Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
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.
Loading...
Apple controls the hardware, so they can be sure everything runs smoothly on it. That's what you get for running Mac OS X on unsupported hardware. Oh, wait....
True, my AppleTV iBricked itself after the last "update". The only solution is to take it to your local Apple Store for a factory reset. Trouble is, my nearest Apple Store is 160 miles away. :-(
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Well, you would suppose that the limited flexibility in configurations where you can get OS X would mean that those configurations that are supported are tested properly.
Apple machines may be overpriced or not, but it's hard to deny that the company tries to make the argument that it provides an integrated environment.
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.
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.
So, how's that 'just workin' for ya?
Sorry, I don't mean to be flamebait, but this story is irritating. If it were a Windows story, it would be, "Microsoft update bricks user pc's" with the summary "Microsoft, in yet another example of shoddy programming, has managed to brick billions of users' pc's with their latest auto-update. With most users unaware they can even disable these updates, is it really any surprise that they've screwed their customer once again?"
Instead, we get this, "Ah gee golly look, I guess this little update means we should let someone else work the kinks out before we update our macs!" Nevermind that Apple has a history of shutting down their hardware via updates.
NOTE: I believe brick == unrecoverable. I'm merely stating what I think the summary would have been, not what it should have been/etc.
Get a USB patch stick (search on google code), which includes SSH as an install... then do a search for "downgrade apple tv" and you'll find a little script which will download and install the 2.2 firmware for you (or 2.1 if you're so inclined)... then we it reboots, go and turn off the auto-update feature under settings.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Exactly â"Âalmost never â" bricking is a very rare occurrence, and it's not happening in this case.
Here we go matching anecdote with anecdote, but I cannot resist.
Look.. I'm a UNIX/Linux guy.. as matter of fact I'm typing this on Slackware. I also like Macs.. but please dispense with the bullshit you're spouting.
I work in higher education as a network admin and work along side the end user support folks. I've seen maybe four Vista crashes out of hundreds of machines coming in through the door.
For the record I've seen a couple of Macs with serious problems as well, including one that lost all of the data on a non-faulty hard drive.
If you don't like Vista, don't use it. I fall into that category, but I don't run around spreading disinformation.
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.
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.
You hardly ever have to worry about pesky OS upgrades.
Perhaps at the "Reality Distortion Field" level the culture is different. But I don't see a hell of lot of difference between the 'user experience' of a BSOD and the failure of a point upgrade that would require a non technical user to return the computer to the store / factory. The OS X kernel panic screen has nifty graphics but also has even more incomprehensible babble than the typical BSOD screen (really, I don't understand Mandarin Chinese, I don't). That's not the user experience you're looking for....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don't see defensive Apple zealots, in fact, here are ALL the posts above, including yours..
Yet another FW update that bricks machines.
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!
Haha :-D
Apple zealots defending this lack of testing to their death. Imagine the trolls that would be out if this were a Vista update ;-)
I know which system slashtarded trolls mostly support, and it's not Vista either. It's the one system that doesn't get idiotic comments like all the above, because updates _neeeeeever_ break it, and bad things just don't happen to it (that Slashdot reports). Quit making the rest of that community look bad.
Switching it on?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You're probably not looking at it right. Or you have the wrong kind of candles. You sure the Pentagram is exact?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
CUPS is easy to configure if you know what you're doing. So it might not be the service that is the unwilling participant in your scenario.
FYI, OSX uses CUPS as it's printing backend. It's just generally transparent if you're not doing anything crazy.
Umm... Pretty much by definition, blue screens can't be user error, unless that "user error" involves something like disconnecting the hard drive while it's in use. If the user can reliably cause a blue screen through software methods, then that is a bug in the software, and not the user's fault.
The fact that you think you can dismiss most blue screens as user or hardware errors shows that your standards have been lowered so far that you're pretty much incapable of making a meaningful judgment on the issue. (In my experience, most blue screens are caused by buggy drivers, and thus not entirely Microsoft's fault, either.)
