macOS Catalina 10.15.2 freezes/crashes MBA every single day – am I alone?

[xnsys]

I don't know what it is with apple of late, but since 10.10 the OS just seems to be so unreliable to say the least - they seem to be adding features that are great ideas, and then programming them in a slap-dash way, and in the process breaking things that have been working well for years...such as WiFi - do you remember the poor performance of WiFi in 10.10 and how long it took to fix, a whole YEAR!

Sleep used to work in 10.9 flawlessly, and I remember having uptime competitions with Windows colleagues - the Mac always used to win hands down, and the only time it would be rebooted is for software updates...not the same now, windows machines are beating this competition hands down...

For a company the size of apple, this in my opinion is disgraceful...
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Having said that - I remember 10.11 being quite reliable...just a lot of things that were bad in 10.10, which were fixed in 10.11 have broken again going forward - did someone just inject the 10.10 code into 10.12+?

 

[danny1988]

Hi there, I bought a Macbook Pro with Touch Bar in September (2019, 13-inch, 4 thunderbolt ports). It's running 10.15.2. I have a very similar issue. Almost every time I wake from sleep my macbook crashes. I have used Apple hardware all my life and I have never ever had such problems before. A while ago I did some Googling and found that others were having similar problems. I followed all the steps recommended (resetting PRAM etc) but the problem still persists.

 

[MrDoh]

I have a Mac Mini that started beach balling with 10.15.2. Occasionally, like once or twice a day...but annoying. All you can do is wait until it figures out whatever it's stuck on. This mini has 6-CPU i7 processor, 2.4GHz. DDR4 memory, and an SSD, so no reason in the world that it should stall out. And, in fact, never did that on Mojave, or Catalina up until 10.15.2.

So I've re-installed Mojave, it was easier to find a Mojave install app than a Catalina one that isn't 10.15.2. Am not seeing beach balls anymore. The only question is when to come back to Catalina...but I'll be waiting until at least 10.15.3 unless I read something new about this.

Not fun to downgrade, but better than watching your computer just sitting there stunned for a while.

 

[VSG]

Alright, just a little update:

As I said, since I believe the issue is caused with the failure of network shares while in sleep mode, I disabled WiFi on my MBA every time I sent it to sleep for the last three days.
Today I tried all of the things that usually resulted in the OS to freeze but until now, it seems to work!

Even opening a NAS-folder in Finder worked after wake-up although the first connection failed because the drive hadn't spun up. For the first time in weeks I was able to regularly restart my MBA just for the sake of testing if I could.

I'll keep an eye on it and give updates in a few days, but for now, disabling WiFi before sending the MBA to standby seems to do the trick for me. Maybe others can test it as well.

As to those Mac-owners who connect via ethernet: Do any of those who experience these issued connect via ethernet? And if so, could you give it a try to disconnect before sending your Mac to sleep?

I know it's not a "fix", but at least it's a workaround and beats force-restarting the Mac(book) any time, in my opinion.

Best regards
VSG

 

[MrDoh]

Yes, my mac mini is connected via ethernet. Now that I'm back on 10.14.6, this is no longer an issue for me. By the way, I wouldn't personally be happy with having to disconnect my computer before walking away from it, and re-connecting it when I get back. Or maybe it would re-connect automatically at that point, I'd still be where I am now, regressed to Mojave.

I'll wait until Apple fixes the problem, myself. Glad you've found a work-around that you can live with.

 

[Mark_KU]

Having the same problems with my Mini 2018 and MBP mid 2015. Connected via LAN to my Synology NAS.
I guess the crashes are really related to the "Automounter" app. Since I installed the app during the Christmas holidays, I have the described symptoms on my machines. I have already written to the developer and am waiting for an answer.

I will keep you informed.


Best regards from Germany

Mark

 

[xnsys]

Mark, I'm getting the same issues as above and I don't use AutoMounter - I really don't think these issues are related to that app considering I don't have it installed...

All AutoMounter does is to call the API to mount servers, the problem appears to be with the Finder / OS and connectivity once mounted to file-shares, where it's for reasons unknown, loosing connectivity and crashing the whole OS - or the file sharing daemon is crashing bringing the OS down.
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Well, woken up the test machine with 10.15.2 from it's sleep, and I'm currently waiting for numbers to launch, must have bounced a few thousand times, don't think that's going to work.

