M1 MacBook Pro crashes and restarts a few times a day

Hi!

My 2020 MacBook Pro 13 is also doing the same. There are screen flashes and yesterday it did a quick restart automatically while i was working. This morning the computer did a full restart (like shut down and restart).

What is the problem?

Welcome, captsri, to Apple Support Communities!

Unpowered hubs (hubs that try to get their power from the upstream USB connection) are notoriously unreliable.

I fully understand the desire to avoid additional cables—especially power cables—but such has been a longtime reality.

Maybe … Someday …

Same for my system, MacBook Pro M1 about 2 months old, first freezes, than crashing about 3 time a day, I don't think this is very good for the MacBook :(

MacBook Pro 13" 8GB memory running latest version OSX 11.2.3

Rajesh Kanungo:

Simply because, at the level you can see, most (if not all) of the drivers have names that begin “com.apple.driver”, does not, necessarily, mean what you seem to think it means.

Especially for multifunctional hubs, such cannot be handled by Apple drivers, alone.

Reporting is always the best option.

I think many people on here are just frustrated that it appears to be a "sensitivity" to many different flavor of drivers that appeared to work until recently. I could see this being an issue @ 11.0.0, but the fact that it's coming in 11.2.x is pretty infuriating. I hope there is something in the works soon.

Thank you, Halliday, for your level headedness. :)

I have an M1 MacBook Air. I was working on HTML pages. I had VS Code and Safari open. It was barely consuming any CPU and RAM. When I restarted VS Code, MacOS became unresponsive and there was purple screen for a second or so and then my laptop rebooted. I didn't a single device connected to my laptop too.

I'm having the same problem on a brand new M1 Air. I've installed MS Office 2019, Dropbox, Backup and Sync (google drive), and that's about it. I have a USB hub i use for an external monitor sometimes. I've had 3 crashes in 4 days of use. Twice while using the hub, once while not connected to any external hardware. All three times were while using Microsoft Office 2019 products (Excel and Powerpoint). Here is a crash report from yesterday (running OS 11.2.3).

I updated to 11.3 last night, hoping that would fix, but got another crash this afternoon under the same circumstances as the first one (THOUGH I WAS IN SAFE MODE THIS TIME) . I'm pretty bummed and considering returning it. If it can't handle these really standard, essential applications, it's not something i want to spend $1300 dollars on. And if it's third-party apps causing instability, well, out-of-the-blue restarts are still not acceptable. I was prepared to be a bit of a guinea pig, but not with this level of problems.

Thanks for any advice you can provide!

Hi Halliday,

Thanks for your reply. Please let me know if i'm wrong, but I think you're mistaken about MS Office 2019 being incompatible.

I checked for Office compatibility before purchasing the M1, as I didn't want to be in this situation. MS Office 2019 and Office 365 have been compatible since December:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-365-and-office-2019-support-for-apple-silicon-c55b603e-14a6-4b69-bdc0-2bb4c9a36834?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

They run natively, though I have had Excel tell me it needs to use Rosetta for some features in some of my older Excel documents.

So I don't think it was foolish of me to expect this software to be compatible with my brand new Mac, especially given how much Rosetta has been touted as a bridge to transition older software to the new platform. I do expect Mac OS updates to improve stability, especially with software that is industry standard for people doing writing and data analysis tasks, but I guess I'm naive. I'll be returning this in 4 days unless I can find a solution I think will allow me to meet this most basic of software needs.

Thanks for your reply, Rajesh. I'm sad to hear you had these same issues, and I suspect i'll be taking your advice, as much as I like the other features of the M1 air. Seems like it needs another year before it's ready for users like me.

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.

Hi Halliday and Rajesh,

Thanks for your replies, and for confirming that it is Microsoft Office that's causing the panic. I wasn't sure if that line indicated that MS Office was the culprit, or that it was merely the active application when something (possibly a background process) caused the panic.

Halliday, your point is well taken, sorry for being snippy. Apple can't be held completely responsible for MS Office code. I guess am just frustrated by the situation I'm in, which is my fault for being an early(ish) adopter. I misjudged when regular users would be able to successfully make this transition, and will wait another year before trying again. It seems like impressive hardware and will be great when the software catches up.

Well, kjloope, according to Microsoft, they have caught up.

It looks like you need to make sure that your version of «MS Office 2019» is a build that is at least as up-to-date as the build that Microsoft posted on the website you showed me.

Also, make sure you don’t have any vestiges of old versions that were “restored” onto your M1 system. (I restored, from a Time Machine backup from my Intel Mac mini, to my M1 Mac mini, that included some incompatible software. Fortunately, they weren’t so insidious as to have background processes and System/Kernel extensions.)

I have been running an M1 Mac mini from “day one” (it did take about a month to ship to me, since it wasn’t a base model), that has had no problems whatsoever. (However. I admit that I don’t run Microsoft Office.)

Hi Halliday,

I have the most up to date version of MS Office 2019, and did install the version with native support.

I did no restoring as i was worried about conflict issues with old programs. Instead, after taking it out of the box, i installed the 3 apps that I need for minimum functionality: MS Office 2019 (brand new purchase and install, downloaded, installed and updated immediately), Dropbox, and Backup and Sync from Google. Other than those 3, my system is straight out of the box. My plan was to see if I could survive on these basics that constitute the majority of my use, and use my old computer for other tasks that require other software that's not well supported yet (R, some genetics software, Evernote), until they get caught up.

I'll submit this information to Microsoft, though I've found no other internet threads about MS Office causing this issue, so I'm not optimistic about it being addressed any time soon.

I'm glad your M1 has been trouble-free, that sounds lovely! It's a dream to use otherwise, and I think I'll buy one in a year or so when the kinks are more worked out. Till then, I'm going back to my old i5 from 2015.

kjloope wrote:

Hi Halliday,

…. Till then, I'm going back to my old i5 from 2015.

Sounds fine. Whatever works best for you.

I’m sorry to hear that this issue appears to have been with «the most up to date version of MS Office 2019, … with native support.» This would seem to not bode well for Microsoft’s code.

Best of luck to you.

I got m1 with 16 gigs and 1 tb and it’s been crashing a lot lately from random things I had a remote session to another my macs and it crashed so fustrating I traded a 2013 Mac Pro 48gigs ram 6core for this