MacBook Pro bricked after failed Big Sur update 😵 ⚰️

I'm exactly the same! I mean I've tried everything to no avail! It's BRICKED, no doubt in my mind.

The funny thing is I was getting it ready to be sold or traded as I've already placed an order for

an M1 machine on Apple! But since this happened I'm thinking to cancel my order as it really put

a bad taste in my mouth as how my mid 2014 MacBook Pro can get dead while upgrading and also

I've lost a few hundred cash which was going toward the M1 machine!

I really hope Apple come up with a solution as I am not the only one! A whole lot of people with

2014 & 2015 machines are dead in the water!

After reading all the posts ... Automatic Updates is getting turned off ... and as many have already recommended, any future Apple updates will be postponed or ignored at least 2 months after release ... Always knew it to be true ... take my advise, I don't use it ....

MacBook Pro 2014, had SD card inserted during the installation and resulted in black screen and not booting.

I was just able to get the installation to resumed after two days of black screen. Here is what I did, YMMV:

1. Let the battery be empty by just leaving it on until it turned off by itself, verify by pressing the power and see the icon on the display to plug in

2. removed the SD card

3. Plug in

4. Reset SMC (hold Shift-Control-Option-Power for 10s)

5. Internet recovery (hold Option-Command-R then press power)

6. Open Disk Utility, run First Aid on the system disk and data disk

7. Quit Disk Utility and Restart

now the installation resumed, finger crossed no more issue.

Hey there!

Wow a lot of reactions to this one.

Many posts so forgive me if you’ve done this.

You mentioned target disk mode, did you manage to create a bootable installer to either reinstall, or even reformat and reinstall the OS? If so how did that go?

If troubles, I’d probably try erasing then reinstalling the previous OS from a bootable installer, but sure sounds like hardware to me if that doesn’t do it, have you been able to connect it via Ethernet, and leave it for a while just to see if it finishes installing?

Best of luck!

200% agree. Here we don’t have Official Istores hence no genius, so I’m still waiting on response of officicial repair shop. But won’t accept hardware faillure due to software upgrade! Really Apple!?

All this is making me questioning transition to Apple silicon...

Hello! I'm sorry to hear about your computer, but I would like to give my suggestion. Have you tried connecting an external display to your computer? Maybe the display driver in your computer might not be functional? After that, maybe you can try to restore an older version of macOS or reinstalling macOS Big Sur via recovery mode? I'm not completely sure what might be causing this problem. Hope this suggestion helps :)

it seems that the problems occur when connecting peripherals to HDMI and SD Slot. The mid 2013 and early 2014 uses the same I/O board.

There are still many thousands of theses older macbooks used daily.

The transition to the new silicone architecture will cause many problems. I am not sure Apple will provide for years os updates in the future for their Intel based machines.

To be an early adopter of the silicone based macbooks is not a proper way to.

Sorry Apple I love your hardware and recommended to many customers but now its time to take a look back to Lenovos T series. Their main advantage: you will get parts and they are easily to fix.

I had this problem too on a MacBook Pro Mid 2014. The screen turns black and installation seems to freeze. A reboot then gets into a constant reboot loop. This problem occurred with the very last beta version.

On my computer it seemed to be also connected with my external Thunderbolt Apple Display. I unplugged the Thunderbolt display before booting and the Macbook started normal. When booting was finished I could plugin again the screen and it worked absolutely normal.

The problem still persists. Also booting in safe mode can help (press shift key when booting). At least my Macbook isn't bricked.

Heya guys.

my wife’s MacBook Pro was completely bricked when updating to Big Sur and it had a SD card Inserted at the Moment.

i see that a lot of people are confirming that they also had and SD card inserted at the moment.

I can’t relate. I was only doing updated on a 2019 MacBook Pro 15 inch. I spoke to support yesterday. I have AppleCare and an appointment Thursday. Entire hard drive other than Microsoft applications are on the cloud. Worse case scenario I need to restore from factory settings.

To @crample: I had the issue of a permanently stuck progress bar too (it wasn't the normal install bar, but the progress bar inside some sort of Installer Assistant) - and my advice (though I have to say, proceed at your own risk), is that if you've left it this long already with no progress, then force a restart.

Having had both issues with Big Sur beta upgrades, my own experience is that this is separate from the issue of hanging at a black screen; they do not occur together, and forcing a restart can proceed with no obvious ill effects from this one - it did for me, but of course YMMV.

(If it helps to explain how I've experienced both issues, I've been updating to Big Sur beta versions on a multiboot Mac, with Ubuntu and Windows as well as either one or two versions of macOS (i.e. Big Sur and Catalina), and so I've repartitioned and re-installed everything multiple times as I've been trying to get my setup just right!)

After calling Apple yesterday they booked me in for a service today at an authorised repair shop. When those guys called me today before the appointment they said they would be charging me to even look at it. I cancelled the appointment.

Its crazy apple expect me to pay to fix a machine they clearly broke !!!

About to call them up again to see if I can get them to sort it out. Getting really angry now !!

Come on apple, this is dreadful customer service, give the price of the kit I expect better !!!

Thought I would have another go at some of the key combos and power up sequences (since its been sat powered down in the corner since yesterday, I know, I am clutching at straws here). Anyway, seems its not even charging now plugged into sockets I know are working and it was definitely charging yesterday !! Anyone else seen this ???

When I was going to my Genius Bar a few minutes ago my 9 years old has tried to switch the MBP on and the Big Sur update resumed with 30 min left. Amazing because I tried several times during the last days in vain. The only one change I’ve done is on my WLAN. I was having 2 wlans, one 2.4 GHz and other 5GHz. So this morning I merged both in one with steering. I mention it because I read many people is resolving the issue disconnecting the I/O Board. At some point, doing so could be like changing WLAN setup... Maybe, when the MBP reboots during the update tries to reconnect to the WLAN and fails... So now, after having change the WLAN setup (also the SSID) seems like the update resumes... I moved my appointment with Genius Bar to Thursday, just in case from now on something is not well finished.... But at the moment the WLAN change is the only one thing that I can think could affect the installation. I hope some of you can support this hypothesis.

Hello gupta009,

I also have a ticket. I spent 2 hours on the phone with Apple. It was escalated to one step before engineering. So it’s in a pile for engineering to look at. Apple will be contacting me Thursday. I will provide this discussion with an update.

mic anyone else makes progress, please post.