MacBook Pro with macOS Sonoma crashes frequently and randomly.

That crash log doesn't have any obvious giveaways, so if I were you, I’d back everything up to another drive (or, to be safe, another couple of drives) and do an erase-install of the system like I did. It might take a few days to get everything up and running again, but I found it less painful than continuing to troubleshoot what is now a very complex OS.

Prior to that though, it might be an idea to run a hardware diagnostic. Use Apple Diagnostics to test your Mac - Apple Support

It might also be a hardware issue with your machine. There are a few similar results from M1 machines, such as here: M1 16" Pro regular kernel panic - always … - Apple Community

However, if you're lucky, Disk Repair will fix the problem. If not, then Apple Support may be your next call.

when working with an external 4K HDMI monitor or USB-C port (Macbook Pro 16 M1 Max 64 Gb 4 Tb MacOS 14.0 (23A344)

:

panic(cpu 1 caller 0xfffffe00276483b4): DCPEXT0 PANIC - apt firmware: apt.c:369 apt_vbi() -- - iomfb_mailbox(67)

apt firmware: apt.c:369 apt_vbi() --

RTKit: RTKit-2413.1.1.release - Client: local-t600xdcp.release

!UUID: 4bcc7a73-3ced-3fd9-a1c7-3238cf8e94ac

Time: 0x000000e0b05e2312

amys6 wrote:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7474731

I wouldn't use it. Not approved by Apple. Could introduce all sorts of issues. People come on to push stuff here where we are trying to solve issues.

Stop peddling BS. Etrecheck does nothing to the system. It doesn't alter anything. All it does is collect information.

Linc Davis hated it because it competed with all of his obfuscated scripts he had people run. His scripts dumped extraneous data to obscure the useful information the scripts generated. Only he knew what to ignore. When etresoft dropped EtreCheck, Linc was no longer the big dog on the street. He couldn't stand that other people could easily diagnose problems without his help.

My hubby updated last week and started having this same problem. He has a MacBook Pro with Intel chip. I tried eight different things. Today I tried four more and one of them worked. Can't say which.

• I reset the PRAM
• I removed all automatic login items (he only had Dropbox). System settings>general>login items
• I turned off all apps allowed in the background. System settings>general>login items
• I deleted every deprecated app (the ones that have the circle and diagonal line across them)

We fixed this!

My hubby updated last week and started having this same problem. He has a MacBook Pro with Intel chip. I tried eight different things. Today I tried four more and one of them worked. Can't say which.

• I reset the PRAM
• I removed all automatic login items (he only had Dropbox as an automatic login item). System settings>general>login items
• I turned off all apps allowed in the background. System settings>general>login items
• I deleted every app that no longer works with Sonoma (the ones that have the circle and diagonal line across them)

This is my second reply to this thread because my first reply buried the lead--that we fixed it!

LocaAlicia wrote:

Luis Sequeira1 wrote:

A clean install followed by migrating only the user accounts will easily restore sanity.

When you say "migrating only the user accounts", does that mean I only have to move this folder back from the external SSD?

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/0936cac5-a713-47da-b7b7-6ae29cf681c4

No.

The steps to a clean system in a recent mac:

1) Time Machine backup

2) System Settings->General->Transfer or Reset->Delete All Content and Settings

3) When asked if you want to migrate, choose the TM backup, and then Check ONLY the user accounts (not applications, settings, or other files). This will get rid of all the old agents and daemons that may have been installed, perhaps a decade ago.

To make them ware of the extent of this, not exactly. Apple has become a behemoth. They do see forum posts, if they're large enough, but it's a game of numbers for them. It has to be a big enough problem for them to do anything about it. There may be other factors into why this isn't getting fixed as well.

To make them ware of your personal issue, and allow them to automatically collect data on the issue, posting here is a start. Calling Apple or going to an Apple Store is the next thing you can do. Submitting a bug report is really important as well: Feedback - macOS - Apple

I'm sure Apple is aware of the issue, but the questions we have to ask: Do they care? Are they too busy with other projects (Vision Pro, iOS, money making services, etc)? Are they of the mind set that they get away with waiting until the next major version of macOS to fix things? Do they think it's big enough problem compared to their overall customer base? I don't know the answers, but I have my suspicions.

I just wish I could go back to Sonoma 14.2.1 where it didn't crash at all for me.

You can, but it may not be easy.

Create a USB Installer from

softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 14.2.1

Startup from the USB Installer and erase your drive.

Reinstall macOS from the USB Installer.

Migrate your data from a backup you made prior to updating past 14.2.1.

Or, manually copy your data from a current backup.

Migration Assistant may or may not work going backwards.

After reading all replies to this post and some other blogs, I did not find a conclusive answer. In my case, the continuous crashing with Sonoma started yesterday. I have a macbook air M2, 2022 Apple M2 chip. My system is updated to the last release.

I did all the different steps suggested here, but when I tried to reinstall SONOMA as the last option, the systems said I had not enough free space on my SDD, that was not accurate. I went back to safe boot to check storage under system settings, and it said that just my apps used 800 GB, but my SDD is 500 GB.

I found several users have same issue, but there is not a single or direct cause for this or how to fix it.

At the end, I this this>

1. I erase as much apps that I could.
2. Disabled my email accounts, so attachments are deleted from my mac, but not from my server.
3. Install a clean up app to erase apps leftovers, cache, and as much junk files as I could. (I used Clean My Mac, but any app should work fine).
4. Reinstalled SONOMA and reboot.

