Some Older Macs Reportedly Bricked After Installing macOS Monterey

[Macbookers]

this also happened to me yesterday, i have the M1 macbook pro and i had no issues with this but when i updated it to monterey my macbook shuts down randomly and i can't turn it back on immediately. I hope they release an update to fix this.

 

[Pro Apple Silicon]

No the article has 10 people that posted. Said nothing about how many total people this affects.

So source that 10 total people are affected.

Right. 10 people is what they could come up with. You cannot pretend there are more, unless there is evidence of more. Every OS bricks a device for 10 people.

 

[Pro Apple Silicon]

The last couple of years apple software has be rough at times. Apple is stretching itself thin.

I believe that in person collaboration is helpful to productivity. Wfh inhibits many helpful aspects of doing your job.

Enjoy you wfh I guess

I believe it has more to do with priorities at Apple than it does stretching anything thin. They are the most valuable company in the world on any given day. They have no shortage of resources. What they have is a shortage of leadership.

 

[Pro Apple Silicon]

The article mentions ten people who complained (in one specific way). It does not claim that's all people who have this problem. That's your (bogus) claim.

One and the same. Unless there is proof of others, it is nothing.

 

[mjaco002]

Ok I thought I was the only one who had this problem. My Mac mini 2018 got bricked. I tried installing the new OS on the same day Monterey was out and my Mac would not turn on.

I went to the apple store the same day and gave my Mac Mini for repair. They currently replaced the power supply but couldn’t revive it. They are currently trying to figure out if it is something to do with the another part. The last step is for them to replace the logic board which I don’t want to do.

 

[mjaco002]

This happened to me, took it to the “Genius Bar”, they did all the reset sRAM stuff I’d tried at home and used a different power adapter (genius!), then said there was no way it would’ve been bricked by the OS and was a hardware problem, $578 flat repair fee, except they then offered to keep it for three days and try a free of charge “software fix”.. which worked. My eyes rolled up, back, and all the way around again. But sounds like it’s the firmware issue.

Can you tell what is this software fix? I don’t want to pay the extra money for them to change the logic board.

 

[Ivan X]

Big Sur was very problematic for my 2015 iMac, with horrible performance issues. They were never fully resolved as Apple doesn’t properly support Fusion Drives anymore with Big Sur and later.

I did upgrade to Monterey, no additional issues but still no great performance.

Because of these issues I never upgraded my 2014 MacBook Pro. Guess it’s time to upgrade the hardware.

The correct move with a Fusion Drive iMac is to split the SSD and HD into separate volumes (so, no Fusion) and format the SSD as APFS, and the HD as HFS which performs better than APFS, and put the user folder on the HD if it's a tiny 24 GB or 32 GB SSD from the 1 TB model, or maybe just the Music and Photos libraries on the HD if it's a 128GB SSD from the 2 TB or 3 TB models.

That, or just ignore both drives and boot the machine from a permanently attached external SSD, which are pretty reasonable these days. And use the internal HD for Time Machine if you like.

 

[Ollé]

Holy ****, glad to see that twitter report of it bricking a 2020 16”. I was about to upgrade over the weekend but will definitely hold off now as my MBP is my only computer and I’m in the end of year crunch…

 

[xpusostomos]

Excellent news, Apple will be giving a lot of free computers... just make sure your data is backed up.

 

[MacBH928]

BrickGate

One thing I learned with modern tech companies, always stay 1 year older with software. A working app is better than no app. Plus near all the updates are non-essentials, just bells and whistles and shiny things.

 

[svish]

That is very bad. I never install new OS versions immediately. Very difficult to deal with such issues. Better to wait for some time before updating.

 

[DRDR]

I have the experience that the Mac Pro 2013 does not show any output on any display when powering it on. If you enter the FileVault credentials blindly it will eventually finish booting. So maybe check, if you have FileVault enabled and type blindly?

 

[fiex]

For the first time ever in all my 15 years of owning a Mac, I had major issues with a new macOS installation.
Monterey installed successfully, but went into a boot loop, where it would crash during startup. So after numerous hours of battle, I eventually got it to do an internet installation of High Sierra (which my 2017 iMac originally came with), and then upgraded again to Big Sur.

I do wonder if it might be because of the fact that I'm running the OS off of an external Samsung T5 SSD through the Thunderbolt port, but the Home Directory on the local fusion drive.

 

[WriteNow]

I can't speak about modern Macs from any personal experience. But I'm appalled by the stories I hear. One thing that was nice about the Mac in years gone by was how "it just worked." (Admittedly, there were a few problem issues here and there--but it wasn't every release cycle, like it seems to be now.)

 

[WriteNow]

Like others, I tend to wait to upgrade software. Reliability day to day matters more than something new. And when I do upgrade the OS (which is Linux these days), I install in a different partition, and keep the old OS installed. That way, I can experiment with the new OS, and be sure that I have something that I know works just in case I need it.

 

[dwaite]

Agreed. I remember some people complaining back in 2005 that Tiger bricked their systems. Of course, not as many or as bad as nowadays, but it's always been an issue in some circumstances.

I think what makes today different is social media and amplifying of issues online, that makes things seem worse than they really are. But, yes, bricking, or system failures in some fashion, has always happened, with any update.

Yes, and people do not realize how much of a workout an upgrade can be on a machine.

For example, I've had plenty of upgrades fail across devices traced back to heat issues from the hard disks (and long before that, CD-ROM drives and floppy drives).

