Resolved Macbook Pro 2015 with OSX El Capitan 10.11.4 system wide freeze (Read the details)

[lobo1978]

None of my macs experience this...
iMac 27" Retina late 2015 (running 10.11.4)
iMac 27" 2012 (10.11.4)
Macbook Pro Retina early 2015 x2 (10.11.4 + 10.11.5 latest PB)

 

[spamman]

I have the Mac in question - I get about 2 freezes a week. 'Cept yesterday, froze twice. I looked in system log and had the same entries as user Tacite had ( early poster in this thread). Seems it always happens with Safari up with video. Only key that works is PowerOff ( thank goodness).

 

[renatoaguiar9]

Uninstall .SAVER screen saver "Aerial.saver", if you have it installed. Decided me.

Hello, for more than a month now, ever since I updated to the final 10.11.4 my macbook completely freezes in Safari and other apps at random times, about once a week.
It usually happens when I click on a link, switch tabs, go back one page, etc. The cursor freezes, the screen freezes, the keyboard...it becomes absolutely unresponsive, even the trackpad loses it's force touch and you can't feel the feedback vibration, the only thing that is still responsive is the caps lock light.

It never recovers from the freeze on its own and the only way out is to force shutdown.
If you are able to recover from it after 30sec-1min, you are probably experiencing a different issue than the one we have in this thread so please post that issue here instead.

I don't have any extensions installed in Safari, and flash is disabled.

Update: Looks like this is not an isolated case, it's a system framework or an Intel Graphics driver bug, a lot of people report 10.11.4 freezing especially people with rMBP 13'' 2015.

Please take a moment and report this to http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html and include this thread link so they can see this.

Also, if you are able, post a video when this happens next time to you. I am collecting them and I'll make a compilation once I get enough of them.

Update 2:
Safari Technology Preview Version 1 also freezes.
OS X 10.11.5 beta 1 also freezes.
I just had a freeze in Chrome, plus in Photoshop, therefore I'm joining everyone else who has "The freeze" in other apps.


Here is the moment in the log I believe the crash happened, pay attention to the first 3 lines:

Mar 25 18:53:01 Macbook com.apple.WebKit.WebContent[2172]: [18:53:01.241] FigAgglomeratorSetObjectForKey signalled err=-16020 (kFigStringConformerError_ParamErr) (NULL key) at /Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/CoreMedia/CoreMedia-1731.15.202/Prototypes/LegibleOutput/FigAgglomerator.c line 92
Mar 25 18:53:06 Macbook com.apple.WebKit.WebContent[2172]: <<<< VT-DS >>>> VTDecompressionSessionWaitForAsynchronousFrames: WARNING: waited 5 seconds for video decoder to complete asynchronous frames; maybe it is stuck or has a buggy path that does not complete a frame?
Mar 25 18:53:08 Macbook watchdogd[284]: [watchdog_daemon] @(_wd_daemon_service_thread) - service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive
Mar 25 18:53:10 Macbook Safari[509]: tcp_connection_destination_handle_tls_close_notify 572 closing socket due to TLS CLOSE_NOTIFY alert
Mar 25 18:53:10 Macbook Safari[509]: tcp_connection_tls_session_error_callback_imp 576 __tcp_connection_tls_session_callback_write_block_invoke.434 error 32
Mar 25 18:53:16 Macbook spindump[2217]: Invalid connection: com.apple.coresymbolicationd
Mar 25 18:53:16 Macbook com.apple.WebKit.WebContent[2172]: <<<< VT-DS >>>> VTDecompressionSessionWaitForAsynchronousFrames: WARNING: waited 10 seconds for video decoder to complete asynchronous frames; maybe it is stuck or has a buggy path that does not complete a frame?
Mar 25 18:53:28 Macbook com.apple.usbmuxd[83]: _SendAttachNotification Device cc:20:e8:13:ef:0c@fe80::ce20:e8ff:fe13:ef0c._apple-mobdev2._tcp.local. has already appeared on interface 4. Suppressing duplicate attach notification.
Mar 25 18:53:41 Macbook CommCenter[242]: Telling CSI to go low power.
Mar 25 18:53:41 Macbook AirPlayUIAgent[570]: 2016-03-25 06:53:41.997718 PM [AirPlayUIAgent] BecomingInactive: NSWorkspaceWillSleepNotification
Mar 25 18:53:41 Macbook sharingd[297]: 18:53:41.999 : BTLE scanner Powered Off
Mar 25 18:53:42 --- last message repeated 1 time ---

[doublepost=1463169673][/doublepost]Uninstall .SAVER screen saver "Aerial.saver", if you have it installed. Decided me.

