Some Users Experiencing System Crashes on macOS 10.15.4, Especially During Large File Transfers

[Ethosik]

This is the problem with the software development industry currently. It's not just Apple, Microsoft and others are at fault for this too. Things have gotten so focused on agile software development where things cannot be tested fully anymore. There are way too many bugs being introduced in software lately. I had a bug in Windows 10 that broke all desktop shortcuts, something that was around since at least Windows 95.

As a software developer, I find the agile development going to do more harm than good in the long run as more businesses focus on new features instead of spending time to work on existing codebase to clean it up. Things need to go back to the good times. Where we wait 2-3 years for Windows 7 to be released. Or a new OS X version. Or a new Adobe Creative Suite version.

 

[honestone33]

My recently-owned late 2012 Mac Mini was working real well, including no issues with OS 10.15.3. But I suspected that Catalina would be the last Mac OS I could use on it. So, on February 1st, I purchased a late 2018 Mac Mini, Core i5, 256 gig SSD, and 8 gig of Ram (except for the processor (the late 2012 model had a Core i7), everything else was the same as the 2012 model). But 3 financial positive events occurred that greatly assisted my purchase. Also, I was able to sell the late 2012 model a week later for $250. Not too shabby for a stable machine that I had used for almost 7 years and cost me less than $1000 when I purchased it brand new.

So, I know I am good for at least 5 or 6 more versions of the Mac OS.

 

[kingtj]

I'm in the same spot. I forked over a lot of money to upgrade to one of the new iMac Pros when it came out, selling my trash-can Mac Pro which really was starting to become trash. (Not only did a memory stick fail in it and need replacing, outside its warranty period, but the external RAID drive cabinet I had attached via Thunderbolt was starting to act up too. And the fact I needed that big, noisy and heat-generating box just to use it with sufficient disk space was crazy in and of itself. The inability to upgrade its graphics card as it got outdated sealed the deal for me. It had to go.)

Now, the iMac Pro has been pretty reliable and a "good" Mac by most standards. But I'm less impressed with their laptops. My previous employer issued us the new 13" Macbook Pros and I hated the keyboard on mine. My friend bought one for her insurance sales business and it's had the lines developing down the screen due to the video ribbon cable going bad, twice now. Also just experienced too many weird glitchy things with wake from sleep and attached accessories. Usually worked fine, but at least once a week? I'd leave the Macbook Pro on overnight in my office, and come back to find the Apple Magic Keyboard wasn't typing to it anymore. Had to power it on and off so the Mac would re-detect it and let me type my password to sign in. Other times, my bluetooth mouse wouldn't communicate with it until I rebooted the machine. And sometimes I'd experience one of the USB-C attached external monitors flickering off and back on randomly. It seemed like a reboot would make that stop for a while, but it would randomly act up again every so often.

I finally let my employer give the Macbook Pro 13" to another employee and kicked in some of my own money to buy a high spec Macbook Pro 16" -- hoping I finally got the "ultimate" Mac portable. Initially, it seemed wise. Better keyboard and better sounding speakers for sure. Definitely better specs! But as these forums prove, that machine is giving people all sorts of grief too -- from random popping noises from its speakers to kernel faults/crashes when certain video functions gets performed, to these reported problems with the latest Catalina release crashing it. And I had some interest in a dual boot configuration with it via Boot Camp so it can run Windows 10 Pro when I need it. And that's a real trainwreck if you don't go get custom video drivers from a third party site maintaining them and use several PC hardware tweaking utilities with just the right settings so it can perform well with 3D games and such. For a notebook that can cost people $4000-ish depending on the configuration? It's absurd Apple's Boot Camp for it wouldn't install a better set of video drivers and provide some optimizations of their own.

Too much money spent for too little in return.... I love OS X and have used Macs as my main computers since 2001 or so. But it feels like the end of the road for me. I'll probably plug along with this gear as long as I can, since it's all recent and "high end". But Apple has lost its way in recent years, and when they try to appease the "power users"? It's this haphazard and overpriced stuff that has design flaws that undermine what it promises to deliver.

Personally, rather than switching, I just quit upgrading my Apple hardware. They’ve become too frustrating to use and I’m not willing to give Apple any more of my money until they get things fixed.

So 2013 MBA, iPhone SE, 2012 Mac Mini, iPad Mini 5; good enough.

I know neither Tim nor Apple care, but then I don’t care that they don’t care.

 

[ani4ani]

I now get it; this is the legendary years of Apple’s OS support?

