El Capitan - avoid, broke my 2013 Macbook Pro..

[sancsell]

Having left the update to settle until November, I was stupid enough to download and try to install on my late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina 13, 16Gb ram etc.. I was tempted through the promised improvement in wifi, which has been pretty dreadful in Yosemite.

It stopped at 90% bar for some hours, tried all manner of reboots to no avail, just went back to the apple logo and the 90% filled bar. Next day the same. After hanging on support for 40 mins, they tried and failed to remedy, as I had, with reboot safe, reset PRAM, etc etc. It would never properly reboot. Disadvantage of a fixed battery. No way of getting it to reboot properly. Even Alt key for network boot failed to work.

Tried to get a Genius appointment at the nearest Apple Store, to discover an 8 day waiting list. Now getting annoyed, as the Apple software update broke my working, less-than-two-year old MBP. Not me. Called to no avai, drove all teh way there to be given a 'turn up tomorrow first thing and we'll try an get you in. Did that, 30 mins after opening time, to be told sorry, nothing until 1.30pm. Hang around and we'll send you a text. Running a company, time is money and this was getting beyond a joke. Anyway, took a patience pill and eventually met the tech at 1.50pm. TWO hours later at the now less-than-appropriately named Genius Bar, the result is a wiped drive and start again with new install of Yosemite. Fair do's, he did try. Maybe there is a little nugget of genius there... no El at all... Now spending another half day re-loading all the programmes.

So heed the warning. Don't be tempted.

 

[sancsell]

PS, and the Apple forum website is broke too, says back soon. Has done since Sunday. What is going on with Apple? Please come back Mr Jobs.

 

[keysofanxiety]

Did you not have a Time Machine backup? Always best to keep regular backups or at least a full backup before you're going to update your OS, best to bear in mind for future. Overall the update to El Cap has been silky smooth for a vast majority of people, there were certainly more issues upgrading in the earlier iterations.

 

[c8rlo]

sancsell, sorry you're having bad issues but glad to see you're getting back on track. the only issue i had was trying to upgrade on my work's wifi but got hung up and completed the install at home with no problems, i've had zero issues with upgrades to any of my Macs(MBP, MBA, & Mac Mini).

 

[mikecwest]

So, El Capitan, did not "break" your MacBook Pro.....You had a failed update for some reason. Sometimes the updates can take a LONG time....It looks like you rebooted after only 40 minutes of the "hung update." Forty minutes, is not uncommon when updating to a new version os OS X. It is likely that it is making a new install, then copying/moving all of you files from your previous OS that need to be moved. Depending on what you have installed, there could be a LOT of stuff to move. Garage Band, for example, uses 2.5 GB or so in your Application Support folder. If you use iDVD or iMovie, or anything by Adobe, they add a LOT of large files/data to that folder.

Next time, be patient, just leave it to update before you go to sleep, wake up in the morning and you would most likely have been ok.

I updated my wife's iMac (I think it’s a mid 2010), it took nearly two hours, with a good five minute "hang" on a black screen....I almost panicked, but decided to just let it be...Everything worked out ok.

Additionally, your MacBook was not "broke," it was most likely an incomplete update, because you restarted before it finished.

 

[sancsell]

So, El Capitan, did not "break" your MacBook Pro.....You had a failed update for some reason. Sometimes the updates can take a LONG time....It looks like you rebooted after only 40 minutes of the "hung update." Forty minutes, is not uncommon when updating to a new version os OS X. It is likely that it is making a new install, then copying/moving all of you files from your previous OS that need to be moved. Depending on what you have installed, there could be a LOT of stuff to move. Garage Band, for example, uses 2.5 GB or so in your Application Support folder. If you use iDVD or iMovie, or anything by Adobe, they add a LOT of large files/data to that folder.

Next time, be patient, just leave it to update before you go to sleep, wake up in the morning and you would most likely have been ok.

I updated my wife's iMac (I think it’s a mid 2010), it took nearly two hours, with a good five minute "hang" on a black screen....I almost panicked, but decided to just let it be...Everything worked out ok.

Additionally, your MacBook was not "broke," it was most likely an incomplete update, because you restarted before it finished.

Actually I left it alone until THE NEXT DAY. Then tried a backup too, still not able to access that.

 

[sancsell]

Did you not have a Time Machine backup? Always best to keep regular backups or at least a full backup before you're going to update your OS, best to bear in mind for future. Overall the update to El Cap has been silky smooth for a vast majority of people, there were certainly more issues upgrading in the earlier iterations.

