MacOS Big Sur Unstable

Mine is really unstable too, on three different macbooks, which is quite upsetting.

The one I use for work reboots basically every other day for "some problem" forcing me to load all the stuff I need basically every other day.

I have been using mac for 6 years, never had any issue, until Big Sur. I hope they fix it quickly because I am finding myself tempted to move to something else.

They did - the vast majority of users have zero issues.

For those that do, it's worth trying to figure out what is different about your configuration that is causing issues, and from there you can sort out whether it is an Apple bug or the fault of hardware or software.

I have four Macs and I work with many other Mac owners, none of whom have had stability issues with Big Sur.

That doesn't mean your issue isn't something Apple needs to fix, but it also doesn't mean Big Sur is inherently unstable.

TBH normal usage is fine. I have two issues that come up often.

1. Every now and then finder beachballs me, so I need to force quit and then it's fine.
2. When I put the computer to sleep, closing the lid, quite often the next morning when I open the lid I find it either frozen or restarting.

Worth noting that I do a very conservative use of all three boxes, I only use software I bought, I have an antivirus, and all that.

This wasn't happening with Catalina. I think I used to reboot maybe once a month just for the sake of it.

Some colleagues at work are experiencing instability too though, after having installed Big Sur, so I'm quite sure it's not something that has to do specifically with my box.

Well done for you, then. Most people have issues ranging from minor to severe.

Clearly as I have mentioned many times before, Big Sur is inherently unstable although the updates have remedied some of the issues, many remain.

Recommending 3rd party diagnostic tools is ridiculous in the extreme - as some have recommended herein. If you buy a new car, and within moments there's an issue, would you take it to a local mechanic to see if he (or even 'she', these days) can put it right? I doubt it.

I have 5 Mac Pros, each of which have minor to serious issues, and the 50+ clients with whom I work also suffer daily from instabilities, odd behaviours and many of the issues indicated on this thread.

Most users will not join or comment on threads such as this, and to see that so many a vehemently stating their issues should tell you something. Big Sur was released too early and although we all appreciate to fully test a product, with the vast range of third party software which most users have on their machines, it is abundantly clear that not enough testing was done.

Many will return to the relative stability of Windows (poor souls) because - who would move to this mess?

Dogcow-Moof, I do not deny your experience ... and I'm very happy for you.

However, may I respectfully suggest that you stop implying that the issues others are having are somehow their fault. Yes, it's possible that Big Sur is perfectly fast and stable for some people under some patterns of use. Those are apparently the cases Apple tested the OS against before release.

However, there are many other users, like myself, who have come to trust that when a new OS comes out you can read about the changes and what apps/software may have compatibility issues to take care of them first, then simply upgrade and keep working as usual. I use my Mac for software development all day every day and have been using Macs since 1984 (yep, the original Mac). Most OS upgrades for the last 20 years have been completely uneventful for me, on multiple machines. Worst case, a feature I liked changed or disappeared or something. But I have never seen this level of instability (frequent kernel panics, spontaneous reboots, bugs in Apple apps, etc.) since before OS X. This really feels like the worst of the Classic Mac OS days. And, yes, I have done a full reinstall with no apparent improvements.

So for those of you experiencing the worst macOS experience in years ... it's not just you, and it's (probably ;-) not because you're inexperienced or stupid. It really is a buggy mess.

The fact that lots of people use it without issue is completely irrelevant for the many us for whom it really is a disaster compared to other OS updates.

Third party apps are generally not as big an issue as third party kernel extensions.

For example, SoftRaid requires an upgrade for BigSur, but their web site specifically notes it is not compatible with M1 Macs running macOS 11.2.

My problems continue in 11.2.2 Just running Safari and I note the temperature was a coolish 52 degree. Accessed a 360 still on a hosting website Kuula. (Which is never a problem previously for my retina Macbook with adequate RAM and SSD). Then after 10 seconds of viewing a freeze and no keyboard working, and I could not force quit. Then the fans ramped up to full speed and then the computer spontaneously powered down.

I restart the mac and the safari pages are restored to the previous-to-the crash state. Temperature is 65deg. Spotlight is indexing in the background now... that may be significant. I access this Apple Discussion thread and get 3 lines into this post and the spontaneous powerdown occurs again. This is becoming more frequent again.

I am now avoiding mission critical activity just incase I get the fan of doom and another runnaway activity, freeze and crash. Why should buying new mac be the only solution I have?

