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macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

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Re: macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

#131

Post by bscphil »

coldtea wrote: post #58
fifteen1506 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why there will never be a Year of the Linux Desktop -- no-one wants to have to depend on forum posts to fix these kind of issues. /troll

Why the "/troll"? You're 100% right non-ironically: the problem being that on Linux the need to consult forum posts to fix these kind of issues is way more frequent than in macOS.

By the standard of "do you ever need to consult forum posts to solve a problem", sure, Linux is worse than macOS. By the standard of "do you ever need to consult forum posts to fix hardware that has apparently been bricked by a software update", macOS seems to be considerably worse. At least, that's my experience. I've never had hardware damaged by Linux, which I've run almost exclusively. On the other hand the one Apple device I've ever owned got bricked by their software update.

I can't say I've heard of that happening to people on Linux at all other than maybe early days of Xorg. Damage (reversible or otherwise) to hardware is extraordinarily rare on Linux, I can only think of it happening during the very early days of EFI and only under very specific conditions.

Re: macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

#132

Post by lxgr »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #128
lxgr wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I can only tell you what happens when you manually change the resolution from 60 Hz to "ProMotion" in macOS. Presumably ProMotion is a specific mode that the display/display controller/... first needs to be set to. If you start out in anything other than that and then switch to it later in the boot process, you'd get that blank screen for a second, and Apple avoids that by writing the startup mode to non-volati…

...so this is where I'm confused, and where I think GP is confused. Why is there a separate 60 Hz mode that requires blanking the display? Why not just keep dynamic refresh enabled on the panel, and then lock it to updating 60 times per second (which it can do, since it's dynamic) for people who prefer that for whatever reason? What is the difference?

No idea, but if I'd had to speculate: Probably ProMotion activates a quite different internal rendering mode, and fixed 60 Hz mode offers a way to opt out of that?

Many applications have a way of synchronizing their drawing loop to the monitor refresh rate, for example; ProMotion must be doing something clever to support them, or they'd just force the refresh rate to 120 Hz.

macOS also supports variable refresh rate external monitors these days (via both DisplayPort and HDMI); I'm not sure if that would be labeled "ProMotion" in the display settings, but in any case there are things that can go wrong there, and having a way to opt out of that at the HDMI/DisplayPort signal level (and not just fixing the frame rate at the GPU level while driving the external link under VRR) seems like a good idea.

Re: macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

#133

Post by JumpCrisscross »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #116
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where? Do you have any examples? The whole battery gate saga. Touch Bar. The 2013 Mac Pro [1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai...

Yeah but that only proves my original point that Apple only admits mistakes when the public scandals are so violent it can't possibly deny them anymore as the shit pile broomed under the carped has grown so large it makes even them trip on it, so then they just enter damage control mode and PR recovery but not out of the kindness of their heart but because of media backlash. But they never have the common sense to re…

They have pulled updates [1]. The one person I know who was affected was given a replacement.

I suppose I'm failing to see the need for a public statement if you've fixed the problem and provide service to those affected. Nobody can pull the faulty update anymore. And it's not like someone with a bricked device is more likely to see a PR statement than seek out support.

[1] https://osxdaily.com/2023/07/11/apple-pulls-rapid-response-u...

Re: macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

#134

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tpmx wrote: post #119
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they never EVER publicly admit any faults or mistakes with their products Of course they do. They’re just secretive in general, and keep communications edited. Compared to the word salad of modern companies on social media, I find it refreshing. Just fix the problem, issue replacements for those affected and move on quietly.

It's not "refreshing" to hide problems.

> It's not "refreshing" to hide problems

Hiding entails ignoring the problem. They're not doing that. Their track record is to fix it. Not every action needs an accompanying tweet and blog post.

Re: macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

#136

Post by TylerE »

londons_explore wrote: post #124
lxgr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing the refresh rate makes the screen go blank for a second or so. GP of this thread links to a post arguing that Apple is going out of their way to avoid just that during the boot sequence.

Except it doesn't... because during use the dynamic refresh rate changes between 1Hz and 120Hz...

That's not a modeset though, that's just the display working as intended. Basically a VSYNC that runs at a variable clock rather than a fixed refresh.

Re: macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

#137

Post by TylerE »

tpmx wrote: post #119
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they never EVER publicly admit any faults or mistakes with their products Of course they do. They’re just secretive in general, and keep communications edited. Compared to the word salad of modern companies on social media, I find it refreshing. Just fix the problem, issue replacements for those affected and move on quietly.

It's not "refreshing" to hide problems.

It IS refreshing not to be insulted by the usual "You are important to us and we're taking this very seriously" PR fluff.

Re: macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

#138

Post by tpmx »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #134
tpmx wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "refreshing" to hide problems.

> It's not "refreshing" to hide problems Hiding entails ignoring the problem. They're not doing that. Their track record is to fix it. Not every action needs an accompanying tweet and blog post.

Of course they are not ignoring the problem, internally. The issue issue at hand is that they are not being open about the problem.

Re: macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

#139

Post by userbinator »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #121
userbinator wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text-only BIOS setup was the norm for a long time before the stupidly bloated EFI graphical stuff became common. Even then, there were the better full-featured TUIs: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Award_BI... https://liveusb.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/awardbios-firstb... And the simplified crap with tabs that often came with prebuilt PCs but later seems to have spread to others too: https://cdn.…

> Text-only BIOS setup was the norm for a long time Long-time Thinkpad users scoff at that ... while the figure of a duck suddenly enters their minds.. (Yes: I clearly remember my pre-USB thinkpad having a graphical BIOS with windows, icons, and a duck-shaped mouse cursor).

For those who haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTaNi6uL41s

BIOSes of the time were all written in highly-optimised Asm, and I suspect those little "easter eggs" they added were because the programmers knew they had enough space left over to put some more fun stuff in.

There was also AMI WinBIOS that provided a GUI, but I remember it being much less featureful than other BIOSes of the time with a TUI and didn't like mobos that used it, so in that case they may have sacrificed functionality for appearance.

Re: macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

#140

Post by adamomada »

atregir wrote: post #97
neilalexander wrote: post #3

Interestingly I ran into this exact problem with my work MacBook Pro M1 upgrading to Ventura 13.6 and assumed it was a totally isolated incident. I don't have a dual-boot setup either, just a single macOS install. The computer was connected to a Thunderbolt Display during the update which I assume had the same effect of changing the refresh rate to something other-than-ProMotion that the linked article mentions. I ha…

Also what's with the magic trick of entering DFU mode by pressing the buttons at a very specific time for a very specific number of seconds? Felt like singing a song to some fictional Mac OS gods and hoping for the stars to align for the laptop to show up in the second Mac. Ah, also the port you use for the USB-C cable matters!! Has to be the first from the left? But why? Anw, I followed a video by Mr. Macintosh and…

Well it’s a mode you really don’t want users going into if they didn’t intend to, so it kind of makes sense to only activate if the user has deliberately done an action that would not happen randomly.

See Also: entering bootloader mode in android devices

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