firewall. My Vallium Firewall App catches and allows me to block trustd. See screenshot below. I have a mid-2015 Macbook Pro 15 running BigSur.

 

[Philly-GUI-Dude]

Did any of your updates trigger a reboot? Maybe Apple tried to do a firmware update!

Honestly I have no idea if I did trigger every boots. But I do know that after some affinity design tools updated, final cut pro and another app updated. I launched into final cut pro, and I start to try to re-render some of my projects. At that point the computer froze rebooted itself and then got stuck again rebooted itself at that point it ended up on that black loading screen and eventually that error screen where it kept on rebooting in a cycle. Tomorrow I have an genius bar appointment, but I do understand I am, I took apart my iMac, I took out my one terabyte SSD, and put back the original 128 GB SSD. After that I tried taking out the SS D’s altogether and having a try to run directly off the spinning hard drive. Still no luck. I tried every combination of anything I can imagine. I even unplug the audio plug from it so that I could try that fix that some people were talking about. Nothing would work for me. I’m really hoping Apple can get my machine up and running again. They me look at it and see that I already have the machine open I may say hell no. But it’s worth a try. This machine has been rocksolid for years, I’m not about to give up.

 

[readit.design]

I want to thank all engineers and designers at Apple which under Steve Jobs management are responsible for my exceptionally pleasurable 20+ computing years. For me Apple after Jobs is just a well hidden greed motivated machine. Clearly I don’t consider Apple to be worthy of legacy of their founder. There is no balance anymore. Personally I am not surprised at all. The last true Apple os was Mountain Lion, after which I have not trusted Mac OS X at all and the only reason to continue using it was a program called: Little Snitch. But I want to thank current management for their contribution in forcing me out of platform that has no ethical or business value for me anymore. I cannot trust my computer to work in critical business cases. I have voted with my money year after year, preached to my costumers and friends thousands of Apple products and I don't regret it. Apple was exceptionally powerful combination for professional work with unbelievable hardware quality. But the real selling point was the software, the Mac OS X (objective c one).Yes, todays world is mobile first and this is normal, but some of us are working with this shiny called computers and idea of merging iOS, iPadOS and MacOS is clearly motivated by vertical business integration not by putting interests of the users first. Thankfully for me there is an alternative – Linux. Finally there is real business reason for companies that make graphic design software to consider Linux as a viable target. So long and thanks for all the fish, Apple

 

[Premium1]

I see so you're suggesting everybody's computer has perfect non-corrupt software? No illegal torrents that could cause install issues? No 3rd party software utilities to do things to override the system functions? Just perfect Mac users right? Because nothing I stated suggested that older Macs WOULD have problems. I said that people with very old Macs tend to not have a clean system and undoubtedly will run into problems let alone they may also hardware issue due to age.

This same thing happened with people that had legacy plug-ins for their music production software that was in 32 bit and would not work in Catalina. Maybe if some people took responsibility for their computer less issues would happen. Nobody here can see another member's computer setup so to automatically take the side of the user against the evil giant Apple without any facts is ridiculous.

I never claimed to take anyone's side, but it sure seems like you are taking apple's side on this one. Of course people could "alter" their computers that would cause issues, but would be interesting to see how many did, but don't let the apple is bad narrative get your panties in a wad...

 

[eico720]

Hmm, so because it worked for you and sw and hw are constants, it is the user.
You are oversimplifying.

I am a convinced Apple user since the Mac Mini came on the market.
I still like Apple's products.
I am not a professional negative reporter.

My MBP 13 Mid 2014 has no a not working i/o board.
I had applied the 10.15.7 update the evening before
and just started the 11.0.1 update taking all the care
it needs after checking time machine backup was fresh
and Apple supporting my machine.

Most users in the same situation report as I can confirm
for myself that the extraordinary thing is that I had an
SD card(Transcend Jetdrive) in a Card reader; in my case external
as part of a USB hub.
Others also report to have all kinds of SD cards in the internal
Card reader.
Result of running the update for some was that the
installation processes stopped. They report that for them removing the
i/o card connection and rebooting, continuing the installation successfully
and after that replugging the i/o card connection in worked
for them without a damage.
Others like me were more unlucky and the i/o board is broken now
by the sw. The installation process was not finished (were still on Catalina).
No I also needed to unplug the i/o connection, I was able with an external
keyboard and an external mouse to get Catalina recovered.
I am now in the process of installing Big Sur.
After this hopefully has been finished successfully I will need to wait for
my i/o card replacement and thermal paste to arrive to be able
to exchange the toasted/ damaged i/o card by a new one
to have a fully functional Macbook again. All this will be on my own expense.
I have ordered an Apple M1 MBP anyway.
I will also continue to use the Apple ecosystem.
I am also using Windows 10 at work and have Linux VMs running.

But what I think is really not ok from Apple is to delete the findings and
facts of their customers exchanging experiences, evidence, workarounds
and solution on the apple support community.
I also do think it is extraordinary for a OS update to damage Hardware.
I think it is not ok to tell customers to pay whatever amount to exchange
a full logic board if an i/o board has been damaged during a sw installation.

Now people can argue that the customers affected by the bricking were
installing the OS update to early or were not taking the necessary attention.
I think this is silly in the first place.
Secondly it does neither help Apple nor their customers.
Customers that receive an OS update have the right to expect their
hardware not to be damaged while installing it.

I also understand that if Apple did not know of the circumstances
under which the OS could damage the HW, as it has not been reported
during the beta test phase that such an error occurred to be responsible alone
for all these hw defects of customers installing this os.