The Big Sur issues do not affect every BigSur user, obviously. That does not mean there is not a problem. If it were a hardware problem why was my Mac fine upto the installation of BigSur. When troubleshooting it is essential to deduce "what changed?". So taking my 6 year old MacBook into an Apple Dealer for hardware diagnostics is not going to assist. We have clearly demonstrated that BigSur is the "what changed" factor - now we have to find out what it is in our specific legacy and new M1 machines that BigSur does not like and hopefully remove that catalyst from the equation.

FWIW I have upgraded to 11.3.1 and that still exhibits the problems - excessive heat, and tell tale issue in Photos where retouch does not work. It hasn't frozen yet.. too early to say. Incidentally, during the 11.3.1 upgrade my fans were working on full speed - I have never experienced that before during an upgrade.

Or perhaps received bonuses for issuing a fast, robust, very stable OS that was stable even in its original .0 release let alone in the updates released since then, much more than Mojave or Catalina were.

Your "unforgivable" was the best experience millions have ever had.

I ask again, what has Apple Support done to help you? Have you taken your machine in to be examined for hardware issues?

Contact - Official Apple Support

The SIGKILLs have long been something that happens during Spotlight indexing and isn't anything of concern.

Let us know how your system is after removing the offending app causing the respawns.

Chrome is… Chrome and does this type of thing all the time.

As I said, Chrome tends to leave a lot of garbage in the console log.

Is your machine leaving a panic log when this happens and/or do you see a message saying your system restarted because of a problem?

You had a bad experience no one else I am aware of had, and I'm sorry you did.

Fans ramping up usually means something stopped responding, most often a third party kernel extension of some type that isn't compatible with Big Sur.

Did you not have a Time Machine backup? Thats the gold standard for recovery.

I'm using MacBook Pro 16 (2019), and I would say this thing is pretty unstable. I think I'm using the latest version (11.4).

• Frequently reboots coming out of sleep, saying there were some problems (happened daily in the past week)
• Emacs freezes frequently for no reason, have to force-quit usually 1-2 times a day
• There are a lot of micro-freezes. The problem is the OS usually does not give any visual cues when this happens (i.e., there is no rainbow cursor thingy), so I'm not sure what is going on (do I need to force-quit or should I just wait a bit)? .
• Also sometimes the machine freezes during log-in for more than 10 seconds --- usually the touch id login is very fast, but sometimes it just does not do anything for a while --- again it does not provide any visual cues so I have no idea if I should just wait a bit or I should force power off the machine.
• I'm not sure if this is hardware design issue or software issue, but it seems like whenever I plug-in an external display this machine always uses dGPU, which generates heat, and the machine gets pretty noisy, even though I'm not doing anything GPU intensive. This should have been designed to use iGPU unless a GPU intensive work is being done. I have to basically hide this thing as much as possible when I use an external monitor, to reduce the amount of noise I hear.

I would say this is more unstable compared to Windows 10 I normally use (I manage about 10 machines) and I wish I could just use windows but I have to use this thing because of work requirements. Also at least Windows gives you visual cues when an application is not responsive or login is taking longer than usual, but frequently freezing without visual cues is very annoying. Unfortunately I don't think I can downgrade to a previous version of macOS because of, again, work requirements.

Given what I have read from this thread, I don't expect any solutions except maybe Apple fixing the OS in the future, but I just wanted to add another datapoint.

[Link Edited by Moderator]

I just upgraded my mid-2012. To a mid-2015 MBPro, the last model Steve Jobs had a hand in, and arguably the best Apple laptop ever. Before Apple jumped the shark with the 2016 and never looked back. Apple continues to solder everything including the SSD and bar folks from using anything other than Big Sur. No Mojave allowed.

Meanwhile, I paid $750 for my "upgrade" refurb with free 2-year Allstate warranty and I added a 1TB OWC modern-speed SSD for $229. And I'll be getting $275 for my 2012 trade-in.

Works for me. And running Mojave, which is stable, and I can run all of my legacy apps and recover from an external drive if necessary. The new ones? Not.

Speed is not the only thing that matters.

[Edited by Moderator]

My "new" immaculate refurb 2015 MBPro is on Mojave and I hardly ever hear fans, except for a couple of my rarely-used apps that are obviously resource hogs. My 2012 unibody was afflicted with fans starting up for apparently no reason on Catalina and Big Sur. To get stuff back after Big Sur screwed up FileVault, I booted from an old CCC Mojave backup and did a full restore from that and then restored the rest from a Big Sur non-encrypted backup using Windows Macdrive, as I mentioned above.