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Users Complain About Installation Issues With macOS 10.13.4 (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The 10.13.4 update for macOS High Sierra is recommended for all users, and was emitted at the end of March promising to "improve stability, performance, and security of your Mac." But geek support sites have started filling up with people complaining that it had the opposite effect: killing their computer with messages that "the macOS installation couldn't be completed."
The initial install appears to be working fine, but when users go to shutdown or reboot an upgraded system, it goes into recovery mode. According to numerous reports, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with users' Macs -- internal drives report that they're fine. And the issue is affecting a range of different Apple-branded computers from different years. Some have been successful in getting 10.13.4 to install by launching from Safe Mode, but others haven't and are deciding to roll back and stick with 10.13.3 until Apple puts out a new update that will fix whatever the issue is while claiming it has nothing to do with it.
The initial install appears to be working fine, but when users go to shutdown or reboot an upgraded system, it goes into recovery mode. According to numerous reports, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with users' Macs -- internal drives report that they're fine. And the issue is affecting a range of different Apple-branded computers from different years. Some have been successful in getting 10.13.4 to install by launching from Safe Mode, but others haven't and are deciding to roll back and stick with 10.13.3 until Apple puts out a new update that will fix whatever the issue is while claiming it has nothing to do with it.
It's always best to let other people be the guinea pigs/beta testers.
Unless it fixes something that is broken that matter to you.
After trying Sierra a couple times, I rolled back to El Capitan - and only recently upgraded my computers to High Sierra 10.13.4. None of the computers I upgraded (2016 MacBook Pro, 2015 MacBook Pro, 2012 MacBook Pro, 2012 Mac Mini, 2017 iMac) had any issues with the upgrade nor with any subsequent updates.
I realize that's just anecdotal, but so are the reports in the story itself.
#DeleteChrome
My housemate uses a Macbook with OSX for work, he's had this exact issue. I run Linux on mine so I avoided it, always annoying when patches break core os functionality.
10.13.4 also breaks external monitors. We have had to prevent updates on many of the MACs on our network because of this.
with apple it's ATI or intel video only now days.
32-bit programs, maybe. Apple wants to move fully to 64-bit.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Looks to me like you don't have the right driver, or the driver hasn't been accepted by the user's system for sign-off reasons. Try this URL if you're talking about DisplayLink.
DisplayLink Support page
For me, even though 10.13.4 installed fine, it has brought nothing but instability and performance degradation:
1. There is 50% chance that if I close the lid on the laptop and then open it, it will crash silently.
2. There is 95% chance that if the laptop entered deep sleep it will not get out of it without crashing. These crashes are not detected
3. The kernel memory leaks are even worse than before. On startup with nothing open the kernel takes in excess of 1.5gb and in 30 minutes of work is up to 3gb of memory. After a couple of days it is taking about 6gb of memory.
4. The purge command is completely broken, it never purges any memory, even if activity monitor says I have more than 3gb of purgeable memory.
5. WindowServer does not reliably pass clicks to applications.
6. Safari memory management is even worse than before. On average it takes 330mb per tab. If you have something like Jira, that tab is easily over 1gb of memory.
Quality is down the drain. Windows 8.1 is my preferred platform these days.
I had an installation problem when installing the macOS 10.13.4 update on my MacBook Air.
After rebooting, my system would crash (requiring a reboot) ad nauseam.
I rebooted in Safe Mode and somehow got the machine out of the annoying reboot cycle. At that point, I rebooted back int 10.13.3 and resolved not to upgrade to 10.13.4 until I heard it was safe to install. When I went to the App Store and checked for updates, the 10.13.4 update disappeared from the list. (It seemed at the time that Apple had pulled it from their servers.) Unfortunately, a week or so later, the update was pushed down and my machine rebooted. But, it seemed to work this time, fortunately.
Reviewing the logs, there was an entry about a file not found which seemed to cause the problem. I didn't save the logs, so I can't report the exact error.
Uh oh. Most of the apps we use show that error. This is going to be painful.