 

[kingtj]

This is the problem with the software development industry currently. It's not just Apple, Microsoft and others are at fault for this too. Things have gotten so focused on agile software development where things cannot be tested fully anymore. There are way too many bugs being introduced in software lately. I had a bug in Windows 10 that broke all desktop shortcuts, something that was around since at least Windows 95.

As a software developer, I find the agile development going to do more harm than good in the long run as more businesses focus on new features instead of spending time to work on existing codebase to clean it up. Things need to go back to the good times. Where we wait 2-3 years for Windows 7 to be released. Or a new OS X version. Or a new Adobe Creative Suite version.

Yep! I was just reading about the Boeing 787 jet airplanes and how the FAA had to mandate they get completely powered down at least once every 45 days. Otherwise, the software that runs their instrumentation starts getting flaky and can show incorrect data in the cockpit! (Apparently, these commercial planes often do go for long periods of time without getting powered off because they're attached to power on the ground for night crews to vacuum and clean the cabin, etc.) To me? That's unacceptable! Industrial-grade software that does a single task shouldn't be developing these kinds of issues that require regular reboots. It's bad enough when our personal computer operating systems and software do it!

 

[An-apple-a-day]

We need a 2020 version of this.

View attachment 904059

Somebody needs to come up with suitable artwork for "Snow Catalina".

 

[sidewinder3000]

I just bought a brand new, maxed out MacBook Pro 16 and it was restarting with a kernel panic every single time it went to sleep. So I wiped the machine and reinstalled the OS. Kernel panic continued. Apple techs couldn’t help so I returned it and ordered a new one. So I guess I can look forward to the exact same issues in two weeks when it arrives. Yaaaaayyy.

 

[An-apple-a-day]

Yesterday I did something I haven't done in 15 years of using macOS, having used every major release and patch release. I've downgraded my MBA '13 to Mojave. It became unusable with Catalina. The process sucks, I'm still reinstalling and configuring stuff but I guess it's worth it. Since 10.15.4 it couldn't even wakeup without crashing, last week I got a full system freeze when I was just editing a document and this weekend I had a kernel panic. SSD is fine, I've ran memtest for hours, there nothing wrong with this Macbook. I've been running 10.15 since it came out and it's by far the worst macOS release ever. Lion and Yosemite were heaven compared to Catalina.

I've been using Mac heavily since 1989. I have never, ever, not installed a major classic OS release. System 6... System 7... 7.1... 7.5... 7.6... 8... 8.1... 8.5... 9.0.4 (the "snow classic" release)... 9.1... 9.2.2. As far as OS X is concerned, I purposely sat out for early releases (a long time) until I felt it was truly ready (Tiger). Throughout that period I continued to use my trusty classic OS. From Tiger forward, I have updated to every subsequent major release (after waiting until at least second or third dot-version update).

Over the years, I have had pretty good faith in Apple's Mac OS releases despite having had to endure some significant hiccups (e.g., I lost the entire contents of a connected external drive after doing a particular update many years ago -- I forgot which version that was). But now, for the very first time, with Catalina, my OS "spidey sense" is tingling. I think I will not upgrade. I will instead wish for Snow Catalina. And if the next version ends up being nothing more than a stale, crumbling Catalina cake with new feature frosting, I will pass on that, too. I am even willing to risk having no more security updates offered if I end up standing pat with my Mojave long enough. At Apple these days it seems that there are too many cooks in the kitchen to be able to bake a good cake anymore.
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I waited until 10.15.4 before upgrading from Mojave to Catalina cause i thought everything would be fixed by now. Well, boy was i wrong.

Honestly, despite my spidey sense warning me not to, I was waiting for the dot-4 to upgrade, too... then I started reading these posts. I slammed on the brakes and will update none of my machines. I'm gonna be doin' the Mojave mambo for a long, long time.

 

[bsolar]

Things have gotten so focused on agile software development where things cannot be tested fully anymore.

Agile has nothing to do with the problem and it's perfectly possible to adequately test software in Agile or whatever professional methodology (although beware that "fully" testing is and was in general never realistically achievable).

The problem is that Agile is being used as excuse to cut corners: in Agile you are supposed to release piecewise but the "pieces" ought to be high quality and completed, QA included. In many cases it's juse unfinished work being released instead.

Furthermore, good QA requires talented people which tend to be expensive. It's engineering still and if you e.g. outsource it to the lowest bidder or give it an insufficient budged (be it money or time), you are going to pay for it in the long term. Too many companies are learning this the hard way.

 

[femike]

It's a different Apple now: Tim, his management, the culture they have created, the board, many engineers have left, the emphasis and what's important has changed, etc. Resulting in significant products being cancelled, neglected, bugs, bad design, growth of similar products, etc. The investors are still happy and thats all that matters now.

