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Restoring Apple Silicon M1 Macs Leading to macOS Installation Errors

zorinlynx said:
The very same article you wrote says that you can boot from a USB installer? I'm confused.
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Yes, you can use a USB Installer normally to reinstall macOS on Apple Silicon. The problem here is the particular shipping version of macOS that came on Apple Silicon Macs that is the issue. If the user first updated the M1 Mac to 11.0.1 they might not be having this issue right now. Again it all comes down to the problematic version that was installed on all M1 Macs at the factory.
 
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swingerofbirch said:
I just said to someone today: Apple has one of the most powerful personal computers starting at $899 (EDU pricing), and yet I'm still probably going to move to Windows because the software quality has gotten so much worse over time. But then I thought: Well maybe the M1 Macs will be different! And then I see this. And honestly I have no idea what Windows is like. I probably last used it in the year 2000. Just tired of having to babysit my Apple devices.
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Windows is cool but it has its quirks. One thing to always remember: the grass is not greener on the other side. Windows has had significant issues with software updates as of late. And windows is even more aggressive in forcing updates down your throat than macOS. A recent 2020 windows update led to blue screens of death if you plugged in an external drive via thunderbolt. Let that sink in. Windows is still quite buggy.

If I were you, I would avoid windows if possible unless you want to game or run an app that won’t run on Macintosh.
 
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Not to sound insensitive, but let the Beta testing begin! Apple is about to make a few billion dollars off of M-series beta testers, aka early adopters!

I’m going to enter the chat when higher-core-count and IPC m-series chips drop.
 
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swingerofbirch said:
I just said to someone today: Apple has one of the most powerful personal computers starting at $899 (EDU pricing), and yet I'm still probably going to move to Windows because the software quality has gotten so much worse over time. But then I thought: Well maybe the M1 Macs will be different! And then I see this. And honestly I have no idea what Windows is like. I probably last used it in the year 2000. Just tired of having to babysit my Apple devices.
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trust me windows has its issues has well, like macos has issues. Windows updates are more frequent and can also brick ur machine
 
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swingerofbirch said:
I just said to someone today: Apple has one of the most powerful personal computers starting at $899 (EDU pricing), and yet I'm still probably going to move to Windows because the software quality has gotten so much worse over time. But then I thought: Well maybe the M1 Macs will be different! And then I see this. And honestly I have no idea what Windows is like. I probably last used it in the year 2000. Just tired of having to babysit my Apple devices.
Click to expand...
My main computers are running Windows. Windows is fine and I like it but it’s not enjoyable to use like macOS is.
 
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I was one of the folks mentioned that was able to restore my M1 Mac mini.
Out of the box, I managed to get my system into a wonky state with flickering screens while setting up my second monitor, even after reboots. Not sure what caused it but decided it wasn't worth the time to troubleshoot. That is why I needed to do a reinstall and go through the setup a second time.
Side affect of doing the restore was getting started with a Big Sur 11.0.1 installed. It has been running great after I got it restored and finished the setup.
 
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macOS 11 on an M1 is likely compiled for that processor. Attempting to restore an install of macOS from a machine with an Intel processor sounds like something that is destined to fail in addition to just being a really dumb idea.
 
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mrj412 said:
I was one of the folks mentioned that was able to restore my M1 Mac mini.
Out of the box, I managed to get my system into a wonky state with flickering screens while setting up my second monitor, even after reboots. Not sure what caused it but decided it wasn't worth the time to troubleshoot. That is why I needed to do a reinstall and go through the setup a second time.
Side affect of doing the restore was getting started with a Big Sur 11.0.1 installed. It has been running great after I got it restored and finished the setup.
Click to expand...
How did you restore it? Did you make a bootable USB stick of 11.0.1 in another Mac? Or did you use internet recover?
 
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swingerofbirch said:
I just said to someone today: Apple has one of the most powerful personal computers starting at $899 (EDU pricing), and yet I'm still probably going to move to Windows because the software quality has gotten so much worse over time. But then I thought: Well maybe the M1 Macs will be different! And then I see this. And honestly I have no idea what Windows is like. I probably last used it in the year 2000. Just tired of having to babysit my Apple devices.
Click to expand...
Windows is still worse than a Mac. The gap isn't as large as in 2000, but it's still there.
 
zorinlynx said:
Apparently the new ARM Macs use ipsw files to restore, just like iOS devices. Interesting.

Choose an IPSW for the Developer Transition Kit / IPSW Downloads

Download macOS IPSW files for Developer Transition Kit
ipsw.me ipsw.me

This is going to be an interesting next few weeks as we learn all about how the platform works.

This worries me a bit, in that I wonder if Apple is going to do signing on these releases, and stop signing earlier releases so we can't downgrade easily. Being able to downgrade MacOS is super-important for some users. It's one of the few things I hate about iOS; for example I wish I could put iOS 6 on my old iPhone 5 for nostalgic reasons but I can't because Apple is stubborn.
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I seem to remember that Apple said that one of the settings for changing security on the new machines was to allow older OSes not recently signed, which may be their workaround for that. Can't find it easily right now, but will look later
 
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swingerofbirch said:
I just said to someone today: Apple has one of the most powerful personal computers starting at $899 (EDU pricing), and yet I'm still probably going to move to Windows because the software quality has gotten so much worse over time. But then I thought: Well maybe the M1 Macs will be different! And then I see this. And honestly I have no idea what Windows is like. I probably last used it in the year 2000. Just tired of having to babysit my Apple devices.
Click to expand...
Don’t need to be so overly dramatic. This is just a software problem that they just didn’t catch. If you think the grass is greener on the other side, think again.
 
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swingerofbirch said:
I just said to someone today: Apple has one of the most powerful personal computers starting at $899 (EDU pricing), and yet I'm still probably going to move to Windows because the software quality has gotten so much worse over time. But then I thought: Well maybe the M1 Macs will be different! And then I see this. And honestly I have no idea what Windows is like. I probably last used it in the year 2000. Just tired of having to babysit my Apple devices.
Click to expand...
I like Windows and macOS, but I think you'll be babysitting Windows more, and the software quality isn't any better. Forced updates once a month, the UI isn't consistent system wide, there are still two different control panels, BIOS updates, driver updates, etc. There are two "major" updates every year, but you might not get it right away when it's released. One computer could get it right away, but another one might not get it until several months later. The Windows 10 October 2018 update deleted files for some users, and it happened again earlier this year.
 
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jlocker said:
Thank you all you early hardware adopters for making my life easy for the next 2 years.
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It's a software issue, not a hardware issue. Likely Apple hasn't updated its Internet Recovery servers with the latest version of Big Sur for M1.
 
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doboy said:
Don’t need to be so overly dramatic. This is just a software problem that they just didn’t catch. If you think the grass is greener on the other side, think again.
Click to expand...
we all know this is the very first instance of a software problem on a computer.
 
mrj412 said:
I was one of the folks mentioned that was able to restore my M1 Mac mini.
Out of the box, I managed to get my system into a wonky state with flickering screens while setting up my second monitor, even after reboots. Not sure what caused it but decided it wasn't worth the time to troubleshoot. That is why I needed to do a reinstall and go through the setup a second time.
Side affect of doing the restore was getting started with a Big Sur 11.0.1 installed. It has been running great after I got it restored and finished the setup.
Click to expand...
So you can run two monitors on the mini? Nice.

Does that mean you could run two monitors on the pro (or air?) in clamshell?
 
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