If you follow the link at the top of your linked page, you get to a page that tells you that DisplayLink basically doesn't work at all in 10.13.4 except in a very limited mode where it mirrors the main display. This was discussed on Slashdot a couple of weeks ago.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Really? Which apps? 32-bit Intel apps are really, really rare on OS X. I don't remember the last time I saw one, with the exception of MS Office (because Microsoft screwed around and delayed their 64-bit transition for an entire decade). Most companies were already well on their way to transitioning their code base to 64-bit when the Intel hardware first came out, so the transition to 64-bit Intel was very nearly lost in the noise, effort-wise.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
32-bit Intel apps are really, really rare on OS X.
I'd be careful with those qualifies if I were you.
Some significant software packages on macOS 10.13.4 are only available in 32-bit versions, including some of the software that ships with macOS. These include:
As such, I wouldn't say that 32-bit Intel apps are "really, really rare". Unless you've removed them manually, you have the DVD player and InkServer installed on your Mac. If you use a corporate Mac, you probably require McAfee Endpoint Security and/or Cisco Anyconnect. Hopefully these developers get with the programme and release 64-bit updates in the near future.
Yaz
Correcting myself slightly -- I only just discovered that TextWrangler has been replaced with the nearly identical BBEdit, which is 64-bit. So scratch that one off the list (or upgrade if like me you haven't done so already).
Yaz
As a developer, I have seen multiple times how under the "shiny" surface, Apple isn't really careful about what they are releasing, but the current macOS is one of the worse I've seen. For example, if you have installed it (and you can still boot), try opening the error console. Chances are you'll see that it throws several "signpost_notificationd - 0 is not a valid connection ID" errors every few seconds! It happens on all machines I have checked, a few 2013 Macbook Pros, a 2010 Mac Pro, a 2011 Mac Mini... And there are multiple threads about it, so it is not something in my part of the world :) Sure, it might be benign (although it is reported as an "error" - not warning - and some users claim it is related to excessive fan speeds), but how on earth can they release something that floods the error logs on many configurations, (including on a clean system, installed from scratch)?
About that "clean system". Last week I decided to install a bigger SSD on my 2010 Mac Pro (the last type that was upgradeable - still hanging on with a 6-core 3.46GHz Xeon, 32GB RAM, USB3 and eSATA cards). I had a Mavericks install usb, did a clean install and upgraded directly to 10.13.4. The "clean" system was pretty unusable, there was an obvious lag on most UI things. E.g. hovering over each section of the top menu would open it after at least half a second (depended on the app - some faster, some slower). Activity monitor showed nothing in CPU or Disk usage. I actually thought there was something wrong with my new SSD, until I cloned the old disk with Mavericks to the new disk, booted and everything was snappy again. Not upgrading the old mac to High Sierra any time soon... Well, I can afford to as I have XCode on the laptop...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
And TextWrangler won't run in the current version of OS X, much less the next one.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I suspect Apple will drop that in 10.14, and will recommend VLC as an alternative. Either way, free app, free replacement, no great loss.
That one is kind of embarrassing and sad; I suspect it involves 32-bit-only user-space driver code written by tablet vendors, but I'm not certain. Either way, I would not call this an app. If you want to include relatively obscure OS features, you would also need to include support for PICT files, and probably a few others. You should definitely file bugs and complain to Apple about this, though.
Games are the big exception. Steam itself, however, is an embarrassment, and 64-bit support is probably just the tip of the iceberg. I wonder if they ever got around to fixing the dozens of bugs that prevented running the Mac version on a case-sensitive volume. Either way, I think it's safe to say that this announcement will light a fire under a company that IMO otherwise wouldn't bother fixing anything nonfatal....
Wow. There are serious security implications involved in running 32-bit code. You've really gotta question any security-related app that still hasn't been compiled to support ASLR. That said, again, I wouldn't really call that an app.
Hmm. They have a 64-bit iOS client, which means most of their code base should literally be a simple recompile to run on 64-bit. What the heck, Cisco? Either way, again, I don't see them abandoning the Mac platform, so you can probably assume that they'll update it soon enough.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
And TextWrangler won't run in the current version of OS X, much less the next one.
