Users Complain About Installation Issues With macOS 10.13.4 (theregister.co.uk) 90
An anonymous reader shares a report: The 10.13.4 update for macOS High Sierra is recommended for all users, and was emitted at the end of March promising to "improve stability, performance, and security of your Mac." But geek support sites have started filling up with people complaining that it had the opposite effect: killing their computer with messages that "the macOS installation couldn't be completed."
The initial install appears to be working fine, but when users go to shutdown or reboot an upgraded system, it goes into recovery mode. According to numerous reports, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with users' Macs -- internal drives report that they're fine. And the issue is affecting a range of different Apple-branded computers from different years. Some have been successful in getting 10.13.4 to install by launching from Safe Mode, but others haven't and are deciding to roll back and stick with 10.13.3 until Apple puts out a new update that will fix whatever the issue is while claiming it has nothing to do with it.
The initial install appears to be working fine, but when users go to shutdown or reboot an upgraded system, it goes into recovery mode. According to numerous reports, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with users' Macs -- internal drives report that they're fine. And the issue is affecting a range of different Apple-branded computers from different years. Some have been successful in getting 10.13.4 to install by launching from Safe Mode, but others haven't and are deciding to roll back and stick with 10.13.3 until Apple puts out a new update that will fix whatever the issue is while claiming it has nothing to do with it.
As usual with updates (Score:4, Insightful)
It's always best to let other people be the guinea pigs/beta testers.
Unless it fixes something that is broken that matter to you.
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Register has always been a tabloid/sensationalizer of IT news... a few blown upgrades leads to an article like this.
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I do that, I waited over 6 months I think before installing High Sierra (just installed 3 weeks ago).
This issue is kind of an automatic update, in fact I never told it to install but it did after a reboot, and my settings say to always ask before installing. Macs are getting as bad as Windows for that shit. Now I see ""the macOS installation couldn't be completed." when I restart my computer and have to do a system restore, but it still happens everytime after a full restart.
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Interesting (Score:3)
After trying Sierra a couple times, I rolled back to El Capitan - and only recently upgraded my computers to High Sierra 10.13.4. None of the computers I upgraded (2016 MacBook Pro, 2015 MacBook Pro, 2012 MacBook Pro, 2012 Mac Mini, 2017 iMac) had any issues with the upgrade nor with any subsequent updates.
I realize that's just anecdotal, but so are the reports in the story itself.
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Hah. Their maximum storage tier is only 2 terabytes. I can't remember the last time I had so little data to back up. Probably somewhere around the time they changed the name from .Mac to MobileMe.
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I had the better part of a terabyte of audio recordings alone, on my PowerMac G5, more than a decade ago. I have well over a terabyte of photos, and by that, I mean closer to two. Add to that various musical compositions, Photoshop-generated book cover art, the apps themselves, etc. Of course, most of that stuff is relatively static content (for example, when you edit photos, you're editing metadata, not the RAW files), so they only get backed up once, rather than having dozens of different versions, so
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Of course a possibly important distinction is that I updated to 10.13.4 from El Capitan, while it sounds like the problem reports are from people who are upgrading within High Sierra - from 10.13.3.
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Seen this (Score:3)
Re:Seen this (Score:4, Informative)
Which Linux distro are you talking about? Through history, there have been such glitches on Linux.
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You must have lost Y2K... even Red Hat had some bad days back then.
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with apple it's ATI or intel video only (Score:2)
with apple it's ATI or intel video only now days.
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DisplayLink isn't out of business... it's just having driver issues.
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Looks to me like you don't have the right driver, or the driver hasn't been accepted by the user's system for sign-off reasons. Try this URL if you're talking about DisplayLink.
DisplayLink Support page [displaylink.com]
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If you follow the link at the top of your linked page, you get to a page that tells you that DisplayLink basically doesn't work at all in 10.13.4 except in a very limited mode where it mirrors the main display. This was discussed on Slashdot [slashdot.org] a couple of weeks ago.
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Re:App not optimized for Mac OSX (Score:4, Informative)
32-bit programs, maybe. Apple wants to move fully to 64-bit.