 

[tywebb13]

I do not have a backup of 10.11.3. I back up all my work files and documents in the cloud. I did not assume that an OS update can break basic internet browsing.

And where can I get an image of 10.11.3? People seem to have them lying around, but with all my searching I do not seem to find anything...

One should do a time machine backup before updating the system so that if problems like this arise it would be easy to downgrade via restore from backup.

If you have no such backup then your only option is a clean install.

A clean install of 10.11.3 would require the full installer.

The 10.11.3 full installer is no longer available from apple. But you can still find it elsewhere by googling. But posting the link in this forum apparently breaches macrumors rules.

And although I use 10.11.5 betas I wouldn't encourage people to install these as a fix for this bug - because installing betas typically introduces MORE bugs (even if it fixes this particular one).

 

[Sarahsee123]

Yeah, it looks like your crash is the same as mine, I can't find "/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs" so I can't see what's there on line 92.
From my understanding, this is definitely a Safari bug, it happens randomly, every week or so, right after I press on a link (in Safari), not sure if it can be manifested in other browsers since it's the Webkit that crashes, specifically the FigAgglomeratorSetObjectForKey, I see more and more people reporting this so hopefully someone notices it.

 

[sandbridge]

In my case (see more detailed post above), the system freeze (and subsequent reboot) seemed to be more frequent in Mail than in Safari. But again, that might be of no consequence nor contradictory. Memory addressing, graphics rendering, etc, can be the same routine under multiple applications.

 

[jerryk]

Same issue here... Can anyone confirm if I stop using Safari it will not happen again?
(Using MBPr early 2015 and OSX 10.11.4)

Thanks

A few replies up someone said it happened to them while in firefox

 

[kleineroscar]

I suffered from the same problem, but a fix i found (or at least now it barely happens anymore) is if i stop using twitter on my mac.

 

[asr36]

Hi, I only just found out this morning about this possible issue.

I have a 13' 2015 Macbook pro and have had this occur twice but it didn't concern me as I run this computer with all data from the cloud. I also have 27' 2013 that had a similar issue which worried me more. I have since migrated all data (700gb) to cloud storage and reconfigured my time machine backups. I also have 13' Macbook Air but have had no issues.

The issue with the 27' started at the same time as this error was reported. I have run hardware tests on this machine and it has come up clear. I have since installed a clean version and have had nil issues.

 

[Sarahsee123]

I host a radio program and just upgraded to this refurbished Mac.... Imagine my shock to experience the freeze two weeks ago... And then THIS week, it did it 4x in about a 30 minute stretch.... I will be playing vinyl & CDs until this situation gets rectified.

 

[Andrewep]

Has anyone had an issue with os x not recognizing the battery immediately upon update?

 

[Antonnn]

You gonna ignore the 25-35% of the non 2015 Macs

Look, I understand your rage from my comment, but I'm not ignoring anyone. The macbook is not a magical machine that has only one issue, there were, are, and will be multiple reports forever about issues.
It is very common to say "my computer is freezing" and every person can mean something different when they say that and that's exactly what most of the 25% are saying here.


For your convenience, I added here the comments of all the people that voted for "Other Mac" which is "the 10%".
From 22 votes!! only 9!! actually posted to this thread and here are their issues, which are partially or completely unrelated:

1.
"Am not even using the El Capitan update yet.
Nor have changed anything.
Was just about to finally update this morning.
Not aware of what was taking place, I could not get into my email, although i could calendars etc.
Concerned, I changed my password.
It said it was accepted but I still can't get my email and its locked me out of my home network for streaming to the TV etc.
Can still access Netflix but that's it.

