Catalina bricked my 2015 MacBook Pro. What to do now?

Having been through the exact same, I spoke to a senior advisor at Apple today and put forth all the evidences of this not being an isolated incident and that it should be considered under Apple’s extended warranty program. The advisor said that as Apple haven’t recognised this issue to be manufacture-caused (as yet let’s hope), my only choice is to have the logic board replaced at the ghastly figure quoted.

What I honestly feel is happening is that Apple realise the issue, yet don’t want to undertake the financial implications of having to replace hundreds of logic boards. Yes they’re pricy, but that’s no excuse not to step up and accept when you’re at fault.

It has a fix for this;

Fixes an issue that prevented Setup Assistant from completing during some installations

That might prevent the issue?

I've got a couple of other Macs that I have disabled the automatic update and I'll leave them until the 10.15.1 comes.

This happened to me as well on a 2014 MBPro. I could NOT recover using standard internet recovery options.

However, I was able to get back to Mojave by using a bootable USB drive with Mojave installed.

You are not alone. Your computer is probably going to be ok. It is a pain.

I brought in my 2019 MacBook Pro to the Mac Shack for a defective screen. I did the Catalina update and I got a call a few days later and they said that the new update doesn’t allow the logic board to communicate effectively with the other components in the computer. They are currently replacing my logic board. They have been trying to fix my computer for almost 2 weeks now. There is supposed to be an update coming out on Monday to fix this issue but we’ll see I guess.

I had the exact same thing happen to my Late 2012 Mac Mini. I also got the same response from Apple, claiming that software cannot damage hardware! The machine worked perfectly before the update and not at all after the update. The body of the Mac Mini was very hot after the failed update. In my case, the machine is not even chiming when I turn it on. Only the LED in the front comes on and I can hear the mechanical drive and fan spinning up. But no display output and unresponsive to any key combinations. This is completely unacceptable and Apple should assume responsibility for rendering our machines useless.

I want to apologize afterwards for my iMac in the Macbook Thread:

Hello, I got a call from the Apple Store today: my iMac would not be repaired yet and ready to be picked up, they have not found the cause yet and are now in contact with "Engineering" and waiting for their call back.

No more words about Logicboard exchange!

New pick-up date is the middle of next week, if the "Engineers" get in touch with the Apple Store as soon as possible.

That would be the second working week in the Apple Store. I'm not happy that this will be delayed so long. Not everyone can pull out their tasks for a long time. There are enough of us who depend on functioning hardware for professional reasons. Therefore we also bought a product from Cupertino and nothing from Redmond. And not everyone has a spare computer.

And not to forget all the private users who don't have the possibility to deduct any costs that might arise from the tax.

Greets from Munich

Fred

Same thing happened to me on my 2015 27" iMac. I started the update to Catalina on Saturday night and woke up Sunday morning to a grey screen. No boot chime and no startup key combinations worked. I took it to my local Apple store and they said my system board failed. They also said a software update cannot cause a hardware failure so my board failing on the exact night that I upgraded is just a coincidence. I now have to pay $625 CAD for a new board.

My MacBook Pro 2014 also got non responsive after Catalina update. It worked fine for about 3/4 days then suddenly it started becoming extremely hot. Now whenever I try to on it, there is nothing on the display but I am only able to hear fan noise constantly running. Any suggestion from Apple side will be most welcome.

Which files, the EFI image I used ? It's specific to the MB model ... there are existing sources for such EFI images on the net, if you're looking for a specific one, you'll find it. You can look for "<your specific MB model and EMC number> EFI dump" and/or "<your mother board reference> EFI dump " or ...

I found mine in a "firmware_vault" on GitHub (assembled by a security engineer from various official Apple distributed files, like combo update packages). It's an fd file, which is an UEFI Intel image, as shown by UEFItool. There are rather old EFI images in this vault, and some are 1 year old ... I was not 100% sure that it would work like this, but it did (up to now, knowing that it was replaced by a later release while re-installing Mojave).

Injecting the serial number normally requires to look for some string inside the EFI image, but it doesn't exist in an fd file. But it was possible when I noticed that the memory area for this information looks to be always the same (at least in the images I collected). So I cut it from the firmware image I saved from my MBP prior to anything else (the Catalina faulty EFI image) and pasted it into the fd image in the right place, and up to now it looks to be ok. I just don't know for now if my EFI would be missing other variables that should be initialized by a more regular installation and initialization of the EFI image (we'll see in the future).

There are points I didn't mentioned ... the method implies flashing with the chip in place on the mobo, and there are several possible arrangements to power the chip during the flashing operation. The first method I tried allowed to successfully read, erase and write from/to the chip: disconnect the battery from motherboard, install the EFI cable on the J6100 socket (but not the programmer), connect the mag safe adapter and wait for the Mac to automatically power on (yes, it should power on in this configuration, at least mine will), power it off by a long press on the power button, then connect the programmer to the EFI cable, then the programmer to an USB port of a Windows PC (in my case), and start the programming software ... This may or may not apply to your specific MB, and once again there are other possible arrangements. It's probably useful to remind that you should be extremely careful not to touch anything inside the MB while it's powered on.

The J6100 connector on the mother board, it's a very small connector (there are 12 and 30 pins variants - 2 different kinds of 30 pins - depending on the MB), with no specific mark regarding pinout. I personally bought a schematic/board view of my mother board to have this information, but you may find the information for your specific motherboard on the web.

There are other possibilities to flash the EFI chip (than the J6100 connector). Using a clip (if the chip does allow it, like a SOIC8 package, mine would not), or unsoldering the chip from the mother board, and in this case you can also find providers of new EFI chips, and some of them can sell the image they use to initialize the chip. These methods may require to tear down the mother board from the MB.

Hope this helps

PRAM reset is "get your Mac back" 101... my point is, if it were that easy I don't think this dicussion would exist.

All reports on all blogs about this are EFI related... not as simple as using your keyboard.

But hey, a simple fix - I hope it works for others. I maintain you aren't bricked if you can do a PRAM reset... bricked is dead and non-responsive... a keyboard that is still responding is as far from bricked as you can get.

Maybe my iMac will magically start listening to the keyboard as well someday....

https://youtu.be/S0QmIxOvILM

The problem in my case is that no key sequences work at startup so there is no way to tell the Machine to boot from the installer.

Had my visit to the apple store today.

Same thing as others requires a £475 ssd replacement.

Thanks for advising of your success Jean-francois17. It now makes more sense and has shown that the Apple support network are not so much gurus as goons. You deserve a big vote of thanks.