MacBook Pro bricked after failed Big Sur update 😵 ⚰️

I have a MacBook Pro 2014 edition. After installing Big Sur, during restarting it showed only a dark blue screen. No key combination worked out. After investigating it showed that the keyboard connector was burned out and I need to pay for the fix - 500€.

Is that the way Apple treats his customers trust in new operating systems?

I have access to an Apple Shop and I dropped the MBP on Friday last week for further investigation. Yesterday I got an phone call from the technician who told me that the problem is the keyboard connector and he’s not in charge to tell me how it got broken. He reinstalled Big Sur and said that everything is working fine now. The problem is I have to pay 500€ for this and I don’t think is fair.

I cannot trust that this OS will not cause further damages on my MBP.

They release 2 OS ( Catalina & Big Sur) who damaged perfectly well working MBPs.

Catalina - damaged the SSD card

Big Sur - damaged Keyboard connector

I feel very sad that Apple decided to go this road on getting rid of older systems.

Trust is more valuable than money.

Sorry for your sour experience.

I agree 200% with your view on these macOS updates and it’s consequences!

I think you should make your case with tech repair manager at Apple and ask for free repair if you can demonstrate it was their software update that caused this issues! Like ndv27

The problem is that unless one has access to advanced diagnostic tools, you cannot prove that the update caused the failure. And even if you could, Apple can choose to hide behind its unreasonable terms and conditions, which nobody reads. Those with broken machines are entirely reliant on Apple behaving reasonably, ethically and with a degree of corporate responsibility. I don't believe that resolving it will make a material impact on their mult-$billion profits.

At present Apple as a company are not behaving responsibly and reasonably. You may be lucky to find individuals within the organisation that behave differently.

I understand this, also makes me wonder why we can’t email support...but you can ask for the diagnostic report with specification of causes of the failure? In my case tech repair called to say they’ve run diagnostic and found no hardware faults. They were now going to try to install macOS...

Software cant damage a physical connector, it was either damaged from the factory or when the "tech" had his paws in it! I do analysis on customer returns for a major components manufacturer, I see this stuff all day.

From what I can tell, it seems to be a Firmware problem that has stopped the motherboard working. Apple issued a new version of the Big Sur installer, going from 20B29 to 20B50, that blocks affected models. I think these are 2013 and 2014 13" MBP's. So if you now see a warning that you cannot upgrade, be thankful.

For those people who have not yet tried upgrading, I suggest getting Catalina up to date anyway. I believe there may be a large security update for Catalina, coming, that may include firmware updates too. We all need to wait for Apple to come back to work next week, after Thanksgiving.

The technician mentioned that he needs to change the whole MBP front case because of the connector damage.

And YES, software can damage components due overheating. In my 20 years experience in software development on multi platforms, I have seen a lot of MBP damaged (Motherboard level) by Windows installations.

I am happy for you! I will call the Genius Bar tomorrow and ask if they could try this workaround with my MBP as well.

Only in my case I had a dark blue screen and no booting sound.

Did they mentioned what caused this failure?

Thx for shaeing!

That's very interesting that the Apple engineers themselves at Genius Bar advised to avoid Big Sur until it's next release. One wonders why Apple hasn't issued an official statement to that effect on their actual website!?

Unfortunately I don't think it's a workaround that us users can do ourselves. They didn't provide any info on to how they did it but I can assume that apple have external recovery tools that can directly install OS's to the SSD. There's a chance that this workaround involved the temporary removal of the IO board as others have stated however as I said they didn't provide details on their fix. I just wanted to inform people that Apple fixed my device free of charge so taking it to them directly is likely the best solution.

It's worth noting that the invoice only stated a "Software Repair"

Hi guys;

My Mid 2014 MBP just came back from Death! I tried to upgrade to Big Sur the very first day that became publicly available and just like so many nothing worked to bring it back to life but 5 minutes ago I tried for the very last time to try to power it up as my M1 is coming and I could not send this back as a trade! but to my surprise it immediately started to boot(verbose)and for about 5 minutes continued to do so and few restart till brought the Big Sur welcome and iCloud sign in!

Good luck.

So here's where I am with my black-screening late-2013 MacBook Pro.

First support call ended with me being told to take it into Apple Service place. There's not an Apple Store near me but there is an authorised dealer/servicer nearby.

They ran what little diagnostics they could and couldn't get it restored.

Next call to Apple got me to a senior engineer who ran through all the startup keyboard combinations and ended with him escalating to some centralised engineering team. I asked what that meant and he said they collect information about failures together and analyse the information to investigate issues.

He ran through a load of questions about what the screen was showing, was the keyboard backlight on, what was plugged in when I ran the update, was there a power or networking outage while running the udpate, stuff like that.

He asked me to send a video of the laptop starting up too.

Sounds like they have put together a set of questions to ask when they encounter this problem and they are collating information about it. So I encourage you to try to get Apple Support to record your failure and pass it up to engineering too. The more failure reports they get the more likely they will be able to figure out what went wrong.

The guy's tone definitely changed when I told him I had an SD Card inserted when running the update. So I reckon they know about this. But are just getting enough evidence.

Same here as apple-magic reported from his call:

I had a good call this morning about the brick of my MB Pro Late 2013 (showing only the grey screen with no further reaction). First I had a brief call with a front-service support guy who again reviewed my case and tried the usual key short-cuts but it did not work out again. Then he forwarded my call to a senior apple care engineer who filled some kind of form together with me, asking several prepared questions, in particular about the hardware setup (however, I had no external screen connected or a SD card inserted during the installation but only the bare MB running). He asked me to record a short movie about the failure and I sent him the movie via a special link. He then sent the filled form to Apple engineers in California. We scheduled an update call for next week. My experience in a nutshell: Once you get behind the first level support and have a personal contact with a senior engineer, you feel that your case is now taken seriously and there is apparently a pattern of failures for vintage MacBooks under the update on Big Sur. Obviously, Apple is about to compile the cases around the world and review them collectively. After the bad experience with my MB being totally crashed, I now have the feeling that Apple is no longer ignoring the cases and that is good news. Let's keep updated about the progress!

I can confirm that a big sur 11.0.1 upgrade including 427 firmware bricked a late 2013 macbook pro 15 inch. Upgrade completed, firmware update noted in sys. profiler, slept & rebooted fine but machine failed to power-up after being shutdown for a few days. Tried NVRAM and SMC resets but was stone dead; no backlight or fans only power changing from amber to green after a while. Eagerly awaiting an update to the recent firmware update that supposedly enabled wake from hibernation with upgraded NVMe drives in late 2013 models. Was hoping to get a bigger SSD after big sur but I'll have to hold off for now.

[Edited by Moderator]