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Apple OS X 10.5.6 Update Breaks Some MacBook Pros
Newscloud writes "As PC Mag reported last week, Apple OS X 10.5.6 can break some MacBook Pros leaving some users (like me) with a dead backlit black screen after the Apple logo appears. While I initially thought I had a hardware failure, it turns out that there is a fix as long as you have an external display, keyboard and mouse. The problem only appears on the second restart, so if you sleep your MacBook a lot as I do, you might not realize the problem is related to the OS update you did the week before. The problem was related to older, incompatible firmware that Software Update wasn't flagging before the upgrade. This definitely gives weight to the argument for waiting a bit to run software upgrades."
So, when you discouvered your Mac had what you thought was a hardware failure, who talked you back from the ledge? Are you in therapy?
Hi, I'm a Mac! Look at me, I can update myself! Hi, I'm a PC! Wow look at that, he's updating himself! So how's the update going, Mac? Hello? Hello? Hellooooo!
Apple zealots defending this lack of testing to their death. Imagine the trolls that would be out if this were a Vista update ;-)
It is nice that this issue can be fixed by users themselves without having to send the computers for repair.
Yet another misuse of the term "brick".
...when they have such a small hardware deployment environment? Seriously... Linux runs on TONS of hardware, Windows runs on TONS of hardware. Apple's OSX runs (in a supported fashion ;)) on VERY little hardware.
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It just works!
I know some people really love their Macs but this is ridiculous.
Hooray, my MacBook Pro is working again. And this seems to confirm for me that the 10.5.6 update breaks some systems if you are running older firmware.
Sorry but if you're skipping a firmware update, and running a major OS update on old firmware, you deserve a headache.
The Software Update presents updates in the order Apple recommends you install them. Skipping one update to run another is a stupid thing to do. The worst combination I can imagine is a firmware and an os update being installed out of order.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
What def would you use? Software almost never makes a piece of hardware completely unfixable. Honestly I'm curious because I don't know.
Waiting on Apple? Look, if you're not the first one to greet and hug your dad, you'll feel less love next time!
Obviously if your dad is Vista, the first one to greet and hug usually gets smack on the head.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Except after two months you still can't get the dual link dvi adapters. Those with 30" monitors were already pretty peeved that they haven't been able to use them. Now you have to buy a useless $30 attachment or go to the Apple store to fix your mac after a firmware bug. No thanks.
Exactly â"Âalmost never â" bricking is a very rare occurrence, and it's not happening in this case.
I've been bit once when switching from OS X 10.4.x to OS X 10.4.y
I instituted the policy and bought a FireWire backup drive on which to duplicate my system disk BEFORE doing anything to the OS.
If the update fails, I just switch boot disk and wait until the fix is made and shown to work.
I really should do that with my Linux disk but I don't use it for work and I can multi-boot it from different partitions.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Why Microsoft tests every hotfix carefully before releasing it.
Typically it is advisable to download and run the Combo update installer for these point releases. While Software Update is great for the little things, these bigger updates can cause issues for a variety of reasons if done through Software Update (sometimes files don't get updated that should be updated due to permissions or corruption or some other random change the update is not expecting to see).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Remember the mooing and the random shutdown. No amount of zealoting will get rid of the inconvenient truths.
I'm a PC and proud of it. I was a linux zealot back in 2003, but then i discovered the eXPerience of drivers, software and ease of use.
-1, troll for all. I'd rather been a -1 troll windows user than 5, insightful zealot in denial.
My iJam also bricked. Damn! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqqqVYKoGiw
I have a MacBook 3,1 and ever since 10.5.6 I've been experiencing around 3 kernel panics a day. I've used both the software update and the downloadable installer, to no avail. Problems with 10.5.6 seem to be wide-ranging and all over the Apple forums.
This definitely gives weight to the argument for waiting a bit to run software upgrades."
I'm going to pick on submitter here. This is your fear of the unknown. There is another guy who I work with that likes to pull this BS out of the air all the time when a new release comes out.
His argument: Ohnoz, I'm scared.
My argument: Here is the changelog. These are the real risks that are posed by continuing to use the old version. These are the benefits of upgrading.
When I started working for the company, software was years and years out of date. He had used this excuse for a long time to basically not do anything he thought was risky, but had in fact amassed a huge amount of risk to the business that ended up costing us a lot of real money.
Granted, there is some value to waiting a reasonable short period of time to gather your wits and read the changelog before upgrading/patching, but that should never be an excuse to coddle a fear of the unknown.
Whenever someone I know tells me that they won't try Linux because they're afraid something will break and they won't be able to fix, I point at these kind of events.