Yes I did have a Time Machine backup, tried access and booting up from that the NEXT DAY after leaving it overnight....

 

[sancsell]

So, El Capitan, did not "break" your MacBook Pro.....You had a failed update for some reason. Sometimes the updates can take a LONG time....It looks like you rebooted after only 40 minutes of the "hung update." Forty minutes, is not uncommon when updating to a new version os OS X. It is likely that it is making a new install, then copying/moving all of you files from your previous OS that need to be moved. Depending on what you have installed, there could be a LOT of stuff to move. Garage Band, for example, uses 2.5 GB or so in your Application Support folder. If you use iDVD or iMovie, or anything by Adobe, they add a LOT of large files/data to that folder.

Next time, be patient, just leave it to update before you go to sleep, wake up in the morning and you would most likely have been ok.

I updated my wife's iMac (I think it’s a mid 2010), it took nearly two hours, with a good five minute "hang" on a black screen....I almost panicked, but decided to just let it be...Everything worked out ok.

Additionally, your MacBook was not "broke," it was most likely an incomplete update, because you restarted before it finished.

Sorry, see other posts, I did leave it entirely alone until the NEXT Day!

 

[sancsell]

Actually I left it alone until THE NEXT DAY. Then tried a backup too, still not able to access that.

The 40 minutes was the next day waiting on the phone for support...

 

[mikecwest]

The 40 minutes was the next day waiting on the phone for support...

Ok, I misread that part....At least in the end your MacBook was not broken.

 

[sancsell]

Ok, I misread that part....At least in the end your MacBook was not broken.

No, but what a work up for a faulty update. I'd be the first with a hand up if I broke it by dropping on the floor, but a software update shouldn't. And there others on forums who have exactly the same 'hanging' 90%finished bar too.

Still can't get on any support communities, they're all saying "we'll be back". Maybe someone tried updating to El Capitan internally...

 

[Max(IT)]

very sad.
I updated 3 Macs, an old 2009 Mini and a 11" MBA from 2010 included, without any issue

 

[psik]

some people lose, some people win, gotta take risks in life.

 

[cynics]

some people lose, some people win, gotta take risks in life.

Ya updating a Mac, living on the brink of self destruction..........

 

[aristobrat]

No, but what a work up for a faulty update. I'd be the first with a hand up if I broke it by dropping on the floor, but a software update shouldn't.

I agree with you. In 2015, you would think that some company has figured out how to guarantee that an OS upgrade will run 100% perfectly on millions of computer. AFAIK, nobody's figured that out yet. I have yet to see an Apple or Microsoft OS update that doesn't end up causing major problems for a subset of customers.

I'm truly sorry that you were in that subset this time.

Until a company does that figure that out, on a Mac, one of the easiest things you can do to protect yourself from that is to buy a cheap external USB drive and use a program like SuperDuper! to clone your Mac to the external drive before you update. When done closing, unplug that drive, set it to the side, and then update your Mac. If that update borks up the drive in your Mac (like your experience with El Capitan), you can plug in the external drive and reboot you Mac from it. It's not as fast as the internal drive, but you're at least up and running until you have time to fix whatever happened to your internal drive. (which may be to clone the external USB drive onto the internal drive -- nicer than reinstalling from scratch like you're doing now because you won't have to reinstall apps and stuff manually)

If it helps any, for every OS X update that you installed successfully, there were people going through (then) what you just went through (now, with El Capitan).

For example:

Yosemite broke my Macbook

osx - Mac OS X Yosemite broke my iMac

I think Yosemite broke my computer.

my mac pro crashed during Yosemite install

My OS X Yosemite nightmare

 

[simonsi]

While its working, make a bootable USB key drive (8GB) using DiskmakerX, then you can easily boot off that when you have issues and recover any issues with the main drive. Useful addition to TM backup.

 

[leman]

Millions of users who are running 10.11 without any issues are energetically chewing their popcorn following this thread

BTW, I have updated our server infrastructure to 10.11 yesterday. It took about 30 minutes. Everything runs smoothly and faster than ever.

 

[pat500000]

some people lose, some people win, gotta take risks in life.

That's not what "updating" is about. It should be working rather than causing more problems, don't you agree?

 

[leman]

That's not what "updating" is about. It should be working rather than causing more problems, don't you agree?