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Uh oh. Most of the apps we use show that error. This is going to be painful.
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Really? Which apps? 32-bit Intel apps are really, really rare on OS X. I don't remember the last time I saw one, with the exception of MS Office (because Microsoft screwed around and delayed their 64-bit transition for an entire decade). Most companies were already well on their way to transitioning their code base to 64-bit when the Intel hardware first came out, so the transition to 64-bit Intel was very nearly lost in the noise, effort-wise.
Re:App not optimized for Mac OSX (Score:4, Informative)
32-bit Intel apps are really, really rare on OS X.
I'd be careful with those qualifies if I were you.
Some significant software packages on macOS 10.13.4 are only available in 32-bit versions, including some of the software that ships with macOS. These include:
As such, I wouldn't say that 32-bit Intel apps are "really, really rare". Unless you've removed them manually, you have the DVD player and InkServer installed on your Mac. If you use a corporate Mac, you probably require McAfee Endpoint Security and/or Cisco Anyconnect. Hopefully these developers get with the programme and release 64-bit updates in the near future.
Yaz
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Correcting myself slightly -- I only just discovered that TextWrangler has been replaced with the nearly identical BBEdit, which is 64-bit. So scratch that one off the list (or upgrade if like me you haven't done so already).
Yaz
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And TextWrangler won't run in the current version of OS X, much less the next one.
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And TextWrangler won't run in the current version of OS X, much less the next one.
Actually, I've been running it without any problems on 10.13.4 up until today.
Yaz
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Really? Wow. BBEdit's website says it doesn't work. *shrugs*
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Yeah -- I noticed that too. The funny thing is that I was just this past week assigned a brand-new MacBook Pro at work (running 10.13.4), and one of the first things I did was go to the App Store, find my Purchased items list, and download a bunch of items I have on my other Macs, one of which was TextWrangler. And it worked just fine (with the exception of the command line utilities, the installer for which seemed to stop working once Apple put added protections into the system directories. Which doesn'
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FYI, if you didn't have equivalents, you could also use xar or cpio (depending on the age of the package) to extract the package's payload to a different base directory.
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I suspect Apple will drop that in 10.14, and will recommend VLC as an alternative. Either way, free app, free replacement, no great loss.
That one is kind of embarrassing and sad; I suspect it involves 32-bit-only user-space driver code written by tablet vendors, but I'm not certain. Either way, I would not call this an app. If you want to include relatively obscure OS features, you would also need to include support for PICT files, and probably a few others
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I suspect Apple will drop that in 10.14, and will recommend VLC as an alternative. Either way, free app, free replacement, no great loss.
I suspect you're right -- Apple hasn't shipped a Mac with an optical drive for several years at least. And I doubt all that many people have unencrypted DVD backups stored on their machines for local playback.
That one is kind of embarrassing and sad; I suspect it involves 32-bit-only user-space driver code written by tablet vendors, but I'm not certain.
I suspect it's another little-used item that has simply been neglected due to low use.
Games are the big exception. Steam itself, however, is an embarrassment, and 64-bit support is probably just the tip of the iceberg. I wonder if they ever got around to fixing the dozens of bugs that prevented running the Mac version on a case-sensitive volume. Either way, I think it's safe to say that this announcement will light a fire under a company that IMO otherwise wouldn't bother fixing anything nonfatal....
We can only hope. My concern however is that even though they might eventually get around to making Steam 64-bit, will they go back and update some of their classic games for 64-bit as well? I'll admit I'm not a he
Re: App not optimized for Mac OSX (Score:2)
You can take Cisco off the list: our IT department gave me a 64-bit client when I reported the issue after updating to 10.13.4.
Unbelievable that you have McAfee on your list. That crap should just die.
Maybe Apple will finally kill off their DVD player? Itâ(TM)s not like theyâ(TM)ve ever been very enthusiastic about shiny discs, even in their hey day (see their BD support ;))
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You're welcome.
Yaz
External monitors too (Score:1)
10.13.4 also breaks external monitors. We have had to prevent updates on many of the MACs on our network because of this.