Oh and the finder has frozen again - yes I had network shares connected when it went to sleep.

10.14 Beta was more reliable than this.
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I'm so tempted to call Apple Support every time this happens - but that would result in at least 2-3 calls a day..

But maybe if I did this then they would fix their cr@p.

 

[mikiotty]

10.15 IMO from an enterprise perspective is a total and utter nightmare - from a home perspective it's windows Vista.

That is, in a few words, what Catalina is.
It's a totally unusable nightmare on my 2013 13" Retina, it's a nightmare on my desktop, it's a nightmare on every other machine I've put it on. When I return from the holidays, I will format and restore every single Mac I own to Mojave, or even High Sierra.
10.15.2 is worse than 10.15.0. Apple needs to get their sh*t together and fix this mess they did this year.
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I don't know what it is with apple of late, but since 10.10 the OS just seems to be so unreliable to say the least - they seem to be adding features that are great ideas, and then programming them in a slap-dash way, and in the process breaking things that have been working well for years...such as WiFi - do you remember the poor performance of WiFi in 10.10 and how long it took to fix, a whole YEAR!

Sleep used to work in 10.9 flawlessly, and I remember having uptime competitions with Windows colleagues - the Mac always used to win hands down, and the only time it would be rebooted is for software updates...not the same now, windows machines are beating this competition hands down...

For a company the size of apple, this in my opinion is disgraceful...
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Having said that - I remember 10.11 being quite reliable...just a lot of things that were bad in 10.10, which were fixed in 10.11 have broken again going forward - did someone just inject the 10.10 code into 10.12+?

I actually found 10.13 (High Sierra) to be quite reliable on all my machines. Never had an issue that made me think about downgrading, which happened with every version after 10.10 (excluding 10.11).
But I agree, 10.9 was the most stable post-SL version. I still run it on my white 20" iMac without any issue whatsoever. EVERYTHING works, it never crashes or freezes.

 

[xnsys]

What I can't understand is how these bugs managed to still be in the release, I (as well as several other people I know) have filed bug reports from the very first 10.15 beta to apple, reports for these very issues, which are fundamental to a reliable system - unless I guess all you do is use it for surfing the web and that's it.

Since Tim Cook has taken over, the quality of Apple products has taken a nose-dive, while the price of them just keeps on creeping up - if he carries on like this then the company will eventually take a fall into the ground as people will vote with their feet....yes you will still have the apple fan-boys, but they will get fed-up eventually, and I used to be one after having Macs all my life.

Right from this one which I've recently refurbished by replacing all capacitors and components that I could find spare parts for.



I've then had a classic, colour classic II, LC, IIvx, G3, G4, G5 then an array of MacBook's and MacBook Pro's. - building my career on providing support to businesses for apple and windows products

And if I'm starting to get fed-up and consider changing, wonder how many people will less experience are thinking the same...It's not good by any stretch of the imagination.

 

[Mark_KU]

I have just spoken with the German Apple support. The 1st Level Support could not help. After a longer discussion, I was connected to the 2nd Level Support. At Apple the problem is NOT known. My reference to various forum threads was dismissed as irrelevant (!!)

Now I have received a Capture Data Image to transfer various logs to Apple after the next crash.

Regards,

Mark

 

[xnsys]

Well that's a load of bollox - they are fully aware of the issue as both my colleague and I have called them to discuss it, even both of us have raised it in the feedback assistant as per their request and have cases open...

Blinkered if you ask me, there is nothing wrong with our software, it's great and works perfectly - the problem is in the way you're using it....

 

[mikiotty]

I have just spoken with the German Apple support. The 1st Level Support could not help. After a longer discussion, I was connected to the 2nd Level Support. At Apple the problem is NOT known. My reference to various forum threads was dismissed as irrelevant (!!)

Now I have received a Capture Data Image to transfer various logs to Apple after the next crash.

Regards,

Mark

And that's another trend that's been going on recently. Apple support will not solve your problem, either because they are incompetent, or because they have "internal policies" that basically say "user, I don't care about you". That's lame.