BUT you know, I saw the hints on how to fix this situation from a user
that was reporting the issue he experienced during installing one of the
recent beta releases and I also so another user mentioning strange
behaviour of the installer during a beta release incl. the use of an SD card
even mentioning that he needed to consult a genius bar to fix the situation
for him during beta installations twice.
Both of these comments can be found on forums in reddit.
I cannot proof that these comments are fully correct or my interpretation
of the full circumstances.
But if any of these forum posts are correct then Apple could have prevented
all this hw damage of hundreds of their customers by either excluding these
older Macs from Big sur updates or by patching the faulty sw before shipping it.
In other words Apple could have done something to avoid all this hw damage.

Of course it is convinient to avoid liability claims and also helpful for hw sales
to tell customers it is their fault or their liability if their notebooks are now
damaged. But in the light of the above potential findings I think it is not
really customer friendly or ok.

Sorry for the long text, but I thought I would like to be a little more
balanced so that I do not hurt anybody's feelings or just blame the poor
guys currently dealing with their not working machines, or the people
at Apple too easily.
I just want this all not to happen again in any of the next release
as we all value Apples HW & SW products incl. the reliability of the
eco system.
Cheers Markus

Thanks for that thoughtful and comprehensive post.

I remain confused as to the large variations of experience in loading and operating Big Sur. I have a top of the line late-2013 MBP and I've had no problems whatsoever. I did not do a wipe and install. I did back up everything before successfully performing the Big Sur installation.

Anyway, I don't have a hard heart towards those who have had problems, some of whom have much newer machines than mine, I simply remain confused as to why the same system software can give people such differing experiences.

 

[ebika]

As an "IT Professional", what in the world were you doing installing a .0, on release day, on a mission-critical machine?

I didn’t install Big Sur on this machine. This was on my Catalina MBP that I was using while Apple had the outage during the Big Sur launch.

 

[Rockar82]

As much as it’s a shiny new OS, it’s always better to wait for the little kinks to be worked out.

 

[djnewlin]

For a company that has more cash than most countries, this is just inexcusable. Why they didn't fully test the different configurations (which they control) is beyond me. Shame on Apple. Shame on Tim Cook. This is what happens when a non-technical Finance weenie tries to run the company after Steve Jobs. Put someone in charge who knows wtf they are doing. It seems all Tim Cook is interested in is showing how "green" Apple is. He has taken his eye off the ball... And now they think they know more about silicon than Intel!? OMG... What next... Get back to basics!!!!

 

[DuyNKS]

Unexpectedly, this is the first time I have damaged my computer because of updating the OS. because every other time I update too normally. I was so trusting that I did not seek information before doing so! too bad

 

[poppap]

I was just able to get the installation to resumed after two days of black screen and countless troubleshooting attemps.

MacBook Pro 2014, had SD card inserted during the installation and resulted in black screen and not booting.

Here is what I did, YMMV:

1. Let the battery be empty by just leaving it on until it turned off by itself, verify by pressing the power and see the icon on the display to plug in

2. removed the SD card

3. Plug in

4. Reset SMC (hold Shift-Control-Option-Power for 10s)

5. Internet recovery (hold Option-Command-R then press power)

6. Open Disk Utility, run First Aid on the system disk and data disk

7. Quit Disk Utility and Restart

now the installation resumed, finger crossed in hope for no more issue.

 

[dannyboyd]

1. If the machine can be recovered, it's not "bricked"
2. You trying to install new software on a 7 year old computer, and surprised it might not work? I have a suspicion these issues are all failing drives.

 

[mknell]

Thanks for that thoughtful and comprehensive post.

I remain confused as to the large variations of experience in loading and operating Big Sur. I have a top of the line late-2013 MBP and I've had no problems whatsoever. I did not do a wipe and install. I did back up everything before successfully performing the Big Sur installation.

Anyway, I don't have a hard heart towards those who have had problems, some of whom have much newer machines than mine, I simply remain confused as to why the same system software can give people such differing experiences.

I personally see hints from affected folks that an SD card, external hard drive or anything connected to the i/o board on the right side of the affected late 2013/ mid 2014 seems to be the weak point causing the hw damage.
I also think Apple engineering should do the forensics and fix the bug in their sw so that it wll not happen to more people.

 

[mknell]

1. If the machine can be recovered, it's not "bricked"
2. You trying to install new software on a 7 year old computer, and surprised it might not work? I have a suspicion these issues are all failing drives.

The number of really bricked, hw damaged devices reported is rising. Looking to the Apple support forum, reddit posts I read, I guess these are several hundred and it is not the drives failing, but damaged i/o cards.

 

[thiskiwicanfly]

I have to say... I love Apple products. I love what Apple stands for, and what they represent. Their ecosystem is second to none and iCloud services that syncs each device together is truly amazing. Accordingly, us customers pay a premium price for these services and devices. But... their OS software engineering team should be ashamed of themselves! Not so long ago the new iMac 2020 27" with 5700XT graphics suffered from graphical white line glitches which they stayed silent about, but was "eventually" fixed by a software update. Then watchOS 7 was released which caused Apple Watch Series 3 devices to keep locking up and randomly rebooting throughout the day. And now, macOS Big Sur is released and we have this fiasco on our hands...!!! The massive advantage of designing both software and hardware together is the ability to develop stable OS software that can be uniformly tested across their full range of supported devices. And yet, this is not what we're experiencing as of late. What makes things worse is that Apple also intentionally choose to stay silent during these issues which makes many people conclude they either don't know about the problems, or don't care, or both - and that is extremely disappointing.