The fact of the matter is, no matter what operating system we use, things break.. I'm actually impressed they don't break more.. as equally impressed as I am that bald-monkeys can rocket down asphalt at 60mph and generally make it to where they're going.
I simply switched to Linux because I'd rather have someone break my tool for free than pay them to do it.. and that it has forced me to experiment more with that tool, and thus understand it better.
But maybe that's all to reasonable.. so let the OS oneupmanship begin!
I had no problems running the 10.5.6 combo update. A lot of people reported having problems using the software update method.
Oh it seems like soneone is a litte bit sad in gaza city, am I right?
You hardly ever have to worry about pesky OS upgrades.
"Everybody using OS X is disappointed because it breaks their PC [sic], try Vista - it just works (and look how shiny it is)"
So, when you discouvered your Mac had what you thought was a hardware failure, who talked you back from the ledge? Are you in therapy?
OK. I'm not a Mac fanboy, but I do use a MacBook (not Pro) among other platforms, and I briefly had serious issues with a newly-purchased (cheapie) Huawei E169 mobile broadband dongle (well, strictly speaking, fraudband but enough to meet requirements). The 10.5.6 update fixed the problem instantly.
FWIW, I have no idea why this worked, nor do I care, since I ran the update without bothering to look for any changelogs. Sometimes "quick and dirty" is good enough...
It's always amazing when this sort of things happen. If it were windows, Microsoft would had been crucified. It's also quite ironic that the summary mentioned sleep mode. I do recall a very similar bug that affects mac book pros - when the device wakes up from sleep, the backlit dies.
No one cares about problems with Apple products, just Microsoft's. Take this anti-Apple rhetoric and peddle it elsewhere so the readers can continue to live in blissful ignorance believing that Apple can do no wrong and MSFT can do no right.
Jobs should fire his OS validation team.
It is completely unacceptable not to find this when you control ALL of the hardware.
Pathetic. The mind just boggles.
Apple really screwed the pooch on this one.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
When I upgraded to 10.5.5 two issues appeared on my macbook pro (coreduo 15"):
* Battery meter would get to between 40-60% and then the laptop would abruptly poweroff. When I was at 10.5.4, the battery meter would drain, as expected, down and warn as expected when it got to 10% or so.
* After about 30seconds of being powered on, the keyboard and touchpad would become unresponsive. External keyboards/mice continue to work.
Both of these issues are documented on apple's forums.
I had this happen to me after update, I fixed it by increasing the brightness on my screen as the update sometimes lowers the brightness setting to 0.
they just work!
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
the one that was supposed to kill what apple thinks are illegal install's of it's os?
if it was it looks like it has a pretty high friendly fire rate..
And assert that certain linux distributions are far worse then this. And by "certian" I am refering to Gentoo. Nothing is more exciting then either
a) some jackass removed some library in a way that breaks half your dependencies. Lesson? Always make sure you can restart ssh and then log in before you close your existing ssh session.
b) having your upgrade break because some jackass depreciated some library in a way that forces you to upgrade in a very rigid step-by-step manner. Lesson? Be afraid of updating your system--it will probably break.
Funner still is searching the Gentoo forums for an answer and sifting through the "this was in the archives, jackass", "this is what you get for waiting a week between updates," and "didn't you read the CVS commit on mailing-list XYZ? We discussed this already, so it isn't my fault".
You haven't experienced "update breaks system" until you've experienced the "Gentoo update breaks system". Gentoo is good in theory and there is a lot I like--for example I love the use of color in their toolkit and the command line. I with other distros and unix's would make their utilities use color more. But Gentoo is a bitch to update.
The installer shouldn't refuse to continue, it should upgrade the firmware! OSX has a luxury no other operating system has--it runs on purpose built hardware under its control. Thus its installer has no excuse to not just update the firmware.
I've yet to see a FM, printed or not, that has workarounds for bugs in a very specific software upgrade. That is what knowledge base articles are for.
This is why nobody has FM's for troubleshooting. Software and hardware are too complex to distill into a few pages of troubleshooting. The best you can hope for is "Is the computer plugged in" and leave the rest to a high quality knowledge base. And what is funny is the "Is the computer plugged in" sometimes turns out to solve the problem!!!
Now, the question is, does apple have a good knowledge base? I dont know, I dont own one :-) Microsoft has the best out there, but even then it is missing a lot of lore that only google can provide. Too bad the FreeBSD guys don't put together a knowledge base... in fact I can't think of any open source software besides Firefox that has a knowledge base.