The crashing stoped and the wrong storage calculation is now fixed. I still have a crash if I am trying to cleanup junk files with Clean My Mac, otherwise it is working great all day long. Hopefully it stands like that while Apple fix this issue.

I hope it is helpful for you guys.

I concur with the thread author. Sonoma has stability issues, of note in my case:

• Safari memory very often increasing rapidly to many GB (eg. 14GB) , leading to system freeze/reboot
• Console crash report: process "Safari"
• Console crash report: process "WindowServer"
• Console crash report: process "CGPDFService"
• Console crash report: process "AXVisualSupportAgent"

Other odd behavior: I have a menu with shortcuts where clipboard can be "read" i.e. via the OS' speak function. After a few hours of the machine running, the shortcut/read function will not work for many hours, then work again. Cleary only a minor inconvenience. The instability and crashes/reboot need a fix; I think the memory management is probably the culprit and needs to be addressed by Apple.

-> To try out this theory: I didn't encounter crashes until now, when closing down Safari / all browsers overnight while backups were running. Crashes always occurred with the browser on.

Observed browser behavior under Sonoma:

• Safari seems to have a persistent memory issue.
• Firefox shows a high "energy" impact (in the activity monitor)
• Opera has shown to make the entire OS UI almost frozen (extremely sluggish), specifically when pages display videos, and/or when the browser is left open and the computer put into sleep then re-opened. The last updates have partially amended these flaws.

I even started to avoid letting the computer on at night for backup purposes. Too many reboots. Only solution until now is to quit Safari/browsers on a regular basis and not letting the computer run overnight unsupervised (or at a minimum, close all browsers.)

PS: machine is an Macbook Air M1 16GB

I've continued to try a variety of things to isolate the issue with the limited time I have available. My crash logging script is up to 17 crashes now (plus the dozen or so before I wrote the script). Min is 5 minutes from boot, Max is 45 minutes. Turned off WiFi. No difference. Created a fresh user account and logged into it. Same thing. Removed Sophos anti-virus. Same thing. Reset NVRAM and SMC. No change. This morning I added my crash logger to the apps that run at login and I noticed a few things that I don't use anymore enabled in the background so I turned them off (Skype, a Blue Jeans helper app and something from Rogue Amoeba). Thought that fixed it but it crashed after 3h57m. Progress, but this is incredibly painful to troubleshoot and makes getting anything done on this machine almost impossible.

• The crash report dialogue does not always appear. About 50% of the time?
• I've used Apple --> Shutdown and upon reboot a panel appeared "Your computer shut down because of a problem. Do you want to re-open applications that were running? [Cancel] [Open]" (wording is approximate). BUT (i) no it did not shut down because of a problem, I quit all apps and did a graceful and intentional shutdown and (ii) the panel was unresponsive: clicking on either option did nothing and I had to wait 60s for it to decide to proceed with the login process.
• I've saved the text of many crash logs to compare.
  • First line of the report is consistent: panic(cpu 1 caller 0xfffffff0216eff60): macOS watchdog detected
  • x86 Shutdown Cause is not (0xf5 and 0x16 are seen more often than other values)
•  log show --predicate 'eventMessage contains "Previous shutdown cause"' --last 24h also shows some causes multiple times but others are one-offs.

Whatever is going on here needs Apple's attention -- in other posts it's suggested that Sonoma is fine, it's third party apps that are messing things up. Ventura handled those apps without issue. I did some heavy lifting with this machine for months without a crash. Machine crashed within minutes of the upgrade to Sonoma and it was idle (at least no user level apps open at all). If the root cause is a third party app, then Sonoma should be doing a much more graceful job of handling the exception. And Apple should at least acknowledge that there's something (seriously) wrong with Sonoma and that they're working on it. There are very knowledgeable customers who will be happy to provide additional info when requested. Well, maybe not "happy" but "willing to put even more effort into helping find the root cause so that they can have a usable machine once more."

A brief update on my prior answer/post:

I have proceeded with the following changes:

• cleared Safari cache
• disable/changed the Sonoma 'slow-motion' original wallpaper

To this day, since the prior post:

• I haven't had any crashes anymore i.e. neither UI slowdown/semi-freezing or crash/reboot
• No crashes overnight during backup: (i) with Safari closed and (ii) with Safari opened... with the side note that I checked beforehand if one tab/website was the reason for Safari's memory constantly growing. Finding the culprit website in time ensured no crash overnight it seems.
• Also of note is that the 'memory leaks' in Safari have been less occurring, meaning I witnessed less often the ballooning of Safari used memory. I would attribute this to the cache clearing.
• Of note also: no system element(s) crash reports in the console reporting application
• The odd 'read clipboard' behavior still occuring

Hey Gang, 14.2 is out. Give it a go. The test release of it solved my crashing problem.

Near as I can figure, this was the root issue, with the Swift development environment:

• Fixed: Resolved a possible Swift access conflict crash that could occur with toolbar items. (113992797)

Here is an update.

I've done a clean install of Sonoma 14.3 after completely formatting the hard drive.

The OS still crashes and the Touch Bar often flicks. Interestingly, the Activity Monitor starts crashing.

Two interesting findings.

1. The crash seems related to the sleep mode. In most of the cases, the rebooting occurred when the laptop came back from the sleep mode.
2. While the Touch Bar was flickering, I put flash light to the light sensor, and it came back to normal. This must be related to the functional automatically adjusting the display brightness.

Now I have the very final check, which is the hardware investigation, although I don't think there was any accident that might have caused hardware damage.

I don't know what to do if there is no hardware damage detected.