macOS Big Sur Update Bricking Some Older MacBook Pro Models

[sully54]

So glad I didn’t update while I’m working on a couple of papers for school

 

[Maconplasma]

Secondly, I am a developer. So I know exactly what my needs are.

Ah excellent. Which one of the iOS apps are yours? I'd love to try it...

Thirdly, if this issue is bricking Macs' firmware then using a separate partition wouldn't save you from you the problem.

If this is issue was "bricking Macs" then everyone would have a bricking Mac no matter which model they have. Are you saying that your Mac bricked? Are you saying that you're developing on an 8 year old Mac? Are you also saying that as a Developer you're willing to take a risk on your Main system that you make money from and instantly install the latest OS without testing first? While going out of your way to make it clear to me you were a developer you neglected to mention any of that. Also a true Developer will have plenty of storage internally or externally if they are working to make money, so that was just laughable that you stated that not everybody has enough storage space. A developer would.

So nice try yourself but you clearly aren't a developer. There's no reason developers shouldn't use old machines. My 15" rMBP is a perfectly capable device, and upgrading it before I need to is just throwing money down the drain. I'd rather invest £3000 a year than buy a new MacBook every year. That will pay huge dividends in the future. Not all of us are as profligate as yourself.

I just love how you expect me to believe you're a developer but you automatically say I'm not. You know nothing about what I do so we'll leave it at that. Furthermore chill.

 

[Ethosik]

How great that you are entitled to affirm this. Maybe some of us are students on a budget who don‘t have the finances to afford a new Mac every two years and a new iPhone every year, like some here who seem to be in a relationship with a computer company.

This is very similar to the arguments about Microsoft dropping Windows XP after a 12 year lifecycle. Stating businesses cannot afford to upgrade their computers often enough and support needed to be extended passed 2014. 12 years and a business cannot afford to upgrade AT ALL in 12 years? Something is wrong.

That is fine if you cannot afford a new computer every two years. But at 8 years you cannot expect perfect support. Use the older operating system

 

[DukeDevlin]

I have a full config MBP 16 inch 2019. What I have to do? Update or not? Thanks.

 

[ebika]

As an IT professional, that ocsp.apple.com outage is horrifying, not because they went down, but because they architected our machine’s OSes to have a weak link. On my work 2019 MBP, I lost all ability to use audio inputs (built in, Blue Yeti, webcam mic) because of the outage (bizarre, right?). I wasn’t alone in this at work. I’m on video calls all day every day as we work at home during the pandemic, so I had to scramble to use my gaming pc for work calls. How in the hell does Apple have a phone home in place that can cripple things like that due to an outage on their side, where they designed their OS to need home to ack things? I am still livid.

edit: I forgot to mention, this happened on my Catalina machine, with no software updates on my side that day. It just so happened that the Big Sur launch coincided with that ocsp.apple.com outage that screwed up our machines. None of us at work are on Big Sur yet.

 

[avkills]

I always do fresh installs for major OS updates; and my 2018 MacBook Pro had to do some firmware update thing before it would boot from the Big Sure USB stick I made.

Also note worthy is that there is an additional step that happens when you make a bootable USB for Big Sure that I had noticed in earlier OSs. After it finishes making the USB stick bootable, there are extra things that get installed to the stick that did not happen before.

 

[Maconplasma]

It's less onerous of late, but in the past Apple had "nag" reminders which were easy to click unintentionally. Maybe not forcing, but also not intentional choice.

I've been a dedicated Mac user for the past 25 years starting with MacOS 8 and there was never a time in the past that Apple nagged anyone on their computer that they had to upgrade to the latest OS.

 

[stringParameter]

My mac mini 2014 now does black lines glitches while playing Civilization VI

I'm moving to PC as soon as they release Rocket Lake, I won't buy ARM Mac

To be fair I'd never recommend a mac for gaming. If nothing else because they don't reliably deal with high frame rate monitors.

 

[mike...]

Ah excellent. Which one of the iOS apps are yours? I'd love to try it...

None are mine, they're owned by the clients of the company that employs me. I'm not at liberty to take credit publicly.

If this is issue was "bricking Macs" then everyone would have a bricking Mac no matter which model they have.

Clearly this isn't true. You could apply that logic to anything.

Are you saying that your Mac bricked? Are you saying that you're developing on an 8 year old Mac? While going out of your way to make it clear to me you were a developer neglected to mention any of that.

I have not updated yet. Yes I am developing on a seven year-old Mac. Yes it runs perfectly.

I just love how you expect me to believe you're a developer but you automatically say I'm not. You know nothing about what I do so we'll leave it at that. Furthermore chill.

I know you're not because you think a Mac's Bluetooth and a Touchbar has something to do with iOS development. You would also know why developers need to upgrade fairly soon after a macOS release to ensure they're testing against the latest version of iOS available with Xcode.

 

[tubular]

I'd already decided I'm going to hold off for the x.1 or x.2 release.

 

[glowplug]

I've been a dedicated Mac user for the past 25 years starting with MacOS 8 and there was never a time in the past that Apple nagged anyone on their computer that they had to upgrade to the latest OS.

But there are entire articles written about it: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...d-nagging-macos-update-notifications.2238697/

 

[reezekeys]

people are relying on these machines for their livelihood more than ever.

Not to minimize this but people that "rely on these machines for their livelihoods more than ever" generally don't update a major OS update the second it's released. Or, they sure shouldn't – would you not agree?

As a musician using a laptop rig to do gigs (late-2013 MBP), I very much rely on my machine to earn an income (although that's not happening right now of course). I usually stick with an OS that gives me the most stable-running rig for my gigs, usually for a long time. I went from 10.9 to 10.11 to 10.14 and will stay here a while as I have 32-bit code hanging around in some of my music apps. When I update, I do a fresh install on a separate partition or external disk, load up the software I need to make my meager living, and run it for a while like that to make sure everything is hunky-dory. If everything checks out, then I update my internal SSD.