 

[tsukeyomi]

Am I the only one who's not having issues on Catalina? 🤔

 

[Val-kyrie]

It’s good to know Apple is keeping up with Microsoft. We wouldn’t want any stable operating systems now, would we?

A sizeable number of Mac users are experiencing occasional system crashes after updating to macOS Catalina version 10.15.4, released a few weeks ago.

The crashing issue appears to be most prominent when users attempt to make large file transfers. In a forum post, SoftRAID described the issue as a bug and said that it is working with Apple engineers on a fix for macOS 10.15.5, or a workaround.

SoftRAID said the issue extends to Apple-formatted disks:Other users on macOS 10.15.4 have experienced crashes after waking their Mac from sleep, with affected systems suffering a kernel panic and rebooting to the Apple logo, according to comments shared on the Apple Support Communities, MacRumors Forums, Reddit, and Twitter.

After updating to macOS 10.15.4, users may also experience continuous spinning up and spinning down of connected hard drives when a Mac is supposed to be asleep, which could result in damage to the drive, according to Jeremy Horwitz.

We've reached out to Apple for comment and we will provide an update if we hear back.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1246577468036841472

https://twitter.com/x/status/1246669457503784962

https://twitter.com/x/status/1243530005965127686

https://twitter.com/x/status/1246470077026717704

Article Link: Some Users Experiencing System Crashes on macOS 10.15.4, Especially During Large File Transfers

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I have Mojave on my 2013 11” MBA, and while it’s not perfect, I feel good that I never updated to Catalina.

Best thing I’ve done was to run the command line to tell Catalina updates to firetruck-off on all our Mojave Macs.

How have you adjusted to the font rendering in Mojave? I was having a terrible time trying to read the screen on my 2013 13” MBA, so I reverted back to High Sierra.

 

[Joniz]

How have you adjusted to the font rendering in Mojave? I was having a terrible time trying to read the screen on my 2013 13” MBA, so I reverted back to High Sierra.

95+% of the time, I’m working off an external monitor now.

I did do something to adjust fonts, but it’s so long ago that I forget what I did. I remember the number 3. Found it:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 3

You can set it from 0-3. I use 3. Make sure to log out & back in after setting for it to take effect.

But with decent mouse support for text editing with iOS 13.4, I’m now using my iPad more as my portable.

 

[Joshooa79]

This has been happening. One of my apfs external drives got messed up. It wouldn't mount but could see it in Disk Utility but would fail getting First Aid. I had to buy a new drive & recovery software to save my data. Could this bug have caused the APFS object map error & make the drive not mount or be usable?

 

[Val-kyrie]

95+% of the time, I’m working off an external monitor now.

I did do something to adjust fonts, but it’s so long ago that I forget what I did. I remember the number 3. Found it:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 3

You can set it from 0-3. I use 3. Make sure to log out & back in after setting for it to take effect.

But with decent mouse support for text editing with iOS 13.4, I’m now using my iPad more as my portable.

What is the resolution and size on your external display. I was still having trouble with the fonts on my 24” 1920x1200 external display, but I think I used 2 instead of 3 when using the command you referenced.

 

[Ethosik]

Agile has nothing to do with the problem and it's perfectly possible to adequately test software in Agile or whatever professional methodology (although beware that "fully" testing is and was in general never realistically achievable).

The problem is that Agile is being used as excuse to cut corners: in Agile you are supposed to release piecewise but the "pieces" ought to be high quality and completed, QA included. In many cases it's juse unfinished work being released instead.

Furthermore, good QA requires talented people which tend to be expensive. It's engineering still and if you e.g. outsource it to the lowest bidder or give it an insufficient budged (be it money or time), you are going to pay for it in the long term. Too many companies are learning this the hard way.

I have been to many places where Agile is used and the stuff is not properly tested. Agile may not be the problem directly, but it is definitely the problem if you know what I mean. Just like you said. And every single business is now using Agile which is pretty irritating as I have been with several that are not testing their stuff properly because they have to get it out in 2 weeks!

 

[Jim Higgins]

Am I the only one who's not having issues on Catalina? 🤔

Yes

 

[winglet69]

Still on Mojave. Longest I've ever waited to upgrade the OS. Will probably just skip Catalina altogether.

I'm exactly in this position. So are several family members with their multiple machines. I used to eagerly look forward to getting the latest OS. Now I wait as long as I can to update. And usually only then because Apple has artificially forced me to by intentionally obsoleting something that still works perfectly.

