MacBook Pro keeps freezing after Big Sur Update

Since I reinstalled Big Sur - full disk wipe - I did not need to restore from a back as all my files are on cloud/google drive. I have not had any problems. I have not re-installed Chrome and am trying to "live without it" and at the moment I keep resisting the urge to bring it back, feeling that it will cause the rainbows again.

I though it would be useful to share my "memory pressure" as there seems to be a lot more going on than Spinalman and my machine is currently doing what it should.

My girl friend has a Mac Book Pro 15" 2019 (i7 9880 + AMD RX 560 Pro).

We upgraded from Mojave directly to Big Sure 11.0 when it was released

and what a huge mistake. Since then the laptop continuously experiences

these frequent crashes and reboots. None of the upgrades to 11.1, 11.2

helped. Then we did a  downgrade to Mojave, after that crashes appearing

even more frequently. After every one to ten minutes the Mac Book is

freezing and rebooting many times in a row. We tried all the tips and

tricks and keyboard shortcuts found on Google, I even deleted the hard

drive and reinstalled from USB Image or Internet, created a new user,

nothing worked. Disk utility has dramatically changed after that

downgrade, after deleting of the old partitions, there are no new

container or ZFS style pools created. Might be a big issue? See picture.

Some internet sites suggests, that after the Big Sur Upgrade, the

firmware was automatically upgraded too, and now reinstalling or

Downgrading to Catalina or Mojave would not downgrade the firmware to

its initial version. And that will cause lots of problems with drivers.

However booting into secure mode also did nothing and crashed. As MacOS

is a Unix, I checked dmesg at the console after Command + S and it

showed Wifi, BT and Ethernet warnings, see picture.

Luckily my girl friend has her old Windows Laptop around, so she can continuing her studies. Anybody have any

idea how to fix this mess? Thanks a lot.

Same problems here. 2015 iMac w/ 32GB RAM and 3TB fusion drive. No issues until Big Sur. These are my drive and memory statuses - let's hope the machine doesn't freeze while I'm uploading them. Disappointing and frustrating. I've already unmounted my external drive because it's constantly spinning up/spinning down and that hasn't made a difference. I've also uninstalled my antivirus (ESET) but no difference. Also, uninstalled Chrome (reluctantly because Safari's limited window management "solution" is atrocious). No difference. I have two external monitors. One is Apple Display and one is Dell. I'll disconnect the Dell to see that that matters but I would sincerely hope that Apple iMac and Apple Display could work together (if this is an external monitor issue). I can't answer Facetime calls initiated by somebody else on my Macs either so this whole Apple ecosystem that we pay out of our a$$e$ for is become less and less attractive with these issues. Every 5 to 10 minutes Big Sur just becomes unresponsive. Not all home users have time to QA and troubleshoot Apple products on their behalf. Apple needs to put their products through RIGOROUS testing with monitors and third-party software loaded to the gills because we users USE all sorts of stuff ALL THE TIME...some of us do for certain, anyway. If the fix is "reinstall and don't load any third-party apps on your machine" then the argument for buying Apple hardware suddenly becomes moot and is not an option I will consider next time. There are plenty of Linux distros out there that offer more ongoing (lifetime) assistance to end users than Apple support offers their users. My Mac is no longer under Apple Care so these forums are one of the limited "solutions" that are available to me and they of no hope what-so-ever. Windows is also back under consideration. From what I've seen recently they're more stable than Mac has been. Mac's iCloud...uhg, don't get me started on that one. $5k worth of poor performance. Lovely.

myapplerock might be right there......

I do run a Late 2014 27-inch iMac, 32Gb memory at home, and another 27-inch iMac at work.

After upgrading tot Big Sur (the same day), the home mac started immediatly to freeze at unexpected moment.

Sometimes is takes 10 second to continue, sometimes it takes 5 minutes to 'unfreeze' it self. No input available, mouse moves and clicks are 'remembered' and executed after the 'unfreeze'.

Took the advice from this forum to enable both the seconds on the clock, and the activities monitor with the memory page.

Now I can tell you for sure that in my case:

There is no SWAP-file, and also no compressed memory while freezing.

I do have freezes where the seconds STOP! But also freezes where the seconds keep going.

For the first 4-6 weeks, the freezes only happened at home. Later on, the same freezes started on my iMac at work in very occasional moment. But now after de last update, the have almost the same problems. While some other 27-inch iMacs at work do not have those problem. But they ALL suffer from a very slow loading of programs after the user-login.