You can suddenly have slowness as that long-ignored file on the filesystem turns out to be on a bad block. Bad blocks typically can't be remapped on reads, so you just continuously have some upgrade process timing out the controller, trying to get information out.

That occasional bit flip from the loose connection just happened while it was writing out the new base libraries. I had external L2 cache fail during an upgrade once, which just created all sorts of amazing issues.

Thats long before you even get to the software issues that can hit on upgrades, such as upgrades from older Mac systems that let third parties pretty do whatever they wanted inside kernel space.

 

[dwaite]

I run BigSur On My mac mini. Late 2012. Flawlesly for nearly a year now. I can’t understand they made it unsupported performance wise. Marketing wise i Can see the picture.
Maybe all Those People having problems to upgrade to Monterey should Hackintosh their genuine Old Mac’s 🙂

They usually make hardware unsupported due to lack of hardware capabilities (e.g. incapable of running Metal), but it sounds like you may have been pushed off the end of Vintage support, e.g. support for that Mac mini is no longer part of the testing matrix.

 

[dwaite]

I have a 2019 iMac i5 with 64 GB of RAM running Big Sur 11.6. Have tried twice to install the Monterey upgrade, it runs excruciatingly slowly (about 6 hours) and then crashes hard at the end. Exactly the same both times. Luckily the machine will still boot back to Big Sur, although it takes a long time for the Finder to appear after the reboot, maybe checking the disk or something.

I'd recommend trying diagnostic mode. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202731

 

[dwaite]

I believe it has more to do with priorities at Apple than it does stretching anything thin. They are the most valuable company in the world on any given day. They have no shortage of resources. What they have is a shortage of leadership.

Hardware fails all the time, and an OS update is very stressful. In the absence of a reproduction (e.g. "upgrading straight from Catalina to Monterey on a 2019 MBP fails 100% of the time") this is likely a few instances of hardware failure being amplified.

 

[Jasonhodges]

I have also experienced a dead 2018 Mac mini as a result of the Monterey update.

the install never finishes correctly and after quite a few retires - even from a usb install media even tried to a complete fresh hard drive it failed and now all it will do is enter T2 DFU or recovery mode.

Configurator 2 running from my macbook recognises the mini in Dfu and recovery mode however all attempts to restore or revive bridgeos eventually fail with an obscure 4010 - ‘received a disconnect message twice, unexpected device stats - restoring’ error message.

obviously out of warranty and apple care, however I rang apple support yesterday and have an appointment with Genius Bar on Sunday for them to take a look. No question about being out of warranty etc at this stage.

was running latest release of Big Sur prior to this mess.

 

[mjaco002]

I have also experienced a dead 2018 Mac mini as a result of the Monterey update.

the install never finishes correctly and after quite a few retires - even from a usb install media even tried to a complete fresh hard drive it failed and now all it will do is enter T2 DFU or recovery mode.

Configurator 2 running from my macbook recognises the mini in Dfu and recovery mode however all attempts to restore or revive bridgeos eventually fail with an obscure 4010 - ‘received a disconnect message twice, unexpected device stats - restoring’ error message.

obviously out of warranty and apple care, however I rang apple support yesterday and have an appointment with Genius Bar on Sunday for them to take a look. No question about being out of warranty etc at this stage.

was running latest release of Big Sur prior to this mess.

I gave it to apple store and they didn’t believe me that it could be because of OS update. Now they are trying to figure out something else.

 

[stooovie]

Knock on wood, three Macs (2015 MBP, 2015 5k iMac, 2020 M1 Air) all updated fine. M1 Air somewhat flaky Safari but I didn't troubleshoot yet. I have also a Hackintosh on Big Sur and I'm seeing those are also generally fine with some work to get BT working again.

 

[rpmurray]

"It just works bricks."

 

[slothinker]

I have a 2017 iMac w/ 40 GB RAM and a 500 mg. HD. Ran into problems immediately upon installing Monterey on the first day of release such as inability to finish the installation, hanging during installation forever (or at least for several days) and so forth. Had I any hair, I would have torn it out.

Using my wife's Big Sur-powered computer I downloaded the new Monterey OS to a flash drive. Didn't work. Tried coaxing TimeMachine into a restoration of Big Sur on the iMac. Nope.

Then I used an old HD with the correct format (tried a few) to download and install a bootable version of Monterey OS. That worked sort-of but on my iMac it restored the wrong "user" to the iMac (long story, I'll spare you the details).

In reading some of the articles on recovering a Mac via a "clean install" (which I ultimately didn't need to do), writers mention the importance of reducing "bloat" on the Mac HD. By this time I was able to occasionally boot the iMac so I spent a couple of hours culling MacMail and OS cache. Free space on the iMac went from about 50 GB to 350 GB.

After backing up everything on the iMac internal HD a couple of ways to Sunday I retried installing Monterey from that external HD. Yes! And I lost nothing!! Finally I copied the Monterey OS onto a new 1TB SSD drive I obtained for the purpose and restored my user info. That worked too.

At this point I'm up and running, Monterey is performing perfectly, I have a HD dedicated to an installable version of Monterey and an external SSD as an alternative way to boot. So ready for 12.0.2.

 

[vett93]

I have a 2017 iMac w/ 40 GB RAM and a 500 mg. HD. Ran into problems immediately upon installing Monterey on the first day of release such as inability to finish the installation, hanging during installation forever (or at least for several days) and so forth. Had I any hair, I would have torn it out.

....

How did you do the initial update?