Actually, I've been running it without any problems on 10.13.4 up until today.
Yaz
Really? Wow. BBEdit's website says it doesn't work. *shrugs*
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I suspect Apple will drop that in 10.14, and will recommend VLC as an alternative. Either way, free app, free replacement, no great loss.
I suspect you're right -- Apple hasn't shipped a Mac with an optical drive for several years at least. And I doubt all that many people have unencrypted DVD backups stored on their machines for local playback.
That one is kind of embarrassing and sad; I suspect it involves 32-bit-only user-space driver code written by tablet vendors, but I'm not certain.
I suspect it's another little-used item that has simply been neglected due to low use.
Games are the big exception. Steam itself, however, is an embarrassment, and 64-bit support is probably just the tip of the iceberg. I wonder if they ever got around to fixing the dozens of bugs that prevented running the Mac version on a case-sensitive volume. Either way, I think it's safe to say that this announcement will light a fire under a company that IMO otherwise wouldn't bother fixing anything nonfatal....
We can only hope. My concern however is that even though they might eventually get around to making Steam 64-bit, will they go back and update some of their classic games for 64-bit as well? I'll admit I'm not a heavy Steam user, but it is the best way to get my occasional Portal 2 fix.
McAfee Endpoint Security
Wow. There are serious security implications involved in running 32-bit code. You've really gotta question any security-related app that still hasn't been compiled to support ASLR. That said, again, I wouldn't really call that an app.
Why not? It isn't just a backend service; it has a full GUI interface. And it isn't as if it's some out-of-date piece of software; the latest definitions for it are dated today. I can' help but feel we're getting into "No True Scotsmen" territory here...
Hmm. They have a 64-bit iOS client, which means most of their code base should literally be a simple recompile to run on 64-bit. What the heck, Cisco? Either way, again, I don't see them abandoning the Mac platform, so you can probably assume that they'll update it soon enough.
I've heard they had a 64-bit client very briefly released, but they had to pull it due to bugs/technical issues. So I suspect it's coming.
The point being, one can't say that 32 bit software on macOS is "really, really rare". As a fraction of the total software currently available for macOS it's probably pretty small, but some of the worst offenders are those that either a) still ship with the OS itself, or b) perform common vital functions that are used by a large number of users (anti-virus, VPN). I'm sure many of these will shake themselves out sooner rather than later (especially with Apple now warning users running these packages), but that wasn't really the point of my post.
p>Yaz
Yeah -- I noticed that too. The funny thing is that I was just this past week assigned a brand-new MacBook Pro at work (running 10.13.4), and one of the first things I did was go to the App Store, find my Purchased items list, and download a bunch of items I have on my other Macs, one of which was TextWrangler. And it worked just fine (with the exception of the command line utilities, the installer for which seemed to stop working once Apple put added protections into the system directories. Which doesn't bother me, as I have bash aliases setup to do the same thing anyway).
Yaz
You're welcome.
Yaz
Have they fixed that yet?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
FYI, if you didn't have equivalents, you could also use xar or cpio (depending on the age of the package) to extract the package's payload to a different base directory.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I just had this problem when installing Sierra (not High Sierra) on a MacBook Pro. This problem may be more wide spread than they think.
When I upgraded to 10.13.4 my machine went into safe mode upon reboot. It said the OS failed to install. A look at the error logged showed complaints about some file missing from the installer directory. Sent me into quite a panic for a while. I finally did a fresh, complete install.
You can take Cisco off the list: our IT department gave me a 64-bit client when I reported the issue after updating to 10.13.4.
Unbelievable that you have McAfee on your list. That crap should just die.
Maybe Apple will finally kill off their DVD player? Itâ(TM)s not like theyâ(TM)ve ever been very enthusiastic about shiny discs, even in their hey day (see their BD support ;))
So glad I stuck with the Apple branded lightning video adapters instead of buying cheap USB video adapters.
That's usually a sign you booted off the wrong drive when installing windows. A linux friend was complaining about similar and told me his boot configuration and it was wrong. And if it really happened on a small update and not as a fall/spring update, your shit is really fragile. You should review what you're doing.