 

[Mark_KU]

What really bothers me is the arrogance with which Apple now presents itself to the paying customer.

The first statement was that they don't support Synology network drives and that I should contact the manufacturer.

Shame on you Apple, premium prices but insufficient support !

 

[julezman]

My late 2013 MBP exhibited same problems as others are seeing. Had been OKish on 10.15.0 and 10.15.1 but 10.15.2 has been very problematic with crashes/freezes in almost every app from Finder, Safari, Terminal etc. Have done hardware diagnostic check, NVRAM and PRAM reset and SMC reset. Disk completely wiped disk and fresh clean vanilla install of Catalina 10.15.2 resulted in the same. I would agree it seems to relate to network drive connections and sleep/wake but can’t be sure. Apple support have advised to roll back to Mojave pending updates to Catalina. Not ideal but hopefully will get everything working again for now.

 

[getrealbro]

Despite Apple’s vast resources and hubris, Apple has not been able to produce stable versions of OSX/macOS every year. Apparently Apple’s management doesn’t believe the old software development adage — “Nine women can’t have a baby in one month”.

In the last decade, Apple has only produced 3 versions of OSX/macOS that have been stable on my Macs. Catalina is not one of them

The stable ones on my Macs are/were…
* Snow Leopard 10.6
* El Capitan 10.11
* Mojave 10.14

GetRealBro

 

[xnsys]

Just had the dreaded file server problem, and what I have noticed is that the mDNS record is no longer resolvable - such as nas._smb._tcp.local - usually it would resolve in terminal to the IP address of the smb device - other stuff resolves fine.

When I first experienced this problem in previous macOS versions, it was all related to mDNS and how macOS cached the records. Seems that this bug is back in 10.15.

Might be clutching at straws though...but food for thought.

Despite Apple’s vast resources and hubris, Apple has not been able to produce stable versions of OSX/macOS every year. Apparently Apple’s management doesn’t believe the old software development adage — “Nine women can’t have a baby in one month”.

In the last decade, Apple has only produced 3 versions of OSX/macOS that have been stable on my Macs. Catalina is not one of them

The stable ones on my Macs are/were…
* Snow Leopard 10.6
* El Capitan 10.11
* Mojave 10.14

GetRealBro

I would agree with that, although I did have no issues with 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7.. 10.8 was semi reliable and 10.9, had it's glitches but with a few terminal commands you could restart services and it would work - 10.10 was a disaster, 10.11 fixed a lot that 10.10 broke, and then 10.12 and 10.13 were semi-ok with 10.14 being a lot better amongst the macOS's with the new look, and looked like Apple were heading back to being as reliable as they were with 10.6 & 10.7 - sadly 10.15 proved that wasn't the case and they have taken a step back for a macOS that introduces very few OS related features

I can't help but notice how the quality has dropped since Steve sadly died, Steve was more of a quality man, Tim Cook is more of a profit man.

 

[mikiotty]

Despite Apple’s vast resources and hubris, Apple has not been able to produce stable versions of OSX/macOS every year. Apparently Apple’s management doesn’t believe the old software development adage — “Nine women can’t have a baby in one month”.

In the last decade, Apple has only produced 3 versions of OSX/macOS that have been stable on my Macs. Catalina is not one of them

The stable ones on my Macs are/were…
* Snow Leopard 10.6
* El Capitan 10.11
* Mojave 10.14

GetRealBro

Agreed, except Mojave was not on my list, and High Sierra was.

 

[tommiy]

Mojave 10.14.5 was good and stable and no issues for myself but 10.14.6 bought external display issues with nightshift driving high CPU usage on the window server. (Confirmed by Apple) and seemingly polling external monitors when the MAC is asleep. The fix for this was to be in Catalina. Indeed Catalina fixed the high CPU issue with night shift but left the external polling issue and introduced 2 additional faults associated with external monitor resolution and the internal brightness on the retina display being set to maximum. 10.15.2 bought with it kernel panic on top of these issues when coming from sleep. I'm sitting on 10.15.1 putting up with the resolution issues needing to connect and disconnect the MAC to get the monitor resolution correct and resetting the retina display brightness each time I plug in the monitors.

And yes on 10.15.1 public wifi does not work some times without rebooting. Supposedly fixed in 10.15.2 but I don;t want kernel panics so its a trade off on usability.

