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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.
All ready to make first post.... but my Mac Book Pro froze!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
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.
If hundreds or thousands are reporting it then it is like affecting several orders of magnitude more systems, by the sounds of things you need to be running the system continuously for a while too so I would say this is likely something easily discovered for them. Most users will simply hard boot and move on. I will never forget a technical gig I had about 20 years, I had to go into help out a design company, the users were furious as their new Windows NT machines would blue screen once a day and it was unacceptable they needed stability like their Mac's. While I was their fixing a driver problem I witnessed there Mac's mac's crash approximately every 45 mins to 1 hour, When I commented on it. they said "no they do that every hour, but we don't have to touch them they just come right back up after a few minutes", apparently the Apple engineer had convinced them this was normal behaviour. So I set Windows NT to auto reboot on blue screen of death instead of sitting there with its thumb up its arse. It is amazing what some users will put up with if they think it is normal.
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.
Coincidently, my Air just froze 10 minutes ago while viewing an animated gif in Safari.
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.