Macbook pro 16 2019 freezes randomly and restarts

At Apple Support’s advice, I reset my MBP’s NVRAM/PRAM and haven’t experienced the issue in some time (though if that doesn’t help, we need to make a very loud and public demand that Apple fix this and in a timely fashion)

I haven't experienced it again with graphics switching turned off. Turning it on again when I need the GPU for more intensive tasks, I run the risk of the macbook freezing and restarting.

I wonder if this is what the upcoming "Pro Mode" in Catalina 10.5.3 will be? Just simplifying the wording and process for macbook users with the tag 'use Pro Mode at your own risk', i.e 'we haven't fixed the problem'. So with 10.5.3 the freezing and restarting is now our fault for using "Pro Mode". Lol.

I'm rarely on battery power anyway but the few times I have been, I had plenty of power in reserve after hours of use, with AGS on, so it was a non-issue for me. It's easy enough to toggle AGS on when using battery, so for me it's a perfectly acceptable work-around and it's much, much less of an issue than the miserable keyboard was on the 2016 15" this unit replaced.

AGS turned off only works for a certain amount of time unless you have it locked to your Intel GPU. Turning off my AGS makes it AMD and its just a matter of time until something tickles it and it resets.

I have noticed that keeping it on the Intel and not having it go to AMD prevents the panic from happening. Things I have tried was to prevent the computer from going to sleep (Energy saver) and turning off the screen saver (set to none), and do not use any apps that require the AMD. This stabilized the computer and no further panics occurred.

As an experiment, I tried to launch Adobe Illustrator and sure enough, within 5 seconds, I get the freeze, high fan, black screen, reboot. Same panic occurs - GPU panic Powerplay failed to resume. So this is definitely is centered around the AMD GPU getting switched on. This may possibly why people get into the boot loop as something launches in your login that turns on the AMD GPU... thats just a hypothesis. I think if someone can somehow prevent the computer from auto opening applications on boot, they may get bast the boot loop. Its just a thought.

Some things I noticed...

The GPU heat had nothing to do with this. It was around 90-100f (fahrenheit NOT celcius). That's the average for the entire machine chips (thank you iStat menus). I also noticed that this didn't happen to me until AFTER 10.15.2 update was installed. This did not happen to me with 10.15.1. I'm not sure if there is a correlation. If anyone has this problem and has 10.15.1, please chime in as I'm hoping that is not a red herring.

Apple Engineering is still looking for me. My bets are on software as this is getting super widespread. But we will see...

I made a little headway on this. This is not a guarantee fix as I have only tested this for an hour or so and I have not gotten any reboots or panics and am able to fully utilize the AMD graphics card, dynamically switch, etc. I have forced sleep and wake up, closed/opened the cover, and so far so good. I can't get it to panic, but this really needs to tried over a few days. I would really like others to try. Here is my history...

I noticed that this does not happen in safe mode. So I needed to find the difference. I looked at the normal login's kexts that are loaded which seem to be associated with AMD. I opened terminal and did a sudo kextstat | grep AMD. It gave me the following:

com.apple.kext.AMDSupport

com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX6000Framebuffer

com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonServiceManager.kext

com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX6000HWServices

com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX6000

com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX6100HWLibs

But when I boot in safe mode, it only lists:

com.apple.kext.AMDSupport

com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX6000Framebuffer

So I started to assume that it had to be software and one of the kexts that are not in safe mode must be the culprit. I didn't want to touch the AMDRadeonX6000* named kexts at first as I felt they were core. You can't really unload any of them except for com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX6100HWLibs, which if unloaded, it just doesn't allow the AMD GPU to activate and it will hang any application that attempts to use. So I decided to try com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonServiceManager.kext. Again it won't allow you to unload it because of interdependencies, but you can certainly disable it.

To disable it, you need to boot into recovery mode (reboot and hold down the Command-r). Once in recovery mode, open disk utility and mount your main disk It may ask you to type in your password to decrypt it. Mine is called "Mac OS". Exit disk utility and then under the Utilities menu, select terminal. Once in terminal, type "cd /Volumes/Mac OS/System/Library/Extensions" and hit enter. Remember "Mac OS" is the name of my drive, yours may differ. Once you have done this, type "mv ./AMDRadeonServiceManager.kext ./AMDRadeonServiceManager.kext.orig". This essentially renames that file to prevent it from loading. Once done, exit the terminal and restart the computer.

So far, its appearing that the AMDRadeonServiceManager.kext is the problem. I honestly don't know the impact on the system having it disabled, but at this stage I haven't had any reboots. I think I need more time to be sure this temporarily fixes it. You can put it back to normal by following the above but type in "mv ./AMDRadeonServiceManager.kext.orig ./AMDRadeonServiceManager.kext" instead.

If others want to try, please do so and report back. This may not be the issue nor a fix. So YMMV. Do this purely at your own risk and I am not responsible if you mistype something and prevent your system from booting. Only do this if you are comfortable in terminal and using UNIX commands.

I'll report back in the next day to see if my system has stabilized.

Randomly, mine is now working.

I had masses of freezes/crashes. Then realised Spotlight was eating resource/battery. Seemed to be a conflict with my BitDefender AV. I let BitDefender do a full scan - it had never finished a full scan before (due to scanning google drive - which I've now excluded). Once completed, and re-built spotlight index, performance & battery are much better, and I've not had any crashes since.

Could be unrelated, but might help others...

In addition to my above post, I'm now positive that the first kind of freezes (temporary ones) only happens when using the laptop WITHOUT the external monitor. When using LG Ultrafine in clamshell mode, it's all... fine 😬. So I guess this problem has something to do with the integrated GPU.

