High Sierra freeze

why is there still no word from apple after more than a week...

That is normal to Apple. These issues were already in the High Sierra public beta. Apple has known about them for atleast 6 months now and they still decided to release it. And Apple never speaks publicly about *any* bug in their products. Usually we just get to read about "something fixed" in the release notes. So far this has not been mentioned to be fixed in any release note.

Hi,

I did the current update for HS and for the last week or so, the only freezing that occurs now is when waking from a long period of sleep. I have used my computer the last 2 days for 5-6 hour stretches without a freeze, even if the computer goes to sleep for an hour. Dropped from 5-6 times a day, to only freezing when waking after a long period of time.

Oddly I have a brand new MacBook Pro with all the bells. And I rarely if at all experience any problems. This leads me to think that Apple build in to there OS's planned obsolescence, much the same way they do with iOS, i.e. dragging performance down. Having said that I would not expect the problem to manifest itself on a 2014 Mac Mini, but perhaps on my 2012 MacBook Air because it is much older. Performance wise the MacBook Air is an i7 with 8GB and 256GB SSD and it flies, but does stutter occasionally when Safari is running. My Mac Mini, just stops, freezes with the beach ball, but again only when using Safari. Switching to Chrome does seem to get rid of the issue.

mrwrighty wrote:

Oddly I have a brand new MacBook Pro with all the bells. And I rarely if at all experience any problems. This leads me to think that Apple build in to there OS's planned obsolescence, much the same way they do with iOS, i.e. dragging performance down. Having said that I would not expect the problem to manifest itself on a 2014 Mac Mini, but perhaps on my 2012 MacBook Air because it is much older. Performance wise the MacBook Air is an i7 with 8GB and 256GB SSD and it flies, but does stutter occasionally when Safari is running. My Mac Mini, just stops, freezes with the beach ball, but again only when using Safari. Switching to Chrome does seem to get rid of the issue.

oddly enough, youre too daft to read the thread and notice that several of us here have brand new macs

My use case:

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) with Nvidia 750M.

+ external monitor 4k. Both displays used custom scalling.

Currently macOS 10.13.1

Issue began after upgrade (Sierra -> High Sierra).

WindowServer process always eat memory (after update to .13.1 less, but still).

Immediately after reboot WindowServer process has ~500MB memory (and 0 compressed memory),

after 1 day usage - ~1000MB (and ~300MB compressed memory).

Problems with freeze starting after viewing any video (html5 or any media player) or when used IDE (Komodo for me)..

When problem started - only way for fix - reboot. Not possible to use a laptop at such time.

Also installed alternative ndidia driver - not helped.

Hi folks,

I see that 10.3.2 did not fix the problem for some people. I upgraded macOS yesterday, so it might be too quick conclusion, but I put it immediately under same 10x of load that would definitely result in a freeze for 10.3.1 (some brew recompilation for something like 4 hours) and it went without an issue. So, fingers crossed, I hope I won't see it any longer and 10.3.2 will resolve the issue at least for for some people.

My hw (that experienced the problem) is Mac mini 2012 with two SSD disks inside.

Regards,

Grigory

My MBP 2017 top spec is fine as is my MacBook Air 2012 i7 8GB RAM, however my Mac Mini 2014 suffers badly with the freezing. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern of age of the affected machines other than the more powerful newer devices seemingly less vulnerable to the freezing. I thought my Mac Mini was sorted when I switched to Chrome but that is not the case but I have also noticed it has started to get slow. I have about 17k photos on it and run Luminar 2018 and it can struggle to load some raw NEF files in the Photos app, taking around 15 seconds before the image is editable. I have upgraded this machine to SSD and initially it flew, but since upgrading the High Sierra, it has started to struggle on some functions.

My 5K iMac started freezing up with photos and photoshop shortly after upgrading to high sierra.

I called Apple support, even went to a senior tech. All they could suggest is reseting the firmware and in the end could only offer that I restore the older OS.

They didnt seem to be aware that others were experience this problem and seemed pretty helpless about diagnosing what could be wrong - even to the point of not having any tools or diagnostics that can help.