If I could get back to 10.14.5 I would as after this things went down hill fast for myself. High Sierra was stable for myself and I am honestly thinking of rolling back to that because catalina OS is just so full of issues.

 

[AJMike]

Hi everyone,

I can't find any info on this so I'd like to check if I'm alone. I'm running Catalina on a MBA late 2013 and have been upgrading from Mojave to 10.15.1.
Everything was working fine until 10.15.2 dropped.

Since I installed 10.15.2 my MBA freezes every single day. Mostly when trying to open a new finder window or switching folders in finder. Right now it was when I was trying to save a Numbers-file to PDF. It's not that everything hangs up, it usually is that this particular app (until now mostly Finder, a few minutes ago Numbers) doesn't respond and there's no way to quit or force quit it. Not even on Terminal.

When you try to restart the MBA all apps close until that last app and waiting for hours doesn't help. What helps is pressing the power-button for a few seconds to force a restart.
Is anyone else having this issue?
And/or a solution to this?

It's driving me nuts. If I'm unable to use the standby mode and have to restart the MBA every time, the whole concept of picking up where you left off is useless.
Everything was working on 10.15.1 … I can't understand how Apple can screw up every single OS they got. iPadOS 13.2 was working alright, 13.3 makes my iPad Air 2 sluggish like hell with up to 10 seconds to open an app following the lock screen.
As much as I love my Apple products – the software right now is a mess beyond anything I've worked with on these machines.

Thanks in advance for any input.
VSG

Wish I could help. but I am having similar issues with 10.15.2. I cannot get Time Machine to make regular backups on either my Apollo Personal Cloud or my Synology NAS, and usually, System Preferences freezes, along with Finder when I select "Use this Disk". The only solution is to do a hard reset. I have also noticed that using Apple Watch to unlock computer sometimes happens, but not always, and when it doesn't, System Prefs does not show "Unlock with Apple Watch" as an option!
I had no issues with 10.15.1, but I think I am going to do a Time machine backup on a clean external drive and reinstall Mojave, unless someone in this forum has a better idea.

 

[xnsys]

I think I've nailed it down - nothing to do with network but sharingd crashing, which in turn when the machine wakes from sleep and tries to reconnect to a file server, it can't and crashes with style.

 

[AJMike]

So I downloaded Onyx and ran the maintenance tab and “Eureka” my 2013 MBP is now functioning normally?. Next task is to make a donation to the Onyx developers! The crashes have gone and Time M is working properly.

 

[xnsys]

My personal view is that there is no need for anything like Onyx - the OS can take care of itself and if you want to clear the cache just hold the shift key when you boot, and boot into safe mode - this clears the cache.

I've never had any good experience with these so called clean-up utilities - right to the point where some have caused more harm than good in the long run.

 

[anthonymoody]

My personal view is that there is no need for anything like Onyx - the OS can take care of itself and if you want to clear the cache just hold the shift key when you boot, and boot into safe mode - this clears the cache.

I've never had any good experience with these so called clean-up utilities - right to the point where some have caused more harm than good in the long run.

Yes because no one in this or the many other threads about sleep/wake issues or other things causing KPs have thought to try anything like clearing the cache.

 

[xnsys]

Yes because no one in this or the many other threads about sleep/wake issues or other things causing KPs have thought to try anything like clearing the cache.

Like I've said before, the best way to clear caches is to hold the shift key when you boot and let the OS do it for you - utilities such as ONYX just run the terminal commands to do the same thing.

 

[anthonymoody]

HELP MAY BE ON THE WAY!

I emailed Tim Cook and got an email back from Craig Federighi (yes, seriously).

He told me:
Thanks for your note.

Are you personally experiencing kernel panics on your system? If so, I’d appreciate your help is isolating the problem. Would you mind sending me system diagnostics from the Mac experiencing the problem? To do this, launch Activity Monitor and select “System Diagnostics” from the gear menu. The process will take a couple of minutes, after which Finder will open a window with a large “sysdiagnose…tar.gz” file selected. Please mail that back to me (MailDrop will be required for the large attachment size).

Thanks!

- craig

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I have done this. Let's see from here...