Mac Mini crashing on sleep

I haven't had any issues with sleep for ages, but you might be right, at least for the moment.

The Apple Support guy suggested disconnecting the Thunderbolt 3 drive and any other USB stuff that isn't absolutely needed, so I'm trying that. I don't think that's the issue, I think Apple screwed up, but I can avoid sleep until this (hopefully) gets fixed. Unfortunately I kinda expect the “solution” will be Catalina.

Tried unmounting TB3 drive and the USB-connected stereo.

Safe mode might work. Very hard to live without things like Dropbox...

Apple really screwed up this time.

The shutdown appears to be controlled, and as far as I can tell it's due to the fan being off and the processor being on while asleep. Shutting off Power Nap does not help.

Catalina install on a fresh drive did fix it. Now, do I throw out $2,000+ of software, or a $1,000 computer? Or just install Windows on it and give up on Apple? Or assume they might someday fix this?

Phone support was nice but they absolutely will not look at the crash reports unless it crashes on Catalina. So I'm out of luck with the mothership... unless a firmware update went in when I was installing Catlina on the external drive... I haven't tested since then.

Probably I will just shut off sleep - wasteful though it is.

Good to hear the clean install worked. Yes, your best bet is shutting of Sleep. It's really not that wasteful, it doesn't use that much energy. You and Ian have done an amazing job of troubleshooting.

Maybe my Catalina-induced (10.15.4 update) recent firmware update to Boot ROM Version: 1037.100.359.0.0 (iBridge: 17.16.14263.0.0,0) is the culprit after all:

I re-tested on a cleanly installed Mojave 10.14.6 with Safari 12.1.2 (without the recent Security Update 2020-002 Mojave or Safari 13.0.5 & 13.1 updates). Also then just using Safari 12.1.2 and then putting the Mac mini to sleep caused a crash (maybe also some other activity besides using Safari can trigger the crash?).

Not sure this matters but I just had a thought and tried without my keyboard... sleep does not seem to crash immediately with a different keyboard. So are you guys using standard apple keyboards, new, old, etc? Is this just a coincidence?

This problem is not in any way tied to Safari. I've not been running Safari and the problem still persists. It is also not fixed by completely wiping and reinstalling MacOS. I have done that while NOT INSTALLING security update 0.2 and the problem is still there.

A quick update:

Just got a hint that there is obviously a Beta-Version of a "Security Update 2020-003 for Mojave" out.

I would assume that the final release will come out probably together with the upcoming Catalina.5 update and will hopefully fix all the troubles that originated in the 2020-002.

I would also assume that a Security Update 2020-003 will be released for High Sierra systems.

Interesting (about a possible the existence of a beta Mojave update). I have avoided sleep for weeks now (Mac Mini 2018) and just shut down every night. Mini starts up in the morning with the error message about having to restart but I'm not convinced it actually did restart. Anyways, send the report to Apple and then on to my normal work until the following day and repeat it all over again.

Hopefully that beta will become an official update soon. This is more an annoyance than a big issue, but very un-Apple like. Or more specifically very un-"when Apple was on top of its game" like.

I sent my DAILY kernel event report a few minutes ago.

If EVERYONE who has these reports wrote a message and sent it back, it might put a little bit of pressure as the inboxes fill with MANY THOUSANDS of them EVERY DAY!

The report has every bit of information necessary to identify the machine and it's configuration, so just give them your thoughts. Mine have included the fact that Apple has messed up our (fairly new) Mac computers - in the course of installing a SECURITY UPDATE!

I had ONE time when the computer slept without incident, since then it crashes on sleep again. I'm not sure whether it's Thunderbolt or Safari related now, but at least it will not crash on sleep if I have nothing connected and don't run Safari. I'm overloaded with work or I'd experiment further.

Crash on sleep issue is not about Mac mini 2018 only. OS updates from March 2020 bring this problem to 2011 and 2012 (and probably 2014) minis too. So I doubt it is about T2 firmware. T2 may be a trigger for crashes (as GPU firmware or driver is in my case with MM 2011). I guess they replaced his motherboard just because their internal diagnostics diagram told them to do so. I doubt they know what caused the problem. If they know, they issue an update.

With my setup using Safari always triggers the sleep/shutdown-cold-boot crash. But I guess there are other workflows that also do this. At one point I suspected that after an iTunes security login I got the crash but haven't tried to do it again.

BTW, yesterday I got a slightly new type of crash log when I accidentally launched Mojave's Safari instead the usual Chrome just before booting the external disk to Catalina: in Catalina there was a somewhat different crash log but I then didn't have time to inspect it thoroughly.

Same here. It's Apple's Frankenstein - they created it - and there's nothing we can do to fix it. We're left with workarounds. I could leave my Mini running instead of shutting it down, others can set their Macs not to sleep - whatever minimizes the issue, for now.

I still get great satisfaction sending back a message with my Problem Report each morning ;-)