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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."
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.
That's right. By default, it downloads updates and then prompts users to install. If a reboot is required, users have the option to defer the installation until the next reboot. There's also always the option to not install the update at all. I agree that Apple's defaults probably wouldn't be a good idea for most Windows users, but they work well enough for me. (And the fact that there's so much outcry over a bad update like this suggests that Mac users are pretty good at patching their systems quickly.)
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.
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.