Nor will it recognize the new password on either of my cell phones-yet to try two ipads but i know they won't work either.
My email just stopped responding as of sometime overnight.
Also not letting me change the password in my mail settings on mail app on the Mac.
I was able to change it at icloud.com but I can get in to everything but email.

I am on a 27" retina iMAC using Yosemite still at 10.10.5"



2.
"Just to add that I get safari freezing especially when hitting a href. safari 9.1 os 10.11.4 iMac 21.5 late 2012."


3.
I have a 27" iMac bought in the fall of 2011. Since the 10.11.4 update, it has not been randomly freezing, but it often beachballs on awaking from sleep, and I cannot log in without power cycling.

4.
I took my iMac in to the Genius Bar and they told me it was a logic board problem, even though it only occurred once I upgraded 10.11.4. It was crashing almost every 30 minutes. New logic board, and the freezing is not occurring, yet. So, is the issue totally hardware independent? Hard to say.

5.
It's happening to me too and I don't even have multiple graphic cards. I've got a Mac mini late 2012 with Intel hd4000 and I've experienced multiple graphic hangs and black screens. I'm on the latest release of El Capitán since October.

6. My issue is a bit different in that it freezes permanently but restarts on it's own after a minute or so. I also don't have to be watching youtube or whatever, it freezes when I'm not even using it.
"end quote"- he is also reporting the freeze after the latest beta 4 which at least 5 people reported that it was fixed, so not sure what's happening here.

7. Uninstall .SAVER screen saver "Aerial.saver", if you have it installed. Decided me.

8. FWIW I'm getting the crashes and beachballs with a late 2013 Retina MBP 13". It seems like it's tied to certain web content - I haven't had trouble with Youtube videos as others have, but certain news sites (especially the ones that have kind of terrible layout and a lot of annoying ad pop-ups and kind of generally click-bait construction) seem to trigger it more than anything else. In fact I don't think it's ever happened outside of that - none of the sites I routinely use, none of my business applications, Facebook, etc - none of them seem to cause the problem.

9. WOW, running El capitan 10.11.4, never have an issue on MBP (late 2013) 15" 16GB/512.
occasionally safari contextual menu have a slow response, but nothing more.

I don't understand what are you trying to say about the common denominator, the common denominator is the macbook and imacs from 2015 and the specific drivers used for their hardware.
It's simple:
- take one rMBP 13 2015 that is affected by the issue.
- take one rMBP 13 2015 that is either not affected by the issue or downgrade it do 10.11.3
- test both for the exact changes made in 10.11.4.
I'm pretty sure their engineers can spot the issue very quick without the need to test it on 20 different machines from different years and configurations.

I'm by no means an apple engineer, I posted my own opinion on this issue, this doesn't mean that I'm right, I'm just speculating and only apple can confirm this if they mention it in their changelogs once 10.11.5 is released.

 

[Topinio]

Not sure if this is the same issue, but my MacBook Air (Mid 2012) has been crashing like a B*stard since 10.11.4 was installed, usually on plugging in the Time Machine drive.

 

[Rique]

Retina, 15" MBP, late 2013. 2.6 GHz i7, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB - 10.11.4 - I also have a freezing issue, although as you can see, I do not have a 2015 13" Retina MBP. My issue is consistently associated with the sleep state. If I put the Mac to sleep (often done by closing the lid, but not always), when I try to wake it up, it refuses to wake. No amount of key presses or trackpad clicks can revive it and so I am forced to do a hard boot. This just started with the 10.11.4 update.

 

[D_S_W]

Early 2015 MacBook Pro 13"

Same problem here with the freezing and forced restart.

It will also reboot in the middle of the night, who knows why.

In addition there is a problem where occasionally if you connect an external monitor it will be detected but will stay black. The mouse will still behave as if the desktop (visible on the laptop) is extended onto the external monitor.

If you close the lid of the laptop the desktop will then appear on the external monitor.

Open the lid of the laptop and a geometric pattern appears on the external monitor.