Mine sometimes randomly shuts down.

Can be once a week. Can be three times a day. I can sometimes work on high performance apps without a hitch. Sometimes, I can't and it all comes crashing down. I basically get a "GPU kernel panic" error message. I'm sure most people here get the same one.

I can't put my MacBook to sleep anymore. I used to be able to but can't anymore, not without it restarting or shutting down completely with that same darn "Your Mac was..." blah blah message. And same, exact same, error log.

I used to think this was a software issue. But I don't think it is. I think it's mostly a hardware issue.

I think Apple pushes the boundaries when it comes to industrial design, and they wanted something that was elegant and beautifully powerful beyond measure with the 16".

I think the problem is in the assembly process. There must be some small aspect or part of the assembly process that has to be done 100% right, no margin for error, or it causes a butterfly effect, and eventually causes a major problem with the GPU and other aspects of the machine.

Perhaps the solution is removing the GPU. I don't know. But that would defeat the point.

The point is, it does the equivalent of Windows blue screening EVERY time I close the lid for more than a few minutes.

EVERY TIME.

I don't think these machines are repairable. I think one has to pray to whichever deity one deigns to worship to, and insist on a completely new, fresh out the box machine, and hope the intrinsic design flaw is not present there.

I also think that over time, the issue will worsen and the machine's lifespan will shrink drastically.

But seriously, if a Mac can't have it's lid shut without it "blue screening" (kernel panicking), then it is, by definition, an intrinsically defective product and thus can't be repaired but only replaced. If it happens a second time, then insist on your money back and carefully consider how much brand loyalty is lost when the words, "It Just Works", as a selling point, are no longer true.

This is serious brand damage.

I'm going in tomorrow to have mine replaced for a completely new unit. I won't take no for an answer. In my country of origin, we have at least six months grace when it comes to defective products. Especially as "The Butterfly Effect" may only make itself known a month after the fact.

Chaos and Design. It's almost beautiful.

I agree partly.. however this problem can be attributed to soldering all your components onto a single board ( this is a really stupid move in terms of product design- any engineer worth their salt can attest to this) and then creating too small a vent to vent hot air away from the board is contributing to a number of these MacBook Pro 16" KPs.. This design issue with venting is also a known problem for the Mac Mini as well...

I ask you this... why is Apple kneen on treating their pro users like amateurs?

I have the same issue where at some point laptop freezes then shuts down.

Sometimes it happens quickly after I turned it on (like the first time I got the laptop), sometimes it takes more time.

Today it did it twice in a row.

I first thought it was Chrome maybe messing up with the OS but I had the same problem using only Firefox, and also had the problem while in the Finder or running Parallels.

When I reboot, the report has the following message:

BAD MAGIC! (flag set in iBoot panic header), no macOS panic log available

Not very useful message....not sure what apple will do with that.

I have :

MBP 16 (512GB, 8GB, 2.6Ghz 6-core i7)

Catalina 10.15.2

I got support on the Chat and I'm now running in safe mode. Problem is I don't know how to reproduce the issue so it could take hours in safe mode until I get it.

I think I caught the error behind the temporary freezes. This is what just popped up in the Console.app the moment the laptop froze:

fault 01:45:18.716592+0000 kernel IntelAccelerator driver returned kIOReturnNotReady for transaction [ID=1301963, IOSurfaceID=1]

fault 01:45:18.731573+0000 kernel IntelAccelerator previous NotReady transaction [ID=1301963, IOSurfaceID=1] sent. kr=0x0

Looks like it's another proof that the problem is related to the integrated Intel GPU.

Please use hardware monitor app to monitor the system temps. Watch for an unusual spike in the GPU and component temps while running programs that tax the system (put a load on the critical components).

However, your error in the report is related more to switching of graphics from discrete to intel than to a heating issue.

So I'm not the only one! Mine doesn't freeze, the apps crash, Adobe Illustrator in particular.

Ironically, the one app that everyone days does crash a lot in general, Adobe Premiere, has not at all, on this 16" or our previous 15" MacBook Pro 2019.

There is def something up with the stability of the 16, and I imagine Apple will release a firmware update at some point because they must be receiving crash reports?

Def an improvement over the 15, but we keep hitting the touch bar icons at the top when typing, so the sooner these become tactile or are removed the better. (I never use the touch bar.)

Did anyone experienced shutting down while being on the login screen, but not logging in, just waiting a few minutes?

The fans start accelerating, slowly becoming louder, and then after a few minutes, the laptop shuts down.

My previous 16" did the same thing at the beginning. Later it started crashing, following the 1-sec fans blaring. After that, I couldn't log in at all; the same story, login stops at 65%, restarting over and over again.

Apple confirmed its a logic board issue, and they sent me a new 16". However, I'm concerned I will have to send back the second 16" as well.

8-core i9 2.4GHz

64GB 2667 MHz DDR4

2TB SSD

AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB GDDR6

I had already changed the energy settings as you described:

"System Preferences > Energy Saver

And uncheck the Automatic graphics switching."

This has also brought me positive results, but only when I'm hooked up to power! When I work with the battery it still crashes when trying to "wake up"!

I'm contemplating packing this MacBook Pro up and sending it back. Can't believe Apple isn't responding to anything on this forum! I've been in contact with the support twice and their only available solution was to reinstall the OS, which I did, and it didn't change the situation what so ever!

How can Apple sell such an incredibly unstable laptop? I have tons of Apple stuff in my home & have never experienced any problems until this laptop, and the support people have no patience at all. They refuse to acknowledge the problem exists at all! How can this be Apple???