Restoring a Bricked iMac Pro Requires a Second Mac and Configurator 2

[mikecorp]

Cool so your buying a possible $5,000 to $13,000 paper weight. Unless you speed more money on another Apple computer.

everyone knows it. it is the fact. Paper weight.
[doublepost=1513680716][/doublepost]

I was aiming for humor, not being that serious. Yes, in reality most people purchasing an iMac Pro probably has an older Mac laying around they could use for this purpose. Lighten up

any older machine (3 years +) will not work. Apple stops supporting them and every update they make is shi ier. Well we are doomed. Hopefully new Steve Jobs will appear somewhere with new company. This one starts to rot.

 

[charlituna]

Apple's way of saying "Buy TWO iMac Pros!"

not at all. any computer can work and in the use case these were designed for there's almost always a Mac Mini running the storage raid, or the assistants desk iMac etc that can be used.
[doublepost=1514957159][/doublepost]

Both that and the idea that you should just have another Mac laying around with High Sierra on it is Apple expecting a little too much from customers.

these computers were not designed and are not being marketed to Joe Q Public. the businesses that they were created for will likely have multiple computers around and are being told about this issue up front so they know to hang onto one of the older computers that these iMac Pros will replace. so not actually a big deal.
[doublepost=1514957359][/doublepost]

Now the iMac Pro requires another Mac to reinstall the OS, which suggests that you need Apple's permission to reinstall the OS, just like on an iOS device. This is scary because it may mean Apple is planning on fully locking down the Mac as a platform.

take off the tin foil hat, none of this means any of that. if you are that paranoid perhaps you need to go back to Windows.

 

[Phonephreak]

I really don't get the hostility. Why do I have to drop all my Apple equipment because I'm unhappy with Apple's direction for their desktop/laptop machines?

I know no one else who owns a Mac. Period. I don't.

The closest Apple Store is 45-minutes away; so 90-minutes round trip. If a Mac became bricked at an inopportune time that puts me in a difficult situation. Any other Mac I'd just boot from an external drive with a clone of my internal one (which I make routinely).

You can like this direction all you want. I personally do not. Nor do I see any reason to abandon Apple entirely for this. Assuming they go this route with all the macOS machines at some point, it just means I'll keep my existing one as long as it suits my needs, then move on to Linux or a BSD-variant.

Because Apple cannot do anything stupid. Must defend Apple and insult anyone who dares disagree

 

[PickUrPoison]

Because Apple cannot do anything stupid. Must defend Apple and insult anyone who dares disagree

It’s the knee jerk Apple hate that gets old. Anything Apple does gets crapped on just because, while the uninformed poster doesn’t even understand the reason why Apple is doing it, let alone have a better solution.

It’s amazing how much power some haters give Apple to affect the quality of their life. I don’t prefer Samsung’s cell phones, and I spend zero time complaining about them on Samsung fan sites.

Let’s face it, dealing with trolls gets old. They’re sad, pathetic attention-seekers for whom negative attention is better than no attention. They feel important when people argue with them. Typically I don’t bother responding, it just encourages more forum-cluttering noise. I wish the ignore list allowed more entries.

 

[yurc]

What iMac Pro user doesn't already own a Mac. Non-issue.

But all our production macs are mac pro tower 2010/2012 which i guarantee doesn't help since they don't have any thunderbolt connection. Even our iMac we have is the old one (2011 sandy bridge model), which we keep because have target display feature which latter absence in newer iMac.

edit : From apple help page, it's like connection can be made using USB-A to USB-C cable (probably) and not must Thunderbolt, so connection to any Mac is possible. Also, the best practice is stay away from power failure or disabling secure boot enforcement.

In case DFU restore required, this implementation still too inconvenient way treating "workstation" class machine like iOS device.

 

[psimac]

My take is this: if you must have an iMac Pro and this security measure is too risky, then simply turn the security feature off. For those of us who live 20 min from an Apple Store or have a number of Macs laying around that do support restoring a iMac Pro in a likely rare secure boot failure, we can happily use Secure Boot with little risk.

Personally, I have a lot of customer data on my computer that would harm my business if it got out. This feature closes the loop that FileVault started. Apple may be a bit paranoid about securing a customer's data, yet that’s better than Windows’ security theater.

If you don’t like Secure Boot, turn it off or buy a different computer than an iMac Pro!

But all our production macs are mac pro tower 2010/2012 which i guarantee doesn't help since they don't have any thunderbolt connection. Even our iMac we have is the old one (2011 sandy bridge model), which we keep because have target display feature which latter absence in newer iMac.

edit : From apple help page, it's like connection can be made using USB-A to USB-C cable (probably) and not must Thunderbolt, so connection to any Mac is possible. Also, the best practice is stay away from power failure or disabling secure boot enforcement.

In case DFU restore required, this implementation still too inconvenient way treating "workstation" class machine like iOS device.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Does anyone know if the primary topic of this thread is applicable to the 2018 MacBook Pros as well or if this is still unique to the iMac Pro? I have found no documentation or news to suggest one way or the other yet...

 

[karanlyons]

Does anyone know if the primary topic of this thread is applicable to the 2018 MacBook Pros as well or if this is still unique to the iMac Pro? I have found no documentation or news to suggest one way or the other yet...

It is. My MacBook Pro managed to somehow brick itself all of its own accord installing updates yesterday and I was able to bring it back up today using that guide.

 

[mhd2100]

In all my years with Macs I’ve never bricked one. If I did brick any of my existing macs, i have no idea how I would “restore.” Seems like this is no big deal.

Sadly I've managed to brick every single Mac I've ever owned (except for an ancient Macintosh performa back in the 90's). In each instance the machine has been recoverable thanks to command line boot options etc. The most recent experience was with my iMac 5k after transitioning to ZFS. The ZFS partition became corrupted and the only way I could restore was to clone the current partition to external disk, wipe, reinstall and copy files back.

SSD corruption was happening very frequently to me and I was initially concerned it was on the way out.
However, it appears that it was caused by frequent small power cuts of 1-2 seconds during the day when I was in work.
Since buying a UPS system, I've had no issues with partition or file corruption.

Moral of the story is.... always have backups and use an UPS!

 

[cmaier]

Sadly I've managed to brick every single Mac I've ever owned (except for an ancient Macintosh performa back in the 90's). In each instance the machine has been recoverable thanks to command line boot options etc. The most recent experience was with my iMac 5k after transitioning to ZFS. The ZFS partition became corrupted and the only way I could restore was to clone the current partition to external disk, wipe, reinstall and copy files back.

SSD corruption was happening very frequently to me and I was initially concerned it was on the way out.
However, it appears that it was caused by frequent small power cuts of 1-2 seconds during the day when I was in work.
Since buying a UPS system, I've had no issues with partition or file corruption.

Moral of the story is.... always have backups and use an UPS!

If you can recover it from the command line it isn’t bricked.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

This reminds me of the old Digital VAX's that had a PDP-11 computer in the cabinet that was responsible for booting the bigger computer, and also doing testing and recovery. Maybe they need to incorporate a Mac mini into the already cramped anorexic cabinet so they have a computer that might work to enable restoring the main computer.