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See the link I posted about about authorizing the DisplayLInk Driver.
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Doesn't work. If you read the very top of that page, it says that the page applies up through 10.13.3, and there's a link to info about 10.13.4 [displaylink.com] that basically says, "It doesn't work in any mode that's actually useful. Don't upgrade."
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Instability and performance degradation (Score:4, Informative)
For me, even though 10.13.4 installed fine, it has brought nothing but instability and performance degradation:
1. There is 50% chance that if I close the lid on the laptop and then open it, it will crash silently.
2. There is 95% chance that if the laptop entered deep sleep it will not get out of it without crashing. These crashes are not detected
3. The kernel memory leaks are even worse than before. On startup with nothing open the kernel takes in excess of 1.5gb and in 30 minutes of work is up to 3gb of memory. After a couple of days it is taking about 6gb of memory.
4. The purge command is completely broken, it never purges any memory, even if activity monitor says I have more than 3gb of purgeable memory.
5. WindowServer does not reliably pass clicks to applications.
6. Safari memory management is even worse than before. On average it takes 330mb per tab. If you have something like Jira, that tab is easily over 1gb of memory.
Quality is down the drain. Windows 8.1 is my preferred platform these days.
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As a user of Windows 8.1 at work and MacOS 10.13.4 at home. I have to say that your problems with MacOS are not universal, and that Windows 8.1 is truly a horrible chore to use. Which makes me think perhaps you are a troll.
Initially failed, but then worked after safe mode (Score:2)
I had an installation problem when installing the macOS 10.13.4 update on my MacBook Air.
After rebooting, my system would crash (requiring a reboot) ad nauseam.
I rebooted in Safe Mode and somehow got the machine out of the annoying reboot cycle. At that point, I rebooted back int 10.13.3 and resolved not to upgrade to 10.13.4 until I heard it was safe to install. When I went to the App Store and checked for updates, the 10.13.4 update disappeared from the list. (It seemed at the time that Apple had pulled i
Re: The Biggest MacOS Installation Issue is (Score:2)
Other problems with this update (Score:5, Informative)
As a developer, I have seen multiple times how under the "shiny" surface, Apple isn't really careful about what they are releasing, but the current macOS is one of the worse I've seen. For example, if you have installed it (and you can still boot), try opening the error console. Chances are you'll see that it throws several "signpost_notificationd - 0 is not a valid connection ID" errors every few seconds! It happens on all machines I have checked, a few 2013 Macbook Pros, a 2010 Mac Pro, a 2011 Mac Mini... And there are multiple threads about it, so it is not something in my part of the world :) Sure, it might be benign (although it is reported as an "error" - not warning - and some users claim it is related to excessive fan speeds), but how on earth can they release something that floods the error logs on many configurations, (including on a clean system, installed from scratch)?
About that "clean system". Last week I decided to install a bigger SSD on my 2010 Mac Pro (the last type that was upgradeable - still hanging on with a 6-core 3.46GHz Xeon, 32GB RAM, USB3 and eSATA cards). I had a Mavericks install usb, did a clean install and upgraded directly to 10.13.4. The "clean" system was pretty unusable, there was an obvious lag on most UI things. E.g. hovering over each section of the top menu would open it after at least half a second (depended on the app - some faster, some slower). Activity monitor showed nothing in CPU or Disk usage. I actually thought there was something wrong with my new SSD, until I cloned the old disk with Mavericks to the new disk, booted and everything was snappy again. Not upgrading the old mac to High Sierra any time soon... Well, I can afford to as I have XCode on the laptop...
Recommended for all users without RAID boot. (Score:2)
Have they fixed that yet?
May not be limited to High Sierra (Score:2)
I just had this problem when installing Sierra (not High Sierra) on a MacBook Pro. This problem may be more wide spread than they think.
Happened to me (Score:2)
When I upgraded to 10.13.4 my machine went into safe mode upon reboot. It said the OS failed to install. A look at the error logged showed complaints about some file missing from the installer directory. Sent me into quite a panic for a while. I finally did a fresh, complete install.