M1 MacBook Pro crashes and restarts a few times a day

I really don’t understand where you are coming from. This is an M1 Mac with a fresh install of OS as a few other users have talked about.

There are no third party drivers.

It still crashes.

The whole reinstallation process was guided by Apple level 3 support because of the crashes.

So this installation is as clean as it gets.

There are no third party extensions misbehaving.

There could be a hardware fault somewhere. Or it could be a software issue as was clearly indicated by the out of bounds check failing in the crash dump. or something in hw is triggering the software or exposing a software fault.

What we have determined with Apple support is that it is definitely not a third party problem in my case.

Rajesh Kanungo wrote:

I think there is something else going on. My replacement M1 crashed when it started (kernel panic), froze, then crashed again (kernel panic). This is a just unpacked M1 with only a power supply and a USBC connected. Migration Assistant had not even started. It crashes less that my previous M1.

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If I had that experience with «a just unpacked M1 with only a power supply», I would return it immediately as Dead on Arrival (DOA).

However, you also indicate that something was connected to «a USBC» port, but you don’t indicate what was connected.

Furthermore, what M1 based machine are you talking about? A Mac mini, or one of the MacBooks. (This can make a great deal of difference.)

Yup. I can’t make head or tail of what happened. It went through all the motions of rebooting. I called Apple Support. We were able to get some sysdiagnose logs as the problem is easy to reproduce by just doing an nvram reset. Comes up with my two login IDs. An attempt to login presents me a password entry screen.

My thought is that login screen threw the exception in the code but still presented a password entry field. It then went into the mode of rejecting my login attempts. The reason I think that is likely is that the password entry field normally has text with guidelines for password or Touch ID and neither was visible. Login works after reboot.

Apple support is supposed to call me back Saturday.

Rajesh Kanungo wrote:

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Still crashing a few times a day. I walk up to the screen and realized that the computer had rebooted. I have no generally idea WHEN it rebooted but I try to make a reasonable estimate.

The console Logs should show exactly when your system rebooted, even if it doesn’t show when it “crashed”.

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No antivirus running, I did a clean install, so nothing from my old MacBook used on the new one. I'm using cleanmymac.

But as I read before, I'm using a hub (not powered) for my external screen and external harddisks.

I have a MacBook Air with the M1. Ever since upgrading to 11.2.3 I have been having multiple crashes per day.

I have used multiple Thunderbolt hubs, powered and unpowered (hubs that I can use on my Mac Pro 2013 with out error), and it seems to be when plugging in a new USB device the system crashes, reboots, and then appears to be stable... usually.

I have no AV or cleaning utilities installed on this machine.

This seems to be an issue for M1 Macs, I have had zero issue with my Intel Macs.

Welcome, nowhere022, to Apple Support Communities!

If the hardware drivers have not been properly written for M1 hardware, one can expect troubles.

Since the M1 hardware is new, while the Intel hardware has been around for quite some time, it may take time for some hardware drivers to “catch up”.

I don’t know what might have changed, nowhere022, but I do know that many of the changes in the last few Big Sur updates involved parts of the Driver subsystem of the Kernel.

Unfortunately, it is possible that some change, in such, may have caused another issue or “sensitivity” in the Driver subsystem of the Kernel.

Make sure you report this to Apple, possibly as a bug report.

The more details you can report—especially if you have a repeatable means to reproduce the issue—the more likely this will be fixed in a future update.

If you can, return the unit and go back. I have stopped even reporting the crash issues to Apple because it is an enormous time sink to put together the sysdiagnose reports and talk to Apple support. They can't help. They just make you collect more data, waste your time, and release after release you see the same issues and even new ones.

I can't go back as the M1 fried my SSD from my older 2013 MBPR.

I should have waited a year.

Rajesh Kanungo wrote:

I don't think MS Office installs any drivers. Kernel Panics are Apple's problem. A user level program should not crash the Kernel.

However, since it is so easy to crash the kernel, I am curious about the OS security.

You are quite correct that «A user level program should not crash the Kernel.» In fact, it cannot.

What kjloope’s Kernel Panic reports shows, however is:

1. There was a Microsoft component installed at the Kernel level. (Like a driver, but it need not be a driver. There are various things a program may install, for its benefit, that might be installed at the Kernel level. [Apple tries to discourage such software practices, but Microsoft does this sort of thing all the time on their own Operating System {Windows}, so, it seems only natural that they would try to do the same on any other system they may run their software on.])
2. It was this Microsoft component that misbehaved, and caused the Kernel Panic.

It is misbehaviors such as this that is why Apple has been warning that such will no longer be allowed, sometime in the future.

(I wish Apple had implemented that prohibition with Big Sur. Actually, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Apple wanted to prohibit such in Big Sur, but deferred that prohibition just because Microsoft wanted to still use it.)

I have the same issue on my new M1 Macbook Pro 13" - rendering it almost unusable for work. The entire system freezes, screen goes purple and the machine restarts (haven't seen this type of things since OS9).. Happens multiple times a day, depending on how much typing I am doing.

It always occurs when I am typing/entering values: in Word, in Chrome, in Sketch, in Outlook.

I ran etrecheck and worked through everything, doing a good clean. Deleted a lot of old stuff from the past ten years that has been hanging around. And it worked! Paid for Etrecheck - well worth it. Things were good!

.... for about 2 weeks.

I've not installed anything new except for a new Java install.

Suddenly I get pink screen crashes again. This time, going to recovery mode and reinstalling the OS (it takes hours each time) DOESN'T fix it. The login screen comes up, and it crashes about halfway through typing my password.

Very unhappy how unstable MacOS has become on this new M1 Mac Mini. I've never had problems like this on the last 5 laptops or so that I've had.

I reinstalled after going through PRAM reset and diagnostics with Apple. Fingers crossed, it has resolved my issues. 1 week and no crashes.

I had this problem a few minutes ago. My bluetooth was off. Really weird.

The crash is probably better than the earlier releases where the memory was getting overwritten!!! At least they are doing bounds checks and committing sepuku as they should have never reached that state.

I wonder if there is a way to set a debugger breakpoint at the kernel level.