Mac OS Monterey update fail

Me and another person in two distant parts of the planet had the unwanted kernel problem and one year laptops are now bricks. It is so disappointing Apple should not have stopped this downgrade update making our lives more difficult with people needing a laptop for work. I may need to buy a new one urgently today if Genius Bar doesn’t give me an immediate replacement. I won’t update this killing downgrade with the new one.

You know, it makes me wonder if Apple even trolls their own support base. If this was going to be an issue with NON-APPLE SSDs... they should have had a disclaimer or something so as to make potential upgraders aware of issues. Bricks are fine when you are making a BBQ... but as you know, not fine when you are trying to work form home and retain your job. I hope that the Apple Store does right by you. Good luck!

I have a 2019 iMac that has a similar error that only appeared when I installed from recovery. My storage is a sad as well. If more of these are reported I suspect a fix incoming. I was able to reinstall Big Sur without issue.

Thank you very much. The Mac supporters that do not accept the problems make me hallucinate. This forum is for reporting problems and fixing them. I was so eager to get this update by alleged good reports and now I realise after knowing there are people having my problem of one one year Mac Book Pro Brick and so many bugs they should stop this defective release. I hope my Apple Store staff would be professional and give me one quick solution. We bought Mac because we are professionals needing good and reliable laptops. I feel duped with this defective update. At office O have an Imac that I won’t update and warned my colleagues not to do it unless we want bricks

Glad to hear they got it going, did they get you to Monterey or not? I worked with apple support to get the information from my computer and install to the engineers. Hopefully this will help them correct these issues.

I got Monterey and it looks like working fine. My laptop is only 1 year old so what happened is quite surreal! I am lucky I have several Apple Stores. I am quite sorry for people that have no access and has no technical help if they are not IT engineers. I really think Apple should urgently make a statement for not “downgrading” with this defective update for the users ending with one brick laptop and not understanding why.

so the takeaway for me is only use apple parts to upgrade your Mac and get ready to pay a LOT. I was able to get my authorized service center to get me a 2 TB SSD for my 2019 iMac. The cost was obscene, but I don't want to do the replace the hd every time I upgrade os's. Pay upfront it's MUCH cheaper.

I've only purchased Apple computers since I bought an Apple IIe many years. I've often upgraded with OWC over the years and have never had a problem like this before. I really think this is inexcusable on Apple's part. I'm about to need a computer to replace my Mac Pro (2013) but I may join friends and family who have switched to those other brands to save money if this is what we can expect from Apple.

I Tried to install on my external Samsung 1Tb SSD on my iMac 27" late 2015

& it soft bricked my system I ran it from the installer app. since my internal SSD had died I had no other choice..

I had verbose enabled & it kept giving me `disk1s1: media is not present` & it kept looping like this for 4-5 min then it reboots & then kept looping the same message.

I then tried to do a clean install via USB & it did not detect any external SSD's or any USB's connected other then the 64g flash drive where the installer was being run from.

Stay away from Monterey if using an external solution.

well, how do I get my firmware updated? my internal SSD is impossible to get to without ripping apart the guts of my mac which is very hard, getting an apple technician to do it would cost well in the thousands to rip apart & replace the SSD for such an old mac & I don't have money lying around for such a repair.

does this mean I'm permanently stuck on Big Sir?

This Is dumb why cant I trigger a firmware update on external.

I am of the wary and aftraid type, skipped Big Sur because my 4K 2017 machine bricked (10 min start up time, slow).

Now I have a Thunderbolt drive with Catalina.

But now software like Safari is failing since the last security update - forcing me on. On to Monterey. Hey. I’m afraid still.

Luckily i did not replace the Fusion’s SSD… That was too costly.

Anyway this information is helpfull, I’ll make a test install on an external Crucial SSD. But I am not cofident at all. Windows was not as bad as this for my night rest.

The dramatic change to big Sur was very unkind to fushion drives. I heard it was corrected in later updates but Apple is really trying to push apple silicon on everyone. I mean background blur for cameras won’t work on i7 or i9’s? Funny how it works on zoom. I never thought it would haven but I am considering going back to Windows.

The problem I have had with the Fusion drive (sluggish 10 min startup etc.) was corrected with a Thunderbolt drive. When I reported the problem, I got an 'I donno'. My big concern is that that solution will be made impossible too now in Monterey. Like they are cutting branches from my tree.

By the way, I have a apple wireless keyboard on my 4K Retina machine that failed within a year. All calls were met with 'I donno'. At last someone at apple service said, please connect the power connector for test mode, and then it worked. So I left it like that.

'I donno' if that responsiveness of the staff is real service. But at least it better than it used to be: do you have a service plan? Else, buy support.

I have a 2015 Macbook Pro updated to 2TB with an OWC SSD. Same problem, same solution: remove/replace/update etc etc. Took several hours. Not happy with Apple's lack of programming competence on this one. Forunately I still had the original SSD...

[/sarcasm] Thanks a lot, Apple. [/sarcasm off]

Tom