True, but update is a non-trivial change to your OS configuration so some problems can occur. Also, we lack any reliable estimate on how many users are experiencing issues after update. Based on website visit statistics, 10.11 is installed on approximately 30% of Macs. Disregarding people who bought a new machine in a last month, this means that dozens of Mac users have updated. If there were major problems, we would have certainly heard about it by now. So far, I do not see any reason to think that 10.11 poses any more issues on upgrading over any other OS in the history.

Furthermore, it depends on what software you have installed etc. I never had any issues upgrading, and I think it is in part because I don't install any third-party kernel extensions, and I don't use applications that abuse undocumented wholes in the OS or hack the OS functionality (like all these Finder enhancers). Apple could certainly use more work in this directions, e.g. maintaining a database of software that can potentially cause issues and warn the user about it. Then again, its a very difficult task.

In the end, I believe that if you play by the rules (that is, adhere to Apple's documentation and guidelines), you won't have any issues. For instance, I have tons of custom config such as launchd daemons that do all kinds of thing both on my machine and on our servers — and all of this stuff was carried over to the 10.11 update without any issues. Unfortunately, many third-party applications do not really play by the rules. You don't need to look far — already MS Office and Adobe applications do some really messed up stuff.

 

[simonsi]

That's not what "updating" is about. It should be working rather than causing more problems, don't you agree?

Of course but there are a myriad of variables, latent hardware issues, previous updates of other firmware etc etc that mean an individual update can stall/fail.

To expect the entire user-base to have a fault-free update is just unrealistic.

 

[pat500000]

Of course but there are a myriad of variables, latent hardware issues, previous updates of other firmware etc etc that mean an individual update can stall/fail.

To expect the entire user-base to have a fault-free update is just unrealistic.

Yeah, but requires improvement.

 

[pat500000]

True, but update is a non-trivial change to your OS configuration so some problems can occur. Also, we lack any reliable estimate on how many users are experiencing issues after update. Based on website visit statistics, 10.11 is installed on approximately 30% of Macs. Disregarding people who bought a new machine in a last month, this means that dozens of Mac users have updated. If there were major problems, we would have certainly heard about it by now. So far, I do not see any reason to think that 10.11 poses any more issues on upgrading over any other OS in the history.

Furthermore, it depends on what software you have installed etc. I never had any issues upgrading, and I think it is in part because I don't install any third-party kernel extensions, and I don't use applications that abuse undocumented wholes in the OS or hack the OS functionality (like all these Finder enhancers). Apple could certainly use more work in this directions, e.g. maintaining a database of software that can potentially cause issues and warn the user about it. Then again, its a very difficult task.

In the end, I believe that if you play by the rules (that is, adhere to Apple's documentation and guidelines), you won't have any issues. For instance, I have tons of custom config such as launchd daemons that do all kinds of thing both on my machine and on our servers — and all of this stuff was carried over to the 10.11 update without any issues. Unfortunately, many third-party applications do not really play by the rules. You don't need to look far — already MS Office and Adobe applications do some really messed up stuff.

Yeah, there is no perfect upgrade...for me coming from sl OS X.. It needs improvement like two steps and 1 step back. Point being.. I have to question QA people to test it fully before putting out for public.

 

[leman]

Yeah, there is no perfect upgrade...for me coming from sl OS X.. It needs improvement like two steps and 1 step back. Point being.. I have to question QA people to test it fully before putting out for public.

And yet it was SL what had probably the most devastating upgrade bug in the history of OS X (the one that would delete users data). The point is, it is not possible to test it fully, because there are too many possible configurations outside of Apple's control. What can remedy the situation somehow is having a strict set of enforced rules, and that's exactly what Apple is trying to do. For instance, only allowing signed drivers, preventing applications from writing to system locations, properly isolating the applications from each other — all these things make it easier to carry out an upgrade in a systematic way.

 

[MagicBoy]

Yeah, but requires improvement.

All software requires continual improvement, that's why it's on the lifecycle flowcharts. Human nature is that the odd error creeps even with QA checks.

 

[aristobrat]

Yeah, there is no perfect upgrade...for me coming from sl OS X.. It needs improvement like two steps and 1 step back. Point being.. I have to question QA people to test it fully before putting out for public.

IMO, there are an infinite number of possible conditions a device can be in (both software and hardware wise) before an update.

Both Microsoft and Apple seem to realize that, and the correlating fact that their QA people can't recreate every set of conditions, so both companies have started to utilize public beta testing, where tens of thousands of additional people act as QA folks to further test the OS before it's released to everyone.

And even then with all that, not all issues get identified.

So throwing more QA at it before launch reduces the number of issues, but still doesn't eliminate them all.