And the erroneous "FW update" phrase... *having* the firmware update would have prevented the problem.
Unless, of course, your macbook is your only computer; and you have no way of knowing how to fix it. In that case, I'd say it's effectively bricked.
iBrick®
If Apple had the market share of Windows and still had the default be "dont automatically install most updates", they'd be a huge source of botnets. Microsoft instead chose to install most updates by default (which is probably what most people want) and let nerds who know what they are doing turn that feature off.
Personally, I am surprised to learn Apple doesn't install most updates by default. I think for a consumer OS, such a policy is a very insecure one and is asking for trouble. Are you telling me it won't update itself without asking even if there is a zero-day exploit in the wild?
Unless, of course, you take it to your local Apple store, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. Then they'll likely have it fixed for you in fifteen minutes. But, yes, it's a PITA.
But it's not actually bricked. It might appear to be bricked, but it wouldn't be wise to make the judgment that it's bricked without at least doing some basic diagnostics such as putting the machine into target disk mode or testing an external display.
Bricking a piece of hardware is relatively difficult for a piece of software to do, even with firmware, because replacing the firmware is usually possible.
Speaking as a bit of a language Nazi (and geek), bricking is one of those terms that should be reserved for extreme cases where the hardware actually IS bricked. Using it for situations where the hardware is recoverable dilutes the meaning and makes it much more difficult to convey when hardware is legitimately bricked.
But sometimes, very rarely it does. Used to be you could destroy the TRS-80 video driver hardware from assembly language; some monitors still have similar problems. Likewise, some devices if disconnected during a firmware update will never come back. And if it can be fixed with a debug cable, it is not bricked. If you have to swap some ROM chip to fix it, it is bricked.
I treat updates with the grand old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So unless the update description says something like "You need to update this or your computer will start eating babies and breathing fire." I let them sit until I see all the idiots that apply the patches the day they are released.
mod parent up. (tis' funny.)
I'm an apple promoter. I'm that guy who gets other poeple to buy macs. People listen to me... I'm the "computer guy".
I'm also a seasoned systems guy.... I choose mac because I *like* it - it works for me.
Now.. loook here apple.
1) Don't keep putting out mushy keyboards. Your new macbook keyboards are a step backwards in time. The previous ones were fine, as were the ones on the little black/white macbooks.
2) What's with removing the power-saving chooser from the battery menu-bar item? I realize you want to "do it automatically" - but there is just no way you can know if I'm on lunch break, adn I want my cmoputer as fast as possible, because I don't care about battery life, or if I forgot my power cable at home and need battery life to be the most important thing on the menu, regardless of performance. At least let me turn that option back on - i cant' see how this equates to good user interface.
Firewire.. you know what? Macs have firewire. That's their thing. It's extremely useful.
Just put it back. I like my mac because I don't need adapters and crap to hook up devices. Now, thanks to some braindead decision, I do.
Keep it up and i'll start pushing people back towards vista.
No, I'm not new here.
Neither am I trolling, neither is this flamebait.
It's just that there a LOT of posts complaining that if this were to happen with an MS update, the Apple gang would be crucifying them and a lot of negativity that this is funny.
Mismanaged updates by either corporation - Apple or MS - is indefensible and inexcusable, and it's usually a real problem for the victims.
The occasional screwed-up update from Apple is something Apple users are - unfortunately - used to experiencing. Ditto for the MS users. Given that I'm a user of both, that's just my experience.
I think we excuse Linux problems (I'm a user of that, too) because the software was free. There's some merit to that, but as I think about that statement it does make me ponder... In any case, the real demerits of the OS choices are overlooked at times like this:
1. Linux not liked because no corporation stands behind the OS potentially misbehaving. This is a real problem in the minds of many corporate managers who have to oversee risk.
2. OS X is the "odd man out" where corp mgrs don't want that risk.
3. MS may obsolesce something that worked for the whole organization in favor of something that seems to work less well, another risk issue for corp mgrs.
The fact that an update involving any of the three might screw something up is neither a decision-point nor cause for immature glee.
The problem from TFA is an unfortunate and foreseeable consequence of testing getting the short-shrift.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
I read through the forum posts and article, which is based on forum posts. I didn't see a single opinion by someone who is even tech savvy enough to tell the difference between a firmware and software problem.
I know you're just a news aggregator, but it seems silly that you're quoting as fact the statements of someone who is obviously non-expert and hasn't sought an expert opinion.
I propose the term "breezeblocked".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And a "bricked" router, etc, can usually be fixed if you have access to and know what to do with JTAG, yet we still call it "bricked". Go figure...