Dunno where the problem takes place, but is in the Big Sur software and it is both user, pheripals and Mac undependant.

I’ve done all of the above with an Apple support specialist. Still a problem. Been off to an Apple support centre and NFF, got it home and, I am getting the rainbow. Can move it, rainbow switches to cursor when hovering over the dock, but nothing can be clicked. Very annoying, it may be a 2015 machine but it’s a powerful machine and I still suspect this is software related

pabloream wrote:

1. I have the new Mac Mini M1 Chip. When it arrived it was something wrong and I decided to formatting the disk and the problem begun. After trying several things and reinstalling Big Sur for 10 times, this solution helped me at the first try. Hope helps you.

shut down your computer

2. hold the power button until the "options" icon shows

3. select the "options" icon

4. when next screen loads, select menu item to launch terminal

5. in terminal type "resetpassword" and hit enter

6. when a reset password box appears, select menu item to erase Mac (is in the menu)

7. in new pop up confirm option to erase Mac.

8. once erased, exit back to recover

9. reinstall the operating system (without formatting disk again)

10. once installed, create the user normally. this fix works on the first try.

I don't think this is very good advice for all those experiencing Big Sur freezes. Yours seems to be an unspecified problem unrelated to freezes.

This is an Apple expert advise that helped for several people. I tried a lot of “solutions” of this problem but nothing worked. This did on the first try as a lot more people. Have you tried it for you to say it doesn’t work? I just want to help someone who experienced the same issue as me, it is frustrating. This worked! 👌🏻

This thread is about Macs that work normally and then after upgrading from previous OS to Big Sur they demonstrate freezes at random times. Your fault is a brand new, empty Mac with an original factory install of Big Sur that was "wrong" from the beginning and you have not mentioned freezes. You have also reinstalled 10 times, so it is a different issue. I would not advise doing such a radical 'fix" on the off chance that it might sort out our original fault.

Has anyone found solution to the freezing after installing the Big Sur. I just upgraded the OS on my MacBook Pro and yes, my Mack book is now freezing, some apps take for ever to open or don’t open at all the rainbow spin just spinning

Hi there,

same issue here with my working/company MBP15(2018, i7). I've decided to upgrade to BigSur after using it on my other two (+1 wife's) computer basically since it is released.

In contrary to my/our personal computers, the company one seemed to struggle - was/is very sluggish and freezes time to time.

I use screen mirroring/extension and on some other forum I saw guys complaining that this happened when some perpherals were connected.

Strangely, the computer tended to hang and restart frequently right after I upgraded so I was pretty upset about it. Then suddenly, it "healed" and I was able to work for almost a week without an issue. And, as suddenly it healed, as suddenly it got worse again; I had to restart the computer once with power button once while it hanged and restarted like two time this morning.

I keep reporting every such instance, hope some fix comes soon because this seems to be a widespread issue :(

I am finding the complete freeze that requires a hard restart has stopped, but the whole OS still exhibits issues of slowing down. The beachball occurs more regularly, Mail appears sluggish at times, text being typed sometimes hangs for a second and then catches up. In Photos I have found that editing using the Retouch tool is so slow that it is unusable. There is plenty of RAM and no other things have changed on my Mac so this is only after Big Sur upgrade.

I have an iMac and have the same issue... I keep needing to restart and hope something works... some days it does, other it doesnt.

Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Messenger, Facetime, Notes... etc etc etc 3rd party software ALL of it crashes... even Apple Crash report doesn't work!

My slow down does seem worst when Photos is running. Retouch is too slow to use - but Pixelmator's retoruch plugin for Photos does not slow down. Worse still, if I export a Photo it takes 20 minutes to complete a 1.4Mb file. The macbook fan is running continuously now yet photos is using just 18% of CPU in Activity Monitor and 800MB of RAM. WindowServer is using 1.28GB.

Curious.

I’m having the exact same problem after having Big Sur for a month or so now it’s freezing. It always starts with it randomly highlighting text I never selected, then clicking doesn’t work, and I can’t quit applications. I keep having to shut down my computer and it’s super frustrating. I need apple to come up with a patch ASAP!

Nothing helpful just posting here so I can commiserate and keep up with any new fixes. I guess I’ll try reinstalling Big Sur as that helped one person. Maybe going back to Catalina...