Catalina 10.15.6 keeps crashing

Yeah sure Etrecheck would be nice, except I've contacted Apple Support and after a morning of troubleshooting the issue now even occurs during recovery mode and while trying to install a new OS. Even wiping the entire disk did not help.

For me this update effectively bricked my laptop and I have to bring it into an apple store to get looked at.

I was going to apply the combo update since the 10.15.6 update screwed up my system but since my MacBook Pro 2014 locks up every 30 minutes or so I’m worried the update may fail mid install.

I noticed that when using YouTube and my system freezes the audio continues to play. I also keep getting alert dialogs they my Apple ID has issues and that certain functions may not work properly. Never saw these until after updating to the later version of Catalina.

I bought a brand new MacBook Air (i5 1.1 GHz / 8GB RAM) three days ago, and it already had three kernel panics. (I've been using macOS since 10.0, and the last kernel panic I remember was with 10.6 or 10.7 about ten years ago.)

The machine is a 100% fresh configuration, no restore/migration from old backups. So there are certainly no old bits of 32bit software, and the few applications I installed are all the latest versions.

SMC+PRAM reset didn't help – and right now I am wondering if anything will, because my macOS already is a fresh install and I don't expect things to get any better by just repeating what I already did. Or should I …?

What data is that? Etrecheck only provides us with a snapshot of the Mac's setup and condition and does not include any personal information. It even anonymizes the hard drive names by displaying them with just the first and last letters of the name with asterisks for the rest, like T*******L. The report saves us a lot of time by providing the info what might take us six or seven questions to get.

In my opinion it is the most useful troubleshooting tool we have to get the to core of problems that users are having.

Me2. Older iMac ran great until I upgraded. Waiting impatiently for a fix. FWIW, I do have Virtualbox installed (although Windowserver starts eating the CPU at boot, without running any user programs). I had to use this Windows machine to even post this reply. Come on, Apple.

I agree with Old Toad. I have this OS installed in two fairly new iMacs and have had no problems. I regularly do maintenance and am careful not to install junk apps, which are most often the cause of many problems. But, unless and until we know what is installed, there can be no answers to address this issue. Moving on to someone who wants to help us help them . . . . . .

Same here. It always happen during the early morning (3am - 9am) when the iMac is idle. Now I restore it from 10.15.5 and will see whether the problem is solved.

I have VirtualBox but didn't run it during the crash. So not sure whether that is the cause.

frtzn wrote:

[SOLUTION?]

My MacBook Air had recurring kernel panics / hard reboots about once a day, mostly over night when it was on idle.

I now got entirely rid of the problem…

My MacBook runs perfectly stable for seven days now.

There is an unwritten law that once you mark a problem as 'solved', it instantly reappears. After working flawlessly for seven days, my Mac crashed again tonight while running at idle. This time, the crash log only states:

Intel CrashLog recorded due to unexpected reset

As I cannot downgrade to 10.15.5 (it is a brand new machine, so there is no old backup I could use), I guess I'll just have to wait for Apple to fix this. Hopefully they do so in 10.15.7.

It turns out the 10.15.6 update released yesterday was only to support the new iMac hardware. This has been dragging on for weeks with no indication they acknowledge, understand or intend to fix it. I guess I will spend the weekend restoring 10.15.5 and figure out all of my changes / work since.

Apple have become truly hopeless.

Yes, I also see those symptoms too - particularly when my system is active. If my system is idle, the window server gets a watchdog timeout and it ends up rebooting and going to sleep / power down because I'm not there to log in.

WHEN IS APPLE GOING TO FIX THIS???!!!!

ARE APPLE PLANNING ON FIXING IT????!!!

dragontorc wrote:

Apple had no plans to release a major update for Catalina in the form of macOS 10.15.7.

The folks @ Cupertino are actually working on a supplemental update for macOS 10.15.6 containing a fix for the App Sandbox which caused virtualization software to crash with memory leaks and "watchdog timeout" kernel panics.

Can you please provide evidence that a supplemental update is being worked on. Or is it just something you heard from the friend of a friend of a friend. Have you spoken with Apple engineering?

Please understand that we are Apple product users just like you. We do not have any inside information. Furthermore, we are prohibited from discussing what Apple may or may not be doing. That said, when there have been serious problems in the past, the company has normally addressed them, so that could be the case now, as well. Sorry for your frustration.

I'm having the same problem. My new MacMini (purchased April this year) will typically crash and reboot every night. I don't have sleep enabled for the computer or disks. I'm going to turn off display sleep to see if that helps.

This is becoming increasingly annoying. The issue has been around for almost a month now, it affects thousands of customers around the globe (Apple support websites but also social networks are full of reports), and so far there isn't even an official statement by Apple (something of the sorts “We are aware of the issue, a fix is under way”)? C'mon!

I tried to restore my iMac to an external SSD but it was going to take 80 hours, plus I'd have to recover all my work & changes in the past few weeks. I gave up as I can't be without my system for 3.5 days.

My next plan is to try using tmutil and bless to do a downgrade restore to a seperate SSD while I'm still using my system.

I'm currently having to reboot my system twice a day.