Requires a restart to behave normally.

I wonder if these problems are all related. Disappointed with this machine, it was supposed to be top of the line.

 

[Vermifuge]

From time to time my 15" 2015 MacBook Pro running OS X (10.11.4 (15E65)) will lock up. It seems like safari is doing something. When this happens I can't switch desktops or applications. Safari and everything else become unresponsive. I can hear people speaking though Team Speak, but I can't use the mouse, trackpad or keyboard. I have to just wait it out until I get control back. It seems like a buffer remembers the actions I have taken and plays them all out in quick succession once the system returns to normal. The amount of time the systems takes to recover can be anywhere from 30s to several min. In some cases I have waited long enough that forcing a shut down was the best option.

But this has been going on since before 10.11.4 I would say its been happing since i updated to El Capitan.

I have a separate issue with Safari. If I should suspend my laptop by closing the lid while running Safari, it will sometimes become unresponsive when I resume operation. After opening my laptop, Safari's open tabs can be refreshed as normal. If I open a new tab or click a link to a new site Safari will not open the new link and it will act like its loading the page but nothing will happen. I will need to force quit Safari and open it again.

 

[cherrybombaz]

I know for me, it's easy to tell what's happening on the 2015 model because the Force Touch trackpad shuts down. Oddly though, last time it happened to me, the audio from the video I was watching still played in the background, indicating that while the trackpad and keyboard were not responding, the system was still functioning in SOME capacity. Very strange.

Yep, I've noticed the exact same problem. Everything freezes on the screen as well as the force touch trackpad, but apps continue to run and video/Facetime still continue to run.

 

[christine85]

I saw this on the front page and maybe this explains my issues with my mid 2011 iMac. It started last week when the computer gets really hot from being in use for 2+ hours. I heard a buzzing noise coming from the right side once. When it gets hot, the computer gets really slow even though the CPU is normal, then I get the rainbow colored ball and it's frozen. My mouse does work but cannot click anything. It happens when i'm doing normal computing -- email, web browsing, music. When it froze around 3+ hours watching a YouTube video, the video kept playing, but the rest of the computer was frozen with the rainbow colored ball and the top right disappearing. (clock, log in name) The only way out was a force shut down and reboot and everything acts normal again. It's at shop now since everything I was looking for online kept directing me to the fans. The tech guy ran diagnostics and everything came up normal but the computer was booted cold so he's going to run it for a few hours to replicate the issue and then run diagnostics. I will give him a call on Monday with this and see if it's related to El Capitan

 

[Foxdie8]

I have been told by a friend that apple released an internal note for apple store employee regarding this problem : they are working on a fix.

 

[ako323]

Thanks for this thread and the mods for featuring it on the front page. Don't think I would've found it otherwise.

Just wanted to chime in as I'm having the same problems.
Using an early 2015 Macbook Pro 13" with OS X 10.11.4

I notice the freezes happen most often when there is an autoplay video in the browser. Happens in both Safari and Chrome, so it's not due to the browser, as confirmed by others here.

Apple support has sent my system's capture data to their engineers and waiting to hear back. In the meantime, I'll give the beta 4 a try. Thanks for the link @Antonnn !

OP here.

I'm going to bite the bullet and announce that 10.11.5 beta 4 has fixed the freeze for me.
I am adding back all my extensions, flash, etc. exactly the way I had it before 10.11.4 to test this further.

After one full week of testing with 12-15 hours a day and lots of youtube videos and exclusively Safari use I haven't had a freeze.

Please read my first post for exact details of this issue.

Seems like a lot of people suggest stuff so I'll chime in:

1. Chrome/Firefox/Opera does not fix the issue, if it does, you weren't affected by this specific issue.
2. If you have an older machine (non-2015) you are most likely not affected by this issue(the insanely lag caused by the hard drive cable failure in the macbook pro 2012 comes to mind).
3. Disabling flash doesn't help.
4. The issue is only affecting 10.11.4, if you had it earlier, it's not the issue discussed in this thread.


