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Mac Users Reporting Widespread System Freezes With OS X El Capitan 10.11.4 Update (macrumors.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mac Rumors: A large number of MacBook Pro owners running OS X El Capitan are reporting widespread system freezes since installing the 10.11.4 update to Apple's Mac OS. The problem appears to be concentrated on 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros (Early 2015) running 10.11.4. Users report that their system becomes totally unresponsive at seemingly random times, with no way to regain access to their Mac other than to force a hard reboot. The issue was initially reported by MacRumors forum member Antonnn on March 25, four days after Apple released what is the third update to the Mac OS. In Antonnn's case, the freezes have been occurring "about once a week," first when browsing in Safari, but then also during the use of other Mac apps, including Adobe Photoshop and several third-party browsers. The freeze seems to affect not only the screen and mouse cursor but also the Mac's Force Touch trackpad, which completely loses feedback. Apple Support is apparently aware of the issue but have so far offered no concrete solution. Meanwhile, some users have resorted to downgrading their system to 10.11.3 by restoring from a Time Machine backup or performing a clean install. Hundreds of others have posted to a dedicated thread discussing the issue. Bill Mattheis posted a video on YouTube of the freezing he has experienced on his MacBook Pro.
Introducing Mac OS X, Xbox 360 Edition! All the hardware failures and locked-down hardware of the Xbox 360, at more than twice the price!
All ready to make first post.... but my Mac Book Pro froze!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Of course Apple hasn't addressed the bug yet. It's Apple. They never have bugs or flaws. Clearly the users reporting this flaw are holding it wrong. Just like it was Booking.com that broke links in iOS 9.3 and the fact it required an Apple patch to fix is the users' fault.
But, the advantage Apple has always had is a very small set of hardware configurations, but if you let a bug like this out the door, you aren't taking nearly as much advantage of that as you should. So, actually, I do hold Apple to a higher standard here, because they need to be. You don't get to set exactly what computers run your OS, and how much they will be and then turn around and say, "oh, that obvious bug we let out the door, it happens, what can you do"
Take the ASUS motherboard UEFI boot problem. Microsoft had admit the problem, post a workaround, and didn't even mention the thousands and thousands of other hardware combinations that worked just fine, because nobody cares anyway. But, if I was an OSX users, I would be upset. The damn things should just work and trudge along, update after update for a few years. But they increasing don't do that, and people paid the premiums for the platform anyway and thank Apple for it. Just stop thanking them for a start.
Ridiculous. I updated three days ago and I havent s
I will never move to El Capitan.
It kills too much software – including the $2700 Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection (basically everything Adobe). I have way too much expensive deisgn, scientific, and creative software to waste two days determining which ones will break. And at any rate, Adobe's asshole move to push people to CC (renting software you use to make a living) alone is a deal-breaker.
BTW, I have several pieces of software that I purchased a very long time ago – back in the days of Carbon – that still work just fine. That is, they ran OS X 10.1, and still do on OS X 10.10 with no updates of the programs. Examples are Audion, Mineteur, and many others.
So the 20-25% premium paid for apple products goes to...ceo bonus?...shiny metal case?...advertising? I dunno.
root@artone:~$ uptime
18:29 up 733 days, 18:35, 13 users, load averages: 0.33 0.27 0.20
There's no reason for OS X to be such garbage, not with the severely limited number of configurations they need to support. The last Mac I used and was actually happy with was the Quicksilver G2 back in the PPC days, that stayed snappy up until its last supported update. Everything after Intel has been mind-bogglingly slow and chuck-it-in-the-trash buggy. And there's no reason for it, not with the resources they have on hand. What the fuck, Apple?
Having to forcefully power off and reboot my MBP frequently. Every other day it seems. Either a problem with NFS lockd going nuts or the random freeze described here.
Still, I would rather deal with shit than with that fuckhead and his sponsor, Red Hat, who foisted PulseAudio and Systemd on us.
...used to freeze after one fatal update too. Most peeps had the i5 so it was an edge case. They never fixed it in Yosemite, but somehow fixed it in El Capitan. Leading suspect was the driver for the Intel graphics.
Apple software has been going strongly downhill recently. I make my living developing for their platform, and the reality is that below the shiny GUI there is an old and unmaintained pile of crap. More shit gets kicked under the carpet with each new release but obviously this can't go on forever.
Funny, couple weeks ago I sold my last MacBook. Just tired of all the Apple BS and lack of focus on making OS X what it used to be. A solid and stable platform that you could count on with stable and well tested update releases too. I don't know what happened at Apple to change this? But after a couple bad years of WiFi issues, bad initial upgrades of the OS and dumb down new software, I just had enough. This only solidifies my decision and I feel for those still struggling with a nice expensive notebook that is now poorly supported by Apple.
Apple: "It Just Wor-
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
With a different OS of course... now how sad am I Tim Cook? with my non freezing non retina over 5yr old MBP.
Apple is going down. Makes me sad.
First big cracks have been appearing, it will crumble.