They had me do this as well - and it seemed like it worked for a while - but after more use of the computer it froze again. The way it freezes, I sometimes see a window partially painted, that's been moved or being resized - which leaves me to believe that the problem is somewhere in the windows drawing - others have suggested a problem with a graphics driver. Given that all my freezes occur when manipulating or displaying images in photoshop or the built in picture app - I am leaning toward the problem being a fault with the graphics.

As I mentioned before, it sometimes freezes the display (but not the mouse) for minutes at a time.

I do the PRAM resets (Option-Command-P-R) every time it freezes and I need to restart. Does not help.

Also, this time at the Genius bar, they blamed it on Google Chrome.

This freeze started happening only with the latest upgrade to High Sierra (might have had a Chrome update around that time too, not sure who the culprit is). Strange thing is, reverting back to Sierra and wiping the disk clean of applications did not help. So, the Chrome theory has some merit.

I am using a 5K iMac so I am not even sure if there is automatic graphics switching on that platform. But will investigate.

As this only happens for me when manipulating graphics and video in PhotoShop and Pictures and the freeze does not affect the cursor, and when the freeze occurs there is frequently half drawn objects left on the screen - suggesting something in the graphics system hanging up. The weird part is that it nearly always recovers and catches up after a few minutes - something like a pending IO operation timeout.

Lately I cant seem to contact anyone in Apple support who can interact and suggest diagnostic approaches based around these observations - also phone quality has gone to **** on the support line. Very frustrating for someone who needs to use this equipment for living.

Coregts wrote:

Macbook pro 2016 with the Radeon 460 freezes all the time....

I would assume that 2016 and 2017 models would be tested by Apple before releasing high Sierra.

I have the same model 2.7Ghz i7 16GB RAM and have not suffered any freezing at all, my 2012 i7 Macbook Air does not suffer either, although my 2014 Mac Mini does. I have upgrade all machines to HS 10.3.2 and it is much better on my Mac Mini, certainly less freezes, but I do suffer with the Photos App stalling closing the library occasionally. I have 16K photos stored which might be the issue although I did upgrade the HDD to an SSD recently which improved matters no end.

ekwin123 wrote:

Thank you very much RJW2 for spelling it out for mrwrighty... He (mrwrighty) fits the customer profile that companies target to exploit.

Sorry to disappoint you. The planned obsolescence doesn't necessarily hold true for desktop devices. You have the choice to upgrade the OS or not. If your device is stable on Sierra, leave it on Sierra, no-one is forcing you to update. As I have mentioned, after upgrading all my devices to High Sierra, my 2012 MacBook Air does not suffer from freezes but my Mac Mini 2014 does, but less so with OSX 10.13.2. My MacBook pro 2016 i7 16GB is fine also as you would expect. If Apple had planned obsolescence for devices my 2012 MacBook Air would be suffering the same fate as my newer 2014 Mac Mini. As an Apple applications developer and Microsoft applications developer I tend to hit my machines hard and expect them to earn their keep. I can see planned obsolescence in mobile devices because of the numbers sold. It is a trade off to provide updates to older hardware and keeping the performance/battery life to a reasonable level. Mobile device users feel hard done by if they don't get the latest and greatest feature set on their device, which would be another complaint aimed at Apple if they couldn't. People tend to change their mobile devices every couple of years, but desktop devices you would expect to keep running for 5, 6 years or longer. As many have said going back to Sierra brings back stability and no freezes. Could the problem be related to the new APFS filling system that Apple introduced, thats doesn't seem to have been mentioned much in this thread. Apple have a very good history in supporting older hardware for many years. Even Microsoft now say that only certain processors will support Windows 10 whether you like it or not. Many companies still run Windows 7 for function and stability and will do beyond the end of life of Windows 7. How many Android handsets can be upgraded to newer functionality after you have purchased them, not many.

I am also having the same issue with my 2014 27-inch iMac. Funny thing is, I have a 2009 21-inch iMac which is also running macOS High Sierra--it has never frozen. One difference is that it's not using the new APFS file system.

Coregts wrote:

New Macbook pro 2016 with dedicated Radeon Pro 460 has the same issue. interestingly, the lower version of this GPU, which is also cheaper, does not have the issue.

I have the same top spec MacBOOK Pro 2016. i7 16gb Ram. No issues at all for me. I also have a top end MacBook Air 2012. Again no problems on High Sierra, but my cheaper Mac Mini 2014 does suffer the probem and it has the lower spec graphics.