The solution right now is to wait for 10.11.5 which should be released in about a month-ish.
If you have a time machine backup use that to downgrade to 10.11.3.
If you want to bite the bullet like me and upgrade to the beta, register to the public beta program. (it's free)

If you don't, but you have decent skills searching google and can spot a good blog from a scam, search for an offline full 10.11.3 installer, if you search through this thread you can find more detailed steps on how to do this, including the expired certificate fix.

 

[Chrizx74]

This happened to me on my hack if I plugged an usb 3 device into usb 3 port (hw intel 1e31). On El Capitan I had to disable usb3 completely from bios or I got freeze during boot. Try to disable usb 3 someway, maybe through efi shell. Or temporarily remove usb 3 kext from s/l/e to see if the problem disappears.

 

[gauravsoni]

Yes i have the same problem on my Macbook pro 15" 2015. The only difference i i can move the mouse, rest of everything frozen. Happens when using Safari 99% of the time. Noticed one thing, if I right click on safari (and wait for 1-2 min) the right click menu appears and i say quit, then 75% of the time everything goes back to normal.

 

[JesperA]

I don't understand what are you trying to say about the common denominator, the common denominator is the macbook and imacs from 2015 and the specific drivers used for their hardware.

No, the common denominator is 10.11.4, not hardware, and there is 1 billion other possible reasons behind these freezes than "specific drivers".

If you make a thread with "Macbook Pro 2015" in the title, obviously the thread will attract more MBP 2015 users than any other hardware and result in a skewed voting result. If you would have kept track on Twitter and in the Apple support forum you would have seen that this issue affect Apple:s whole lineup, i've seen Mac Mini 2011-present, iMac 2009-present, MBP 2010-present. The hardware i´ve seen least reports from are Mac Pro but that is probably because there is way less Mac Pro users so naturally they will get reported less.

So, this issue affect the whole lineup, the MBP 2015 is not the holy grail for debugging.

I'm pretty sure their engineers can spot the issue very quick without the need to test it on 20 different machines from different years and configurations.

The problem was introduced in 10.11.4, 10.11.3 had no issue with this kind of freezing, the engineers most likely looked what changed between 10.11.3 and 10.11.4 rather than focused on some arbitrary hardware chosen by you based on nothing other than speculation

I'm just speculating

Exactly, you are speculating, but make it sound like facts and i´ve seen you many times being stubborn and way to defensive everytime someone else on this forum report the issue on another hardware than your beloved 2015 MBP.

Its important to let the Apple engineers know that this issue affects the whole lineup rather than what you suggest: limit it to one specific hardware chosen by you, fortunately the Apple engineers seems to have solved the issue


No point for you to become hostile or defensive when people like me are trying to set the facts straight. This is just normal discussion, no need for you to overanalyze stuff and claim it to be "rage" when someone just say whats really going on

 

[Alefried]

Yes, same issue, twice here on a recent MBP13" received in February. Thanks for the upcoming patched update !

 

[UnhackableiPhone]

I have experienced freezing issues on my Macbook Pro since I've installed Mavericks on it (originally came with Mountain Lion). It's an early 2013 13'' model with an Ivy Bridge Intel i5 cpu and an Intel HD4000 GPU.

After a few crashes I checked the logs and it turned out to be a crash in the framebuffer for the Intel GPU. I have tried a lot of things to solve the problem, including:

- not using Safari. Turned out switching to Firefox didn't make a difference.
- disabling AdBlock + Ghostery + all the other plug-ins. This also didn't make a difference.
- removing flash (primarily because of the security risk). This also didn't solve the issue.

The last thing I tried was changing the scaled resolution to the default. I had it at 1440 x 900 but the default is 1280 x 800. Since then I've had NO CRASHES AT ALL (even while running 10.11.4)!!

Maybe some of you guys should try changing the scaled resolution back to the default?! I know it's not really the best solution because it should be fixed with a software update but at least it may solve the problem.


FYI: I also own the late 2015 27" iMac (with an AMD GPU) and a mid 2013 13" MacBook Air (with an Intel GPU) but I have never experienced freezing issues with those computers. Maybe it's also important to know that I use my devices for at least 5+ hours a day (being a developer).