I installed it on my 16" yesterday - haven't seen any of the issues in the article yet.
Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update
331–340 of 440 posts
Re: Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update
#332Is there any actual quantitative evidence this update is any worse than any average update? The article presents three forum posts as evidence... which isn't evidence. I assume every update ever has messed up a handful of people's computers, even if just coincidentally (e.g. the computer was going to die on the next reboot no matter what). If thousands of people were complaining on Twitter that would be one thing. Bu…
2019 imac getting kernel panics when going to sleep.
It seems silly if you're not affected. But now that it's hit me, i'm about to go back to mojave. If it was just a weird bug, I could deal with it. But to kernel panic is a big deal to me. I cant trust the computer to not break if I walk away from it for 10 minutes.
I guess I could turn off sleep, but that doesnt seem like a solution to me. To keep it running all the time so it doesnt break? nah.
Re: Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bricked, to me, means it is physically just fine, but it doesn’t work due to some kind of software issue. “I bricked my phone and had to spend a whole day reading obscure guides to three different levels of embedded software before I could get it working again” feels like a perfectly valid sentence. You can fix a bricked thing, just like you can fix a broken thing, but both require some investment of time and possibl…
I don't agree. imo "Bricked" means you turned your piece of electronics into a brick, it cannot be recovered. Otherwise as mentioned before, it's just "broken", which can be recovered from in most cases.
> a brick, it cannot be recovered.
A bricked device usually can be recovered using only software tools and sometimes a special cable. Sometimes those tools or cables are only possessed by the manufacturer, which frustrates consumers and makes it seem like the devices are unrecoverable, but they’re not.
A broken device, on the other hand, can’t be recovered using software tools or a special cable because it contains broken parts that must be repaired or replaced.
Re: Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update
#334This has been mentioned quite a few times but Apple's software quality seriously has taken a turn for the worse in the last few years. I've usually updated my macs to the latest OS's within a couple of weeks of release, but Catalina is the first time where I still have yet to update. Stories of bugs such as this as well as mail messages getting blanked out and unrecoverable makes me actually scared to upgrade.
With Catalina, I'm also not seeing any major benefit to upgrading. The features list is thin and no 32bit programs kills a lot of random stuff that I can't find a quick replacement for. This is the first time I'm not upgrading macOS in 15+ years.
I'm still running Mojave on my desktop (iMac 5k.) I have the occasional 32-bit, obsolete app I run, and don't want to deal with the upgrades right now.
Re: Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good definition of bricked is "software update rendered the computer unusable for the user".
Indeed. Or two be even more precise, renders the computer functionally equivalent to a brick.
I think the caused-by-software part is key.
The Sonos "recycle mode" bricks the device. If same effect is produced by a bad capacitor (rather than a deliberately-blown efuse), it's just broken.
Re: Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
The SSD in a T2 Mac is encrypted in the same way that an iPhone is, so if the DFU crashes hard enough you’ll have to regenerate new keys and that’s equivalent to drive zero. Glad it helped.
Is it possible to export a recovery key? Because this kind of failure simply due to a bad update shouldn't be acceptable.
You get a recovery key when the original key is generated.
Re: Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update
#337I'm consistently amazed by HN's ability to take the most meaningless, inconsequential part of an article (the scroll behavior, the whitespace, the usage of the word "bricked"), and nitpick it to hell and back instead of actually discussing the article. Bravo.
Look, if the update might "brick" my MBP, meaning break it irreparably, then I have a reason to care about this, and since it can't, I don't. It's a semantic difference but an important one.
Re: Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone know what might have caused this recent downturn in Apple's software quality?
I have never worked at apple but I know a few people that do and did dating back to the 70s. They have a culture of team independence, which is good and bad. Every team gets to choose their own language, tools, and process. This leads to an enormous amount of fragmentation across Apple. Additionally, there's a lot of secrecy and territorial behavior around products and teams. Finally, a lot of Apple's resources are d…
Regularly scheduled software releases makes no goddamn sense to me. Why are MacOS, iOS, iPad OS, and tvOS supposed to ship at the same time? Moreover, does anyone really care if these get updated once per year? Especially tvOS. I really wish Apple would move to releasing new software "about" once every 24 months and just use the extra time to test.
Re: Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. People on reddit are too boring serious and straight to the point. Here on HN we can have a link about some programming language and we start discussing about physics, the Universe or cats. Much more creative. :)
People on reddit are serious ? Which subs are you following ? All I see everywhere there is one word comments such as @nice, @oof,..etc and witty remarks. The discussion quality on HN is far better. Granted we do nitpick here though..
Sure the discussion quality is far better, if you're comparing to reddit in general. Discussion is often on par if you're on a niche subreddit focused on something technical.
From a personal perspective, the discussion quality on HN (on average) has declined over the past couple years. In the past the majority of comments were more substantial; it was more common to see paragraphs of well thought-out comments that delved into nitty gritty details when addressing a point.
But in the past couple years there's been a gradual increase in single-sentence comments that contribute nothing to discussion but only end up taking up screen space. Like the random person who wants to throw in their 2 cents, but have zero cents to offer.
Even HN is not immune to Eternal September.
Re: Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this issue only affect T2 Macs and MacBooks? If so, maybe a DFU restore is needed.
Do T2 Mac’s have DFU mode like iPhone’s? If so that’s news to me and pretty interesting.
The T2 chip itself (runs bridgeOS which is like watchOS) do. It is used only to recover the firmware of the T2, AFAIK it can't be used to write to the SSD directly.
The checkra1n team recently showed that all Macs with a T2 chip are vulnerable to checkm8 exploit used to jailbreak iPhones, and this could persist for a while due to the T2 chip staying on between application processor reboots.
This allows override of mic disconnect (except on the newest models which switched to hardware disconnect), Secure Boot/Firmware Password, and allows you to bypass Apple's signing of Intel ME firmware, TB3 firmware, and CPU microcode. Whether or not there is still Intel signing after that is unknown, but there are already some sort of issues with the host key being leaked on that. The one useful feature I can think of is allowing SSD replacement (you still have to find a way to resolder ofc) and Touch Bar customization.
I think the most likely attack vector for this is an evil maid style attack where corrupted T2 firmware is loaded that rewrites the contents of the SSD while macOS is running to launch further exploit code on that platform.
The one thing not to worry about is if you have FileVault turned on with a password, that still can't be cracked because your password is not stored anywhere on the device. But the BitLocker-style automatic encryption with no password that just locks the SSD to that specific T2 chip isn't useful anymore.