My MacBook Air suddenly started malfunctioning

My MacBook air is about 2 and a half years old and has worked pretty much flawlessly, but a few days ago it just suddenly started bugging out.


  • Mac suddenly crashes, it seems mainly when connected to my external monitor. Seems to happen a lot when watching videos, then the screen on the actual mac goes black, it freezes on the monitor but if i use the pause/play button on the keyboard it'll still pause/play any audio. So it doesn't seem to fully crash for at least a couple minutes. Then after it eventually fully goes i can restart it
  • Weird things like not being able to close windows, quit apps or save word documents,
  • Sometimes dragging recently quit apps up from the dock would usually remove them but sometimes it doesn't.
  • I've had issues opening the settings app where I'll click on it and the dot underneath appears and I'm taken away from my current window as if it's going to open and then it doesn't
  • Not sure if this is an issue on the mac or Norton side but I've been trying to do a live update on Norton security and that just isn't working
  • There have definitely been more things but these are just the ones I can remember immediately


Those last ones are all more minor but they've all (not 100% certain about the Norton one) literally just come on at once. I've been using the same monitor the whole time I've had the mac and never had issues but it does seem like issues are occurring more frequently when connected to it, although I do mainly use it with the monitor so I don't know if that observation is necessarily true.


I apologise for all the information but help would be much appreciated, and I can provide any information needed to help. Cheers!


[Re-titled by Moderator]

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 14.0

Posted on Oct 23, 2023 10:00 AM

Reply
1 reply

Oct 23, 2023 1:22 PM in response to stew05

First thing I'd do is boot into Safe Mode and see what, if anything, changes: Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support


I'd also recommend uninstalling Norton (using their uninstaller) as anti-virus apps, "Mac Cleaners", etc. cause issues with Macs. Anti-virus apps simply aren't needed on a Mac, since nothing gets installed without the user permitting it.


Let us know if anything changes.

My MacBook Air suddenly started malfunctioning

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