When Apple was firing on all cylinders the premium as worth it. Things did 'just work' and were a joy to work with. The mac pro debacle, no passion for the once amazing pro apps, iphones that don't have space for anything other than ios, the list goes on and on at this point (with some doozeys!), and it's just getting longer. These days it's like paying extra to get kicked in the teeth.
Because I refuse to create an apple ID to use my fucking computer. I'll be wiping this piece of shit and installing linux on it.
With "hundreds", hell, even tens of *thousands* of people experiencing a problem, it's still a tiny, tiny percentage of systems. The problem is that when your userbase is in the millions, a 0.1% problem is a *huge* problem. Apple shipped ~4,500,000 systems in 1Q16 according to IDC, just how are they supposed to find a problem that affects as-close-to-zero-percent-of-systems-as-makes-no-difference ? You can QA until you're blue in the face, but it's not going to catch *everything*.
The bad news for Apple is that (a) Apple fans are vocal when things don't "just work", and (b) it's only going to get worse. It's particularly bad for Apple because they have far fewer product lines than most PC retailers, so a problem that affects one line has a disproportionately large effect compared to other manufacturers. On the other hand, the upside is that because there are relatively few product lines, the problem is easier to track down, isolate, and eliminate.
So, as userbase grows, there are going to be more and more cases like this - some failure mode, followed by an outcry on forums, followed by (hopefully) a fix. Apple's problem is to try and make sure this doesn't affect their image of having computers that "just work"...
Physicists get Hadrons!
I didn't even know there was an issue until I saw this story. So I take it "Widespread" is only widespread for the people who have the specific hardware that is affected.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Apple is perfect. Just ask any Internet forum over the last 20 years.
My install of OS 10.11 in October 2015 seemed to be terrific. Then I found that had trouble with SDHC cards on my 2009 iMac 27". It might read and write cards after a clean cold boot, but it also might self reject them, and it never would even see a SDHC inserted after a sleep cycle. Others reported similar issues, one post on the topic was up to 9 pages a few weeks ago on the Apple Discussion forum. The problem was reported on many different models, not all were old.
10.11.1, 10.11.2, and 10.11.3 brought no relief. Then, 10.11.4 improved its operation substantially. SDHC cards would work for several sleep cycles before being gone to the wind. Sometimes, just to be assertive, OS X 10.11.4 reverts to its old ways. It likes to mess with me.
I have never had El Capitan freeze on me BTW.
10.11 El Capitan brought a whole new USB software support and some people have claimed various fixes for the SDHC issue, use a driver for an external reader, muck with the control files for USB, etc. The reliability and security of these fixes is always dubious.
Other problems also came with El Capitan (for me at least). Calendar spins its color wheel cursor at me as type in new events, it takes 5 or more seconds to respond to a single character. I've played with the various iCloud settings and mitigated the problem, but not by much.
El Capitan came with a number of "improvements". The Notebook application was supposed to have numbering and other new features. I tried them and couldn't believe how poorly the features worked. I looked for an alternative and discovered the best application on the planet, Microsoft OneNote. I now use it on my Mac, my iPhone, my Chromebook, my Windows bootcamp partition, and at work on the PCs. Highly recommended. Best app I've ever used.
The myth of "it just works" is a myth. I curse my Macs oddities way more than I curse at the PCs at work, except for cursing at the work itself.
I toyed with restoring Yosemite from my Time Capsule. I finally did a few weeks ago, but to an external Firewire disk. Then I found that using an external disk for booting OS X doesn't work that well. It won't wake from sleep well, for example. But I tried, I just don't want to blow away the internal disk for it. Any besides, it took 6 hours to build that disk from Time Capsule as it restored 650MB of media besides the OS plus all the old versions of my software. You have no (minimal) control over Time Capsule.
There is nothing Apple sells that I want any part of anymore. The new iMacs look just like the one I've been using. Maybe my problems with El Capitan are due to my computers age, but I buy Apple because they've historically given me good value and lasted with full software updates. Like for seven years now.
I may have to switch to Windows one day. Don't tell me about Linux, I use it all day at work too. Not Ready for Prime Time.
So, I guess I'd rather bitch than switch.
My computer has been freezing a lot since I installed el capitan. But I figured it was because the hardware was dieing. So I'm so happy to hear it might not be the hardware!!!
another thing it started doing is it can't remember my icloud password more than a day. keeps asking me.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is happening with my air, and I haven't upgraded to El captain yet. I'm guessing it's a recent security update or something. Sometimes the cursor slows to a craw, then it freezes
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
No one does anything important (like real work) on a fucking Mac! Now you'll be thankful you never considered the Mac as a work laptop.
if there is "no way to regain access to their Mac other than to force a hard reboot", doesn't that make it a crash rather than a freeze?
freeze sounds better. like the machine might come back from it if we just waited long enough. but these sound like crashes.