Between reading the MANY threads like this, added to the ones about UI changes (like the disaster that is Mail in Catalina), I'm quite content to stick with Mojave as long as possible.

Kind of a sad reversal from the past.

I’ve gone from immediately installing all updates in the 10.0 to 10.2 era, to waiting for the first point release, then the second or third point release, to waiting a few months, and finally with Mojave not installing it until after Catalina was released. (Later than my comfort level was fine with it but I’d gotten lazy and apathetic. A month or two before Catalina would’ve been Ok.)

Decisions based on feedback from everyone here, thank you very much. Consequently I’ve had very little post upgrade regret.

This.

 

[Scottsdale]

Once I did a fresh Install of Catalina 10.15, and didn’t use any backups to recover apps or system info, my MacBook Pro has worked correctly.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Yeah, what I’ve found is, if I step away from the desk long enough for the MBP16 to sleep, when I come back, the cursor & performance will be laggy, fans will be cranking like mad, drives won’t eject, and it’ll eventually hang & crash when you inevitably reboot. When it does reboot, I notice some graphical sputtering and gagging getting back to the desktop. This is still an unstable boot, and the same problems will be present. So I reboot again right away, and then it works like it should.

I turned off power-nap yesterday afternoon and thought that might have fixed it, but it’s hard to tell since Keyshot crashed it twice on its own since then. I joke that all my reboots since buying this computer are actually hangs and crashes, while the old 2009 MBP17 acts like a server and CNC machine control 24/7 and hasn’t been rebooted once since Sierra went on it.

I looked into people’s attempts to put Mojave on the MBP16, and of course the sticking point is the missing graphics driver. Apple could cure a lot of woes by doing something unusual for everyone who spent a fortune on these MBP’s and needs a stable release, by issuing a late update to Mojave with the graphics drivers we need so we can upgrade to (or past) Catalina when it’s mature instead. But obviously that’s as unlikely as it is.

 

[0924487]

reverted to 15.13, not planning on updating anytime soon.

 

[winglet69]

Yep! I was just reading about the Boeing 787 jet airplanes and how the FAA had to mandate they get completely powered down at least once every 45 days. Otherwise, the software that runs their instrumentation starts getting flaky and can show incorrect data in the cockpit! (Apparently, these commercial planes often do go for long periods of time without getting powered off because they're attached to power on the ground for night crews to vacuum and clean the cabin, etc.) To me? That's unacceptable! Industrial-grade software that does a single task shouldn't be developing these kinds of issues that require regular reboots. It's bad enough when our personal computer operating systems and software do it!

As a B787 captain, I can tell you it is a big step back (for me) from my previous aircraft, the B777. We call the Dreamliner the "Plastic Fantastic" or the "Flying iPad" because so much is done in software now. Even the circuit breakers are "virtual", you set and reset them from a LCD with a cursor.

There are always updates to software on the aircraft, and each one fixes a few bugs, and introduces several new ones. It's amazing. Privately we sometimes wonder if or when the B787 is going to have its "Max Moment", when something no one told us about, or something no one foresaw due to the software complexity, occurs. At least they're all parked at the moment. The B777 was absolutely rock solid in comparison, a magnificent machine and feat of engineering. Like all things now, the B787 was designed more with accountants in mind than pilots or engineers.

But it's not just Boeing, or even just aircraft manufacturers. You see it in cars, you see it in home appliances, in everything. Ticky-tacky cheap materials, buggy software, abominable UI...I used to expect better from Apple, alas it just isn't the same philosophy of the company I first embraced in 1985.

 

[Joniz]

Once I did a fresh Install of Catalina 10.15, and didn’t use any backups to recover apps or system info, my MacBook Pro has worked correctly.

Mac users used to laugh at Windows users for having to do stuff like this.
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What is the resolution and size on your external display. I was still having trouble with the fonts on my 24” 1920x1200 external display, but I think I used 2 instead of 3 when using the command you referenced.

I’m using an HP 22cwa, same resolution, and everything’s fine using HDMI. I write, so if fonts were a problem, I think I would’ve noticed.

Or my eyes have gotten so bad that their blurriness compensate for the display’s blurriness, making them sharp & clear.

(And why did iOS change my first blurriness to business and then the second to burritos?)

 

[howdytom]

This issue is related also to Mac Mini 2018 Kernel panic bug_type 210 after Security Update 2020-002

 

[nylonsteel]

found some irritating changes and behavior in 10.15
though im up for updating wish aapl would incorporate features users want fixed/improved
some issues havent improved for years...