Has anyone else experienced MacOS Big Sur being really unstable? My MacBook Pro often freezes when shutting down and I have to hold down the power button to get it to power off. Also most apps freeze when quitting them and I have to Force Quit them. It's just unstable and doesn't seem that great. I'm running a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015) with 16GB or RAM.
MacBook Pro
To verify it's not a 3rd party software issue Apple had me do the following:
1 - make sure I had a full and current backup of my hard drive, either Time Machine or a full clone.
2 - Boot into the Recovery volume, erase the drive and reinstall the system without migrating any files from my backup. Run and see if the crashing continues. If it does it's hardware or the system. If it doesn't then the user files are the culprit.
You might try the above to verify that it's no any of your files or 3rd party apps that the culprit.
Hi I have removed SoftRaid and can not deduce why I had it on my 2013 Macbook Pro. I have a range of external HDD and SSD but I don't recall them being anything other than plug and play.
Re: extensions. Thanks for that - and maybe that is a pointer to the issues. Are you saying that Safe Mode does not disable kernel Extensions? If so then that may explain why we still see issues in Safe Mode. I presume extensions are only installed when Apps are installed and so deleting apps will leave the extensions still potentially working. When I remove apps there is not always an Uninstall option, so it is no surprise that a 5 year old mac will have a dirty tide mark of orphaned extensions and all manner of remnant grime.
Why? Because updating to the latest OS was what got me into all this trouble in the first place!
Secondly, since the issues started immediately on upgrading to Big Sur, none of the incremental updates have sorted the problems... so I very much doubt 11.3 will solve it. That is why an acknowledgement from Apple would help - at least to show to us that there may be a solution in the future updates.
Sure - I know that. But the downside is that we are considering alternatives or chucking our existing Macs... because we have had 3 or 4 updates that have not sorted the issues.. so we don't expect a solution, even if Apple are working on one.
So I will wait to hear if anyone has a cure. Frankly a new range of emojis and a screensaver saying Hello is certainly not worthy of an update. I am a long term fanboi - but reliability is 1000x more important to me than fiddles to iTunes or Reminders.
As I said, our experiences are wildly divergent then.
I know you've contacted Apple Support on the issue and I hope they resolve your issue.
Have you taken your computer in for them to examine it for hardware issues?
Not wishing to hijack - but simply my hardware is as factory fitted, and worked well with previous OS. A local Apple Dealer will not diagnose this issue sufficient for it to get back to Apple for a fix... if they are addressing the issue.
Maybe.... but then I have done all the other usuals... and your suggestion to upgrade, again, to the 11.3... I think it is better to be targetted in seeing the commonalities of all the users reporting faults... rather than hoping we have all developed hardware faults co-incidentally as we installed Big Sur so many months ago.
Yes. Since I made one of the original posts about the unforgivable early release of Big Sur, clearly Apple … ‘workers’ have been working 24/7 to correct the appallingly unstable original release.
Long - very long - may they continue their myriad of updates until it’s as stable, finally, as previous releases.
Head should have rolled over this whole debacle.
Big Sur does not "kill your computer," and jumping back two operating system releases is rather ridiculous, IMHO.
But in the end, if it makes you happier, feel free to do so.
Big Sur has been nothing but a win for all of my machines.
Sez you. It corrupted FileVault, rendering updating impossible.
And it's not ridiculous. Under BS (a good acryonym for it, by the way), my fans were powering up full force with no reason. It's now as silent as could be. Big Sur is a pig when it screws up. Thank goodness I had an old non-encrypted SD backup. Otherwise, I would have lost everything. Oh, and a Windows machine to recover the rest from a more recent Big Sur external backup.
I hope this helps: I used an old bootable backup to get most things back.
To get the rest from a Big Sur external backup, like my Microsoft user data and Libraries, which are hidden by Big Sur -- even in parts of backups that Mojave or Catalina can't access -- I actually had to use Windows outfitted with MacDrive to read the CCC drive, which, thankfully was not encrypted. If that sounds just wrong, it is.
After 7 weeks of no crashing, I crashed. I was browsing with Safari, with Mail, Photos, Whattsap, Messages and Find My open, and with an external SSD connected but not actively being used (which is unusual to have connected). The temp was 72deg and the fan on full. In Console the usual entries that show up continually every minute of the waking day:
My MBP keeps restarting after the upgrade, I Have reinstall Big Sur trough recovery mode but the problem persists.
As I mentioned, Big Sur has been 100% stable for me across multiple machines, including a 16" MacBook Pro.
What is the "instability" you see?
I have found Bug Sur not table at all. My MS work,Excel, powerpoint, etc crash often when opening.
My external monitor intermittent goes to black screen.
You're right, it shouldn't.
It also never has on any of my Macs nor those of the hundreds of people I personally know running Big Sur.
MacOS Big Sur Unstable