Just do what the Linux kids do: just reboot the machine using the last good kernel from the bootloader. Example: the current version of Linux (4.6.0-rc7) has problems with DVB. Try to run the TV tuner and it hangs the box. One of two solutions: 1) Boot another kernel eg: 4.5.0 and then run the TV tuner card without fail or 2) keep booting the 4.6.0-rc7 kernel, but don't try to run the TV tuner card. Of course there is another solution: search for an interim DVB patch, patch the kernel, rebuild and then run that. I haven't bothered (even looking) for option 3, as when they build these things they don't necessarily apply all needed patches or have the framework to support a patch until its "ready". So I may wait for an rc8 or rc9 before I start to look. So maybe one or two weeks. Now I know the Mac kids are like the Windows kids (they don't compile their own kernels, they barely know what a kernel is, and don't know what 'compiling something something' is), and even the words 'bootloader' might cause confusion, so maybe they should just stick with whatever the vendor chucks at them and offer grateful thanks for whatever they get (however broken).
Timmy hates Macs, any Macs, all Macs. Don't trust Timmy.
Ha ha
I reinstalled Yosemite on a bunch of Mac Pro towers due to breaking audio capture hardware and the head tracking camera no longer working for the Oculus Rift DK2. My guess is that Facebook and Apple are in the midst of a secret war as nether side will admit it's their problem or fix anything. Apple sure has gone downhill since Jobs left. Never was a Jobs fan, becoming less of an Apple fan as time goes on, really hate that stupid watch. Woz still rocks!
I do have a 13" MBP, and about every two weeks, it will be unresponsive when I SSH or RDP into it, and a screen lock pops the pinwheel of death...forcing a hard shutdown.
Even more quirky, if FileVault is in use, upon reboot, it will block the keyboard input for a random duration (30-60 seconds), allow keyboard/mouse movement for 100-500 milliseconds, then block it again. To get around this, if I don't do a "fdeutil authrestart" as a way of rebooting, I have to clear the NVRAM, and after doing that, it boots without issue... until it is time to restart again. Initally, with 10.10, I didn't have that issue until the update last August. 10.11 seemed to clear that up until about 2-3 months ago when it came back.
I know Apple can do better than this. They control the vertical and horizontal with their hardware. My 2008 MB (first unibody aluminum model) is still going strong, after a battery, SSD, and RAM update. The 15" MBP I use has zero issues with it. My iToys work flawlessly.
Even though Macs are not Apple's cash cow, it would be nice if Apple could either pay more attention to them, or if that isn't the company's focus, spin Macs off into a separate company that can focus on making the absolute best x86 hardware out there.
Not just Macbooks but iMacs. I have a mid-2010 iMac which is still a useful and usable machine, but since updating to 10.11.4, it sometimes just goes into a hung state when waking up, showing the spinning pizza indefinitely in the login screen (I have it set to require login on wake). Requires a hard power-switch shutdown and reboot to unstick it. Happening about once every three or four days since the OS update.
you just found out it's gay lmfao
distrowatch.com
This happens to me on my hack. Had to disable usb 3 (intel s7) from bios to have the problem disappear. But, can you disable hardware on a real Mac? From efi shell maybe?
Original post describes my experience exactly.
I always wait a long time to install updated software, especially when the software is the OS, so the developers have time to get the bugs out. Software isn't easy and it's no surprise to me if there are some minor bugs that weren't found in the initial testing. But when the software in question is the OS and it's been widely loaded and in operation for months, then significant bugs should have been eliminated.
So I was shocked after loading El Capitan (El CRAPitan to me henceforth) and my box immediately started locking up like nothing I've used for years and years. Couple of hard-boots a day. Am I back in the '90s? Is this DOS or something?
And I do almost nothing on my computer. Some surfing, watch some shows, a tiny bit of writing, about three spreadsheets, that's it. No games, very little music, a few photos, zero development, nada. Nothing even vaguely fancy. And I definitely went through my hard-drive and cleaned it up and deleted as much as I could (lots of old photos) and yadda yadda.
Now I get the spinning color wheel just scrolling down a document I've written. Total crapification. And I know that if I take to some so-called genius at the store or complain to Apple, then I will be told that I need to buy a new computer. No way. I will never reward Apple for crap software.
I bought Apple instead of Windoze because Apple (used to) just work. As someone in this thread has already noted, Apple builds for Apple so there are no hardware issues. This recent experience cancels any presumed advantage. Considering how little I do on this box, I will switch to Linux on a Raspberry. Be good for an old retired coder like me. Might learn something.
Thank you very much for this timely post. After not having any luck with Apple phone support, I was less than an hour away from driving 70 miles to the nearest Apple store to try and resolve the hard freeze error. Apple Care showed no indication they knew anything about their OS freezing up. Bastards.
Windows, Linux, iOS, etc. I always wait until I am forced. I also don't like how we can uninstall updates Apple software updates like in Windows without restoring from backups. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
UUuuhmm ....ya'll obviously know Apple from your neighbors or the news. Coz lemme let you in on a lil secret: If u want ur Apple product to work smoothly DON'T install 3rd party apps, software and/or extensions. Your Apple product already has all the functionality you'd need built-in, ask your neighbors! Also on the bottom of the keyboard it clearly states: ' No indians! ' (feathers,that is)
~Bouridans Ass