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.
1) It's Japanese on the panic message, not Chinese
2) When written, you just call it Chinese and not Mandarin Chinese; the distinctions "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" are primarily for spoken language, as the written languages are very nearly identical
3) I fail to see how it could be incomprehensible, seeing as it is pretty much obvious that there are different languages on the panic screen, and that it is giving you very clear instructions on what to do next: see one for yourself
Besides, Windows XP (and likely Vista too) ship in a default configuration where they do not show BSODs (at least, that was the way it was set up on my system, a consumer-level laptop). This means that all the user gets to see is the system *instantly restarting*, without any sort of warning whatsoever. It also means that they won't see a BSOD, but will be informed after startup that their system "recovered from a serious error" or something like that.
One argument for the OS X panic message is that it doesn't replace the entire screen, meaning that whatever you may have been working on is still potentially recoverable. With a full-screen BSOD, where technical details essentially fill the screen, this doesn't happen.
It's worth noting that Apple's Software Update always asks for user confirmation before installing anything. This is substantively different from Microsoft's strategy of installing any and all updates without asking until the user uses the control panel to change the policy.
While this difference doesn't change the number of suckers using each respective platform, Apple's the vendor that makes it easy to put off updates until they've been in the wild for a while. It's also much less presumptive of Apple. (Though their update process with the iPhone offsets any goodwill they may have gotten from that.)
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.
1) There's no such thing as a UNIX/Linux guy. You're a Linux guy if you're typing it on Slackware. If you were a UNIX guy you'd be typing it on Solaris or BSD. Also, Slackware? Are you guys on ELF binaries
Well, would you want him to type the same reply twice on a different platform just to prove you're wrong?
Key...board? Is that like a touch screen?
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.
True, but which of those used the slogan "it just works"?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And here's what the popup box says: To allow, click the mouse button. To deny, click the mouse button.
Srsly, unless it said that it would totally bork your display, asking for confirmation is a waste of time and totally irrelevant. Obsequious != user friendly.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'd argue that OS X was a unix playground since the public beta - probably because by that time, I was used to pure BSD and pure AT&T UNIX and many, many variants and pre-Novell, pre-SCO and pre-whatever nobuddy I knew gave a toot about certs - so long as we knew how to manage the beast, it was just another nix.
Is it true that this rev is the first to be certified as UNIX? I'll take your word for it.
But certified or not - it's core has always been UNIX. Today Apple gives credit to its FreeBSD heritage, but in the early OS X days they noted the OpenBSD and NetBSD components that were part of the effort. I think that all the hoo-hah has come from the non-BSD kernel being a part of it all.
Even if it had had a BSD kernel, I don't think it would stop unintelligent or uniformed opinions about OS X. Non-unix guys and non-OS X experienced guys don't get that in the early OS X days, many of us would run an X desktop in addition to our Aqua desktops (many of the tools for that have fallen by my wayside) and unless you were doing kernel mods or kernel programming, it was indistinguishable from BSD. When fink came out, one guy I corresponded with regularly at the Apple form posted his Gnome desktop running on his Mac.
Your link was for OS X server. For those that don't know, simply install the BSD subsystem and devel tools with the desktop version and you get X and gcc and from there, just about anything useful that you might like.
By 10.0, you could finagle NetInfo to manage your desktop as an NFS server and many other server tasks. As memory serves, the Apple mods removed my instructions on how to do that from the Apple forums. Can't say I blamed them - the guys that could wrench a desktop rev into a server rev didn't my advice and the guys that did were prolly better off paying for the server and getting Apple support (that group being mutually exclusive to those that were comfortable running a free nix server in the first place).
I don't really have a point, so I'll stop. :)
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.
Gentoo, the Linux distro for professionals who don't want a working OS.
But why should any user have to know how to configure CUPS? Yes OS X uses CUPS but as a user you don't even generally know that. You can access the web interface but the vast majority of users have no idea this is even happening. OS X does all the configuration for you and all you really have to do is plug the printer in.