When I was cobbling together my own OS kernel in the early 1990s (no, I'm not Linus) I killed a 3.5" floppy drive by coding a bug in the driver which caused the head to seek from the outermost to innermost track, over and over again (a funny little accidental infinite loop it could only get into under a certain set of conditions). I guess it was causing the head to slam against something, or lose alignment, because within just a few seconds it stopped seeking and never worked again...
Yet another misuse of the term "brick".
Apparently you are unaware of Eric S. Raymond. A geek who appointed himself to be in charge of all geek definitions.
Apparently you don't know the definition of bricked.
There's no place like
Completely agreed. And thanks for posting something constructive rather than the "omg can u imagine the apple fanboys if this was vista?" posts that usually appear on stories like this.
No. It's been common knowledge that if you have to use a jtag, then it's bricked since your typical user couldn't get the system operational.
A Mac is bricked when its soul is sucked in by Steve Jobs' tractor ray. With every Mac that gets bricked his powers keep growing.
Face your daemons!
Linux not liked because no corporation stands behind the OS potentially misbehaving.
I think it's not so much that they have someone they can rely on to fix their problems because- let's face it- if you have a problem with Windows it's not like MS are going to do anything about it.
What *is* the case (and may be what you meant) is that with something like Windows, they can always clearly blame MS if something went wrong. Particularly as (paraphrasing) no-one ever got fired for buying Windows; being able to blame MS is an accepted defence. Whereas with Linux there is no-one to point the finger at clearly, making it more likely that it ends up pointing at *you* for going with that weird-ass commie hippie etc. operating system.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
You identify another facet of the phenomena and a very valid one at that.
I meant what I said - so I **am** guilty of being perhaps too narrow or too obscure. Not only can you blame someone (MS specifically, but Apple applies in my analogy) but if the problem is, in fact, big enough then someone will fix it - like a nice third party for malware or a virus or a bad network problem, if MS or Apple doesn't. (And I mean nice in that sentence in the worst possible way!!)
FWIW, I didn't think you were paraphrasing on the part about no one ever getting fired for buying Windows. That was my intent.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
FWIW, I didn't think you were paraphrasing on the part about no one ever getting fired for buying Windows. That was my intent.
No, it was paraphrasing- and updating- the old (and now out-of-date) expression "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM".
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Geez - I'd forgotten all about that!!
They say if you're old enough, you've seen it all before. If you're older than that, you've forgotten what you've seen. And if you're older than that, you run the risk of forgetting what you've forgotten.
Many thanks for the clarification.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
My argument: Here is the changelog. These are the real risks that are posed by continuing to use the old version. These are the benefits of upgrading.
Those are what's on the label. I'm going to guess "breaks some laptops" isn't.
The fact is there's often the risk of some unpredicted interaction. The more diligent the manufacturer is about mapping out potential machine states, the lower that risk is, but the risk is going to exist.
Waiting a while does in fact provide some advantage: rolling out the updates effectively tests it on a wider variety of potential machine states. The manufacturer then has an opportunity to fix reported problems.
software was years and years out of date
Years and years is obviously too long to wait, but a few weeks can be quite prudent, unless your risk is a security vulnerability with an exploit already in the wild.
Tweet, tweet.
Doesn't seem like the definition should depend on the competence of the user.
See, i don't understand this. I have my MB updated fully, and it works fully. I have modified the dock, changed permissions of the files and yet it still works fine.
Anyone having problems is a fucking idiot and should not be allowed a computer.
Do you have to have seen the source to the patch and prove that you understand it in order to be granted one?
No.
Did you have a relevant contribution to make?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
reset PRAM. it should resolve the issue. a silly thing to let slip by, but trivial to fix.
big deal!
"Bricked", you've turned the hardware into a brick.
An error where reinstalling the OS fixes it isn't "bricked" it is "broke" at best.
iBrick®
Watch it! That term is copyrighted.
That's because JTAG A. is specialized hardware that very, very few people have access to, and B. almost always involves soldering a connector onto the device's board because it almost NEVER gets shipped with the headers populated in production hardware. So yes, safe to say if it requires soldering inside the unit, that qualifies as bricked.... That's significantly different than a software issue.
BTW, at least one of the people in that thread is (with 85% probability) seeing an NVidia chip failure. I wouldn't be surprised if several of them were that. The original poster also has some sort of hardware problem. And so on. These issues are all over the map, but are getting lumped together because they have the same symptoms and all happened right around the time of a software update. I strongly suspect that this is yet another non-story in which people jump to very wrong conclusions and mistakenly see patterns where none exist. It happens after pretty much every Mac OS X update, and apart from fairly minor things like "X feature of Y app doesn't work" or "X application crashes now", they almost never pan out.... (The one time in my memory that they did, it was caused by APE.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
What def would you use?
