MacOS Big Sur Unstable

I have had contact with apple support twice - did not solve the problem. I followed all recommendations:

• Boot in Safe Mode with Apple Support
• Deleted all temp files with Apple Support
• Uninstalled AV and installed free Malwarebytes scannerUpgraded to 11.1

I never had such an unstable MacBook Pro (new by the way...) for over 10 years... This quality is bad and I am by far not the only one here.

Solving a problem starts with admitting it, not with denial...

The point people are making, William, that simply acting as a apologist for the failures experienced - clearly - by many, many users does not solve the problems.

You can bleat on about how many stable machines you have - I have 5 unstable Big Sur Macs - but the fact remains that for many users, Big Sur is simply not a good enough product to have been launched when it was.

If you would care to offer clear, first hand advice - and not references to other websites or products, people would value your 'contributions' much more.

I state again that in my 35+ years of using Mac systems, this is by far the least stable.

I state again that Big Sur is the most stable macOS release.

That's not an apology for Apple, that's my experience and that of hundreds of other users I personally interact with.

Where does that leave us?

I have asked again and again and again for Etrecheck reports, but I've yet to see them posted.

So if you would like help figuring out why your systems are unstable, people here are happy to give it to you.

It could even be Apple's bug, but if you haven't reported it to them and we can't diagnose it here, it will never get addressed.

Dear William,

Thank you for your final admission that it could be Apple's bug.

We all know that already, but thankfully you have finally admitted that the weight of opinion and experience is fully against you.

William, how does giving you an Etrecheck report help? Every time I do a hard reset, I send Apple a crash report, so they know. What would you do exactly? Like I said, all I'm doing is browsing the web via Safari. The only other recourse is to use a different browser like Chrome, which I also do and also frequently freeze on. So then what, troubleshoot which specific websites and avoid them (Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, etc)? That doesn't really help. So where would this go if I give you the Etrecheck report? I suspect nowhere.

MS applications crashing - that's an issue for Microsoft to sort out.

External monitor - I couldn't tell you, but the fact that a shorter HDMI cable solved it points to your configuration being on the edge of some spec or another for some reason.

I don't have any issues with any of my systems going into or out of sleep, so off the top of my head it sounds like a peripheral not entering or exiting sleep mode properly; do you have third party peripherals installed or connected via USB or TB?

Hi William,

I expect from a company, which has verticalized the tech stack (HW, SW, Apps) almost entirely, an extremely stable OS versions. So far this has worked very well with Apple and their support continues to be really good (at least comparing to the non-existing support of MS). Yet, probably due to the huge tech step (supporting two processor architectures) QA seems to have suffered due to the release pressure. Can happen - but should not happen.

I know fairly well what I am talking about, having been a serial software CEO and being board member of a number of successful software companies.

Please continue to contribute with valuable hints, as ETRE was one.

Best regards Martin

[Edited by Moderator]

Before you reply, just a small idea: Apple could identify all those "bad" tools in the upgrade process and suggest to delete/deactivate them rather than just crashing... Unlike in Windows, unfortunately deleting an Apple App is a very manual process for 3rd party applications (unfortunately). Every Application should have a proper uninstall function, which truly uninstalls everything. This is not the case for many OS X applications and Apple should insist that it is... I deleted library entries from tools I deleted years ago...

It’s not Apple’s responsibility to test third party apps and tell you which ones are “bad.”

The operating system was not “crashing” at all, rather the apps you installed were using a lot of computing resources and the operating system was servicing them.

As far as those Library entries, aside from taking up disk space they had no effect on your system.

Well DUH... still it bothers me that something like a third party app can completely crash the entire network component of the operating system, causing me to be unable to close an application or quite a program. This just tells me that Apple is phoning home with every move I make in the operating system even though I choose to not share analytical information.

Neither the operating system nor the networking stack had “crashed.”

Rather when installing a VPN, you are telling the OS to run all networking through IT - so for example, if the VPN decides not to pass on any traffic at all, no network traffic will be.

VPNs are much more intrusive than a normal “app.”

I totally agree, ironside 1975. I am using Mac OS X since 2008 on a daily basis and fortunately, I did not experience a similar amount of issues before. If it is just the fault of the "bad" applications that we "bad" people are installing, why did these problems just arise after the upgrade to BigSur?

I find it impossible to believe that people on here still deny that Big Sur is unstable.

We must not forget that most people do not complain, they either suffer in silence or buy somewhere else.

The tiny number of Mac users who clearly show that Big Sur is unstable and was released too early are but the tip of the iceberg and the apologists are deluding themselves that Big Sur is a stable, reliable system.

With any luck 11.2 will have addressed these legion issues of instability and give us back (finally) a productive and worthwhile system upgrade.

If you want to claim that issues that are very likely configuration issues unique to your system make an operating system unstable for millions of users worldwide, I can't help that.

I will say of the hundreds of Mac users I personally know using Big Sur, none are having stability issues.

Will macOS 11.2 address stability issues where they had previously existed? Yes it will.

However the mere existence of them does not make the prior release inherently unstable.

I remember pretty much being in at the beginning of this thread, a week or two after the release of this apparently 'wonderful' new OS update.

I have trawled through a lot of the comments, and whoever that bloke was who kept being an apologist for Apple must surely have noticed by now, that those who have actually taken the trouble to reply to his fatuous and idiotic 'support-Apple-till-I-die' statements, that he is in the most tiny minority ever.

Big Sur has been a disastrous release, and even with two subsequent updates remains unstable.

Let's hope that Apple has actually taken note of this thread - about as likely as Zuckerberg empathising with a human - and are doing something about it all.