There is also the idea of cloning your startup partition to an external before you do an update. It's unclear if the bricking described in this article makes it impossible to option-start the affected machine from a clone though.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Interesting how Apple put out the Public Beta months ago and this is discovered just now? You mean nobody with a 2013/2014 MBP ever had a bricking issue all the time during the public beta? Hmmm. Sometimes I get the feeling that these issues are made up in order to crap on Apple when they release new products. Furthermore while I'm not saying bricking should happen I think it's a stretch trying to install the latest OS on near 7 and 8 year old computers and expect to have no issues.

There's probably not much overlap between those on bleeding edge OS updates and 6 year old hardware.

 

[Maconplasma]

But there are entire articles written about it: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...d-nagging-macos-update-notifications.2238697/

I don't need a link to a forum thread when I have first hand experience. Also another thing it's not often (especially here on MR, and today's thread proves it) that people don't bother upgrading. They tend to upgrade right away so not many were ever being "nagged". Regardless Apple can't force anyone to upgrade and what you're stating is completely opposite of what this article is about. It's about people who are jumping on upgrading on day one of release.

 

[ProfessionalFan]

I have a full config MBP 16 inch 2019. What I have to do? Update or not? Thanks.

Back up first and then run with it. I am running Big Sur on my 15 inch 2018 Pro with zero problems.

 

[scartart]

Ha, that's not at all what I asked. I asked if Microsoft was giving free OS upgrades, not feature or software updates. Apple has done that since the first release of Mac OS X. Let's see when the next major version of Windows comes out if all Windows users get it free of charge. 🙄

Windows 10 20H2 was recently released and free to all Windows 10 users. That is somewhat equivalent to the MacOS 10.14 to 10.15 upgrade last year.

Microsoft now develop Windows on a 6 month release cycle. Windows 10 was announced as the last version of Windows, there won’t be V11 or something else.

 

[chucker23n1]

Interesting how Apple put out the Public Beta months ago and this is discovered just now? You mean nobody with a 2013/2014 MBP ever had a bricking issue all the time during the public beta?

That, or it was reported, but didn't bubble up to someone at Apple QA as a critical issue.

Or it wasn't reported, because it doesn't affect everyone with that machine.

Furthermore while I'm not saying bricking should happen I think it's a stretch trying to install the latest OS on near 7 and 8 year old computers and expect to have no issues.

Oh, so Apple says it's a supported machine, but users who spent $2k and beyond on it shouldn't expect that to actually mean that it'll work?

 

[DukeDevlin]

Back up first and then run with it. I am running Big Sur on my 15 inch 2018 Pro with zero problems.

Yeah back up with Time Machine, but I have read some latency issue on MBP 16 inch, so there are many opinion on this topic. I use it for video editing on final cut pro.

 

[lartola]

This is very similar to the arguments about Microsoft dropping Windows XP after a 12 year lifecycle. Stating businesses cannot afford to upgrade their computers often enough and support needed to be extended passed 2014. 12 years and a business cannot afford to upgrade AT ALL in 12 years? Something is wrong.

That is fine if you cannot afford a new computer every two years. But at 8 years you cannot expect perfect support. Use the older operating system

You might still get that perfect support, though. I just updated my 7-year old mid 2013 MacBook Air and macOS Big Sur works flawlessly on it. Not all of us are having issues just because the machine is old.

Now a 12 year lifecycle for windows XP may have been an extreme, but it's just as much of an extreme from Apple to release software updates every year for all of their platforms. They can't improve that much in just a year and they do have to work in a bit of a rush to release the new software, which can cause more bugs to go unnoticed and make it to the public release of the software. I think 2-3 years would be a decent length for an update cycle for both hardware and software. 1 year is too short and people will have to work in a rush to have the new software and hardware ready for the public, while more than 3 years is too long.

 

[bobbie424242]

People are updating their MacBook wrong. That's all there is to it.

 

[Bandaman]

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

Yeah, one of the main reasons I use Apple products is for privacy. If I no longer have that on Apple, then it’s the same as every other company. This is honestly shockingly stupid.

 

[Maconplasma]

That, or it was reported, but didn't bubble up to someone at Apple QA as a critical issue.

Big Sur Beta was released during the summer. It's now November. The smallest issues regarding Apple make news instantly on tech sites.

Or it wasn't reported, because it doesn't affect everyone with that machine.

Then it wouldn't have been reported today because it still doesn't affect everyone.

Oh, so Apple says it's a supported machine, but users who spent $2k and beyond on it shouldn't expect that to actually mean that it'll work?

I clarified that in multiple posts. I can't force you to read it anymore than Apple can force anyone to install an OS.

 

[GtrDude]

Apple has turned into one big huge gigantic mess. From their phones to ipads to all their computers.
Freezing keyboards, usb-c only to the OS's...all of them.
What a joke.

 

[davidgnomo]

My 2019 iMac freezed 3 times already ... the screen just blocks and the system restarts by itself after a couple of minutes : in one occasion though I had to physically switch it off and manually restart it

 

[CarlJ]

I got news for you buddy. The "Big Bucks" you paid for your 2013/2014 Macs has served it's purpose. You're not entitled to a free OS year after year, especially for these Macs that are near 7 & 8 years old.

It has nothing to do with entitlement. Apple either says the OS upgrade covers these machines, or it says they can’t be upgraded. And its not a suggestion, the update app makes that determination. If the update app says the machine can be upgraded, and then proceeds to brick it, that’s entirely Apple’s fault. Your opinion that they’re not entitled to that upgrade is complete ********.