The general definition seems to be
In a state where the hardware is fine but the software is fucked to the point where the system cannot be recovered without extrodinary measures.
Some measures that I would consider extraordinary:
* opening the case and soldering extra wires/connectors to the board
* buying special programming hardware
* removing components that aren't intended to be user removable
* creating a media shitstorm and hence bullying the manufacturer into releasing previously hidden recovery information
That was afaict not the case here, the firmware screen was still coming up so a reinstall should have been possible and the initial software issue could be directly installed if the user had an external keyboard monitor and mouse (hardly specialist hardware)
I wouldn't consider either a normal OS reinstall or using an external keyboard monitor and mouse to control the machine to be extraordinary measures.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
So it's not even that help isn't available if something goes wrong -- there IS support out there... managers just don't like Linux because there's nobody to sue!
I suggest you read Slashdot
It broke my Hackintosh!
I'm really not trying to be a smart ass but is there an example of something meeting those requirements in the last decade? Something not anecdotal but a real bug that has occurred that caused hardware to brick? Should the word brick ever be used anymore or should the word be modified to mean something more modern, like PITA for average user to fix?
Then maybe it's about the hardware. If I need to crack open the case and plug in a JTAG, it's bricked, since the end user is unlikely to own the tools necessary to fix it. If everything is fixable via software (even if it involves holding down some obscure keystroke and typing in some commands) it's not bricked.
3. MS may obsolesce something that worked for the whole organization in favor of something that seems to work less well, another risk issue for corp mgrs.
The way I see it it's the *opposite* of this that keeps MS stagnant. They have so much legacy technology in their platform that it's all just cruft that contributes to compatibility and stability problems. Peek into the Win32 API and notice how much has been deprecated but never removed, for fear of breaking some major legacy app or another. The consequence of this is that developers now *know* that MS has no teeth behind the word "deprecated", and will gladly keep using API that has been obsolete for near a decade. This is a vicious cycle, forcing MS to keep back-compat a higher priority than it ought to be, since removal of long-disused API will break even new software.
Gentoo, the Linux distro for professionals who don't want a working OS.
Perhaps. My reference was based upon what I think I know of corporate management's perspective of things - perception and reality don't necessarily coincide.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
At least he wouldn't insist on referring to it as Gnu/bricked like Stallman would.
On Vista when it wants to reboot, the nag screen as a "snooze" button so you can defer the nagging for up to 4 hours. After the 4 hours, you can just hit the snooze again for four hours and when you leave for the day it will just reboot for you. I think they improved it quite a bit.
I sure wish Microsoft would figure out a way to let 3rd party installers hook into it's auto-update system. Every seems to want to re-invent that wheel and they all seem to do a really shitty job of it. The way I see it is there is no reason for "GoogleUpdater.exe", "QuicktimeUpdater" or whatever when the OS seems to have a pretty good update system already.
In recent news the PSP. Before that there was the first generation XBOX modifications (soft mod, not generating keys before swapping a drive out or wiping it).
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
"Bricked", you've turned the hardware into a brick.
An error where reinstalling the OS fixes it isn't "bricked" it is "broke" at best.
I always refer to the comparison of the common paperweight with the verb/adj "bricked." That way the people who stole their geek cards can understand the term's definition a little more clearly.
Hardly new. I remember when updating all the PowerMac 8500 machines in our office to OS 8.0 a decade ago. The new OS caused the CD-ROMs in [i]half[/i] of our entire Mac network to stop working. They just didn't exist anymore, save for holding the "C" key on bootup (first time ever I could actually push the "eject" button and have it work every time). Also, for the Macs where the CD-ROMs did work, inserting an audio CD caused an instant system lock-up. That drove our Arts and Entertainment department nuts.
For months, I had to install new software over the network. Back then, there were no critical updates, and I believe it took Apple about 6+ months to release the much-applauded 15MB 8.1 "Superpatch" which finally fixed the CD-ROM issue. There were no other patches either before or after the 8.1 update -- Apple wanted everyone to buy 8.5 to get other fixes.
BTW, all the Macs that had the CD-ROM fail had Sony disc drives, and the Macs that worked fine had Toshiba drives. So much for a closed platform with limited hardware configurations. Even back then, it was mostly PC hardware.
...including the ability to switch power profiles from the power menu icon. Now if you want to temporarily switch from Better Performance to Better Battery Life, you have to open System Preferences.
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