MacOS Big Sur Unstable

Amen and thank you for this. I have grown increasingly concerned recently that we are back in the late 90’s with innovation stagnation and a general acceptance of mediocrity. The absurd lack of responsiveness of the OS in general - in particular in notifications, the “click bloat” and frankly frequent failures at the kernel level taking the entire system down for unknown reasons are unsettling. Hard to tell if anyone at Apple Park Way is paying attention....

Well, as they say, the old adage is that most people don't complain, they simply keep quiet and move on elsewhere.

That's probably why there is the misconception that there are many users with 'zero issues'.

Some additional data,

Found out this also might be related to the phoning home mechanism that I recently found out MacOS Big Sur is doing when opening and closing apps. This would explain why my apps refuse to close on a NordVPN Connection.

Apple, you have failed us professionals with this operating system. This is the biggest disaster since Windows Vista.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again.

WE SHOULD NOT HAVE TO RUN 3rd PARTY APPS!

If Apple had ensured that Big Sur was as stable as possible before release, we would have all received what we ultimately paid for.

Why should we, the CUSTOMERS, seek solutions for Apple’s errors?

I'd be happy to diagnose, but not really sure how, or what to do.

I use it in a super safe way, never had an issue in 6 years, but after migrating 3 macs to big sur, they all started to misbehave.

Not sure what I can do, pretty much I reckon is apple's responsibility to provide a stable OS, don't you think?

After years of using MAC, I am close to going back to Microsoft. My configuration did not change. I upgraded to Big Sur and have so many issues. Not only are MS apps crashing, I have Page and Keynote crashing.

Question should I wipe my system and reinstall ? That is what I use to do when I was on MS. I reboot more often.

I am heading back to the U.S in May to take my system to Apple Store. Apple does not have a Apple store here in Phnom Penh.

The local apple partner needs to hold my MacBook for 4 months to change the battery. Not sure why they need to keep it for 4 months.

thomaschrist wrote:

They recommended NOT to use EtreCheck and had me uninstall it.

If you have any concerns or questions about EtreCheck I would be happy to answer them. This forum would probably not be the appropriate place for that however. I'm not even allowed to give you a link to the website where you could send a support request. You'll have to Google it on your own.

I was chatting with Apple support (via AppleCare+) and they suggested all of these very time consuming activities. It was very nice but I want my machine to "just work". Glad I stuck w/Mojave on my production iMac.

Sorry to jump on the complaint wagon. Not only the office products are crashing, Pages, numbers, etc occasionally crash.

My MacBook Pro runs very warm so much so it slows down. To avoid the over heating, I have a fan blowing directly on the MacBook.

If my dell had the same UI as the Mac, I would swap in a minutes. I am not a fan of Ubuntu Desktop.

Is this a strategy to get folks to upgrade to the M1 Macs?

Amazing all of the "it's not me, it's you" replies here. This OS is a real problem that Apple needs to address. I have to Force Quit/Restart roughly 2-3 times daily and I'm not a heavy user. This is on a brand new Macbook Air that I purchased three months ago. I never experienced this with my previous Macbook Air products using Mojave and its predecessors.

Apple really needs to understand that a lot of PC users originally moved to Apple because "they just work". Between these hangup issues and their 'forced upgrade' approach, I am (quite unbelievably) actually considering moving back to a PC.

Hi Dogcow-moof, Thanks for the speedy reply. I am not sure why or when HighPointRR was installed. I don't recognise it. Likewsie I am unsure why SoftRaid is on there... unless it is associated with a external drive I have or a SCISI adapter.

The sony is associated with a camera. I'll put them to one side and see how it goes. Thanks

Hi Dogcow-moof, I tried Big Sur without any other software installed and it was unstable. In my opinion the only solution must come from Apple, and in any case each of us must be able to use their own peripherals and software and not give them up in order to use the latest version of the operating system.

I've mentioned that for me and everyone I know it's been the fastest, most stable version of macOS we've used.

As far as peripherals and software, that's up to the relevant vendors to make sure they are compatible with the new version of macOS. Developers and peripheral makers are seeded with the new operating system for at least a three to four month beta period to ensure functionality, and too many don't bother to do anything until it is actually released.

ratfink0819 wrote:

This is a 2020 M1 Macbook Air I'm talking about. Sorry, I'll hop off the discussion since I don't really have a question. Just super, super frustrated.

Yes, and there will be teething pains in transitioning to a new hardware platform, especially if you use third party software.

I don't mean to diminish your experience, but your issues do not mean Big Sur is fundamentally unstable any more than my experiences mean that it is.

However I work with hundreds of others who use Big Sur every day and their number of issues is also zero.

Given that, it's vital to try and sort out what is different about your system than mine and try to track down the issues.

Some people have narrowed some down to issues with sleep mode, but otherwise I can say I've been using Macs since I bought a Macintosh II in 1988. Like you, most upgrades have been reasonably painless though a few were not.

Still, I have never experienced a faster, more stable Mac OS devoid of issues than macOS Big Sur.

I can compare that to my Mac Pro 5,1 running macOS Mojave, which while basically stable has moments where it is not at all; in fact power cycling a printer after it failed to connect to a shared folder on my Mojave Mac caused it to panic just the other day:

Sun Apr 11 13:00:21 2021

*** Panic Report ***
mp_kdp_enter() timed-out on cpu 7, NMI-ing
mp_kdp_enter() NMI pending on cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 8 9 10 11
mp_kdp_enter() timed-out during locked wait after NMI;expected 12 acks but received 2 after 14826414 loops in 1662499788 ticks
panic(cpu 7 caller 0xffffff801eab501d): "IPI timeout, unresponsive CPU bitmap: 0xf3f, NMIPI acks: 0x0, now: 0x0, deadline: 1267341061210717, pre-NMIPI time: 0x480a3d5c34327, current: 0x480a3f390ab14, global: 1"@/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-4903.278.65/osfmk/x86_64/pmap.c:3038
Backtrace (CPU 7), Frame : Return Address
0xffffff9d8b3b3250 : 0xffffff801e9ad5cd 

[ ... ]

0xffffff9d8b3b3fa0 : 0xffffff801e95a8df 
      Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
         com.apple.filesystems.apfs(945.275.10)[00425E1C-D376-3886-B0E5-EFA9D3835ADC]@0xffffff7f9fd0e000->0xffffff7f9fe10fff
            dependency: com.apple.kec.corecrypto(1.0)[BDB1CED4-CBD9-3E42-965B-825B114BCD67]@0xffffff7f9f659000
            dependency: com.apple.driver.AppleEffaceableStorage(1.0)[938C70B4-D1C9-3D67-B2AE-AC3BB27323A4]@0xffffff7f9fc78000
            dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily(2.1)[D8540F0C-6F9E-31AB-988B-08B009CB344B]@0xffffff7f9f57e000

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: logd

Mac OS version:
18G9027

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 18.7.0: Mon Mar  8 22:11:48 PST 2021; root:xnu-4903.278.65~1/RELEASE_X86_64