Q: 10.9.3 kills third monitor

Just off the phone with Apple Care. Third time calling about this problem. This time they escalated the issue to a senior advisor. He reiterated the only solution is a restore to a date previous to installing 10.9.3. He had no ETA on a fix. He offered to escalate the request for help to the Apple engineering folks with the caveat that it will be up to four days before he gets a response. I will post what I hear when I hear back.

Martin

Mac Pro Desktop Computer (Six-Core) connected to three Dell U2312HMs.

10.9.3 killed my third monitor on my shiny new 27" iMac. Tried everything, nothing fixes. Thankfully was able to restore a time-machine verson of 10.9.2 (which has also become flaky with external monitors).

Frustrating is an understatement.

please everyone with this problem: submit a bug report via bugreport.apple.com

"...Even though somebody might have reported your bug ahead of you (your report will be marked as a duplicate), it is still very important as your report might provide more information. Besides, more duplicates mean higher priority for Apple engineers." from ivan_pavlov (@ivan_pavlov) @ http://9to5mac.com/2014/05/26/os-x-10-9-3-causing-more-headaches-for-mac-pro-us ers-external-monitors-getting-disabled/#more-324775

Bug report filed...

Another approach is to ask Applecare for access to the prevoius (10.9.2) download that worked.

If they get enough requests for that solution, someone there may finally internalize that the current way of Software Updating time bombs to the field with no way of undoing their damage is mucked up, and something about it needs to change.

I specifically asked the Applecare folks for 10.9.2 and was told it was not available. Can you point me in the right direction?

I rolled my Mac Pro via a Time Machine backup to 10.9.1. Now iMovie won't work.

Thanks.

Not sure what Applecare meant, but here are the 10.9.2 update files

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1725 - <-- 10.9.2 Update

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1726 <-- 10.9.2 Combo update

Thanks much.

I will give it a try later tonight and report back if any glitches in the process.

These are UPDATE files, not the whole OS (as I understand it). I am trying to re-install 10.9.2 over 10.9.2 but it will not let me (that's a whole different issue). Good luck. Getting frustrated like all of you.

I had nothing but trouble in going backwards...best to stay on course with 10.9.3 and let the Engineers release the next update to sort things..

I'm personally going to try to figure a way to at least get two montors working. Maybe wire in a dumb third connection so I can at least have my original two monitors.

I just receive my new 24" display port monitor and I can use four 1080p or less monitors:

- 2 display prot monitor

- One HDMI monitor

- One VGA monitor

The senior advisor I spoke with was suprised I use four monitors and asked how I worked with them. I'd surmise those with a large number of connected monitors are definitely in the minority.

I think this is more telling of the quality control process Apple uses when updating OS X. From my perspective it looks like no test case was exercised that catches this type of problem or it was exercised and the update was made anyway.

Either perspective is disconcerting to me.

Bug report filled also!

One of my colleagues (Wjosten) has suggested:

"If you use Internet Recovery to reinstall OS X, it installs the version of OS X that originally came with your computer."

So if this is a deal-breaker, the suggestion is to invoke Recovery_HD and use it to Re-Install [the old version of] Mac OS X over the Internet. Once complete, very selectively search for the individual updates that take you back to the last working version.