MBP 1 year old next week and seems to be broken

Barks · 12 Nov 2020 at 20:50

Edit: It seems from Googling that Big Sur pre-installation is causing serious issues. I hadn't initiated the download but as soon as my Mac said it was ready for installation I started experiencing all these issues.

It crashed earlier. Since restarting finder keeps crashing, I can't open any applications that aren't OSX apps. Loads of items in activity monitor are saying 'not responding.'

I've done a diagnostic of the hard drive and rebooted several times but it keeps doing it.

Has anyone experienced this before? It's pretty unusable.

Barks · 12 Nov 2020 at 20:55

Diagnostics all fine too

Every time I force restart it just reopens into the same state with windows open etc. This is frustrating.

ChrisD. · 12 Nov 2020 at 21:03

Tried an SMC reset?

Barks · 12 Nov 2020 at 21:20

Yep tried that.

Now it won’t accept my password at login or recovery mode and has locked the login. I’ve had issues before where it inverts the caps on the password but nothing is working now.

What the hell is wrong with it?

Barks · 12 Nov 2020 at 21:25

Ah turns out the keyboard has magically changed so hash is now a pound sign. Christ this is not my night.

Edit: Oh my days it’s now just not accepting any of the new passwords I reset to. How do I just nuke this thing and start again?

Barks · 12 Nov 2020 at 21:37

Edit again: Finally accepted the new password. Guessing it wasn't syncing with their server or something. Now it's all working absolutely fine again.

So confused as to what just happened.

Barks · 12 Nov 2020 at 21:48

Judging from some of the comments here other people have suffered the same.
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/12/macos-big-sur-download-issues/

"My machine can no longer run any 3rd party programs after a restart after several installation failed notices during download."

"Apple just DOS'd every single mac for almost 10 minutes. This is the bigger issue. I shouldn't have to check-in to an Apple server every time i want to launch Microsoft Word."

Both issues affected me only I didn't even know Big Sur was out so hadn't initiated any update. Apple seem to be making a lot of blunders lately. The iOS popup issue a few weeks ago was infuriating too.

Feek · 12 Nov 2020 at 22:24

I've been having problem opening apps, generally stuff bouncing in the dock for ages before opening, or just not opening but I'm still on Catalina after a failed Big Sur install yesterday. I wonder if it's related.

Barks · 13 Nov 2020 at 11:49

Feek said:
I've been having problem opening apps, generally stuff bouncing in the dock for ages before opening, or just not opening but I'm still on Catalina after a failed Big Sur install yesterday. I wonder if it's related.

Yep it was doing this, had several icons bouncing in the dock and refusing to open. For me, Apple are losing their “it just works” reputation that drew many away from PCs. Have encountered all sorts of issues lately, some widely publicised, others just trivial annoyances like the unlock Mac with Apple Watch not working.

fez · 14 Nov 2020 at 12:52

There was a large outage with various apple servers and services that co-incided with the time that we could download Big Sur in the UK (6pm Thurs) and the communication between your mac and the apple servers was buggered to the point of causing all sorts of issues with the OS hanging, lagging and generally being a bit *******. I had some issues with lag but nothing too serious as I wasn't trying to do much but update. Gave up and went to bed and everything was fixed the next day and the download and installation went smoothly and quickly. Downloaded the 12GB in about 40 minutes which is quick for an apple update.

random_matt · 14 Nov 2020 at 16:12

Glad I haven't updated yet.

Barks · 14 Nov 2020 at 19:48

fez said:
There was a large outage with various apple servers and services that co-incided with the time that we could download Big Sur in the UK (6pm Thurs) and the communication between your mac and the apple servers was buggered to the point of causing all sorts of issues with the OS hanging, lagging and generally being a bit *******. I had some issues with lag but nothing too serious as I wasn't trying to do much but update. Gave up and went to bed and everything was fixed the next day and the download and installation went smoothly and quickly. Downloaded the 12GB in about 40 minutes which is quick for an apple update.

Should have taken your slightly more chilled approach. It ended up ruining the last episode of the Queen's Gambit and had me in a foul mood

That also explains why the password reset thing wasn't working either.