Apple's T2 Chip May Be Causing Issues In iMac Pro, 2018 MacBook Pros (digitaltrends.com) 92
According to Digital Trends, the T2 chip that enables things like secure boot, better encrypted storage, and "Hey Siri" support may be causing problems in MacBook Pro and iMac Pro computers. From the report: Many iMac Pro owners have reportedly suffered numerous kernel panics -- the MacOS version of the dreaded Blue Screen of Death in Windows -- since they hit the market at the end of 2017. You can find a handful of threads on Apple's community forums, including this one, detailing the trials and tribulations customers are experiencing with their expensive iMac Pros and Apple support. The problems apparently reside in the new MacBook Pro laptops, too. Of all the error messages uploaded to these threads, there is one detail they seem to share: Bridge OS. This is an embedded operating system used by Apple's stand-alone T2 security chip, which provides the iMac Pro with a secure boot, encrypted storage, live "Hey Siri" commands, and so on. It's now included in the new 2018 models of the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. But whether the T2 chip is behind all the kernel panics is up in the air. The symptoms and solutions are varied across complaints, such as iMac Pro owners daisy-chaining storage devices seeing crashes along with those with nothing connected at all. But Apple is aware of the problems and is apparently working on the issue behind the scenes. While Apple is replacing these machines, the problems still seem to occur on the new hardware. This latest controversy comes hot on the heels of the last MacBook Pro controversy about overheating concerns.
Colonel PAnick (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
On my work-provided 2015 MacBook Pro, I’ve had an issue where plugging an Ethernet adapter in to one USB port when another USB port is already in use triggers a kernel panic. But, by itself, the adapter is fine.
I should probably take it in before the warranty expires... but it never seems to happen at a time when that would be convenient.
Re: (Score:2)
Was that an Apple branded Ethernet adapter causing a problem? I'm curious.
It's this one from Anker: https://www.anker.com/products... [anker.com]
Note that when I referred to plugging in a second USB device, I was not referring to one of the USB ports on this hub - this adapter plus one other device were both being plugged into USB ports on my laptop.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if I need a new machine, or to take the Macbook Pro in for service.
You know, in the automotive world, we like to say that Ford was kind enough to circle the problem. (Yeah, it's an oval, but circle can mean circumnavigate.) In the computer world, the warning label that tells you that you're looking at an overpriced, underengineered pile of shit is the Apple logo.
next mac pro needs to have storage that is not loc (Score:2)
next mac pro needs to have storage that is not locked to the MB or locked into apples choices.
Forced raid 0 is an no go even more so 2 pci-e cards stuck behide an X4 pci-e link.
Re: (Score:2)
next mac pro needs to have storage that is not locked to the MB or locked into apples choices.
Forced raid 0 is an no go even more so 2 pci-e cards stuck behide an X4 pci-e link.
No one using a Mac Pro or an iMac Pro is going to be storing data files on the internal storage; the files they typically work on are entirely too huge. Those users typically use SANs or big external RAIDs.
So an internal RAID is a pretty silly thing on Pro machines.
Re: (Score:2)
internal RAID 1 better then raid 0 or even
multi disk setup with
OS Disk
Archive Storage / Backup disk
scratch disk / temp work disk.
Time to go back to the drawing board (Score:1)
MacOS really needs a complete rewrite from the ground up. At this point it is a Frankenstein pastiche of this and that culled from here and there. It's architecture has long been eclipsed, a cousin to GNU Hurd, and just as ancient. Apple engineers have kept things afloat with some pretty good hacks. But they are hacks nonetheless.
MacOS is long in the tooth, and chock full of ugliness. It is time to start over with a clean new 21st century design.
Re: Time to go back to the drawing board (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple has never been capable of a clean rewrite. The culture there isn't capable of 'inventing' something that big, and NIH is the holy gospel. They tried to write a new preemptive multitasking OS to replace the hoary old pascal-based MacOS when MacOS 9 was growing long in the tooth. Pink/Taligent was a disaster. They failed so badly that Jobs had to come back and take over with the Unix derived workalike from NeXT, which notably was developed OUTSIDE the Apple fogzone.
It's really a pity they didn't go wit
Re: (Score:2)
Apple has never been capable of a clean rewrite. The culture there isn't capable of 'inventing' something that big, and NIH is the holy gospel. They tried to write a new preemptive multitasking OS to replace the hoary old pascal-based MacOS when MacOS 9 was growing long in the tooth. Pink/Taligent was a disaster. They failed so badly that Jobs had to come back and take over with the Unix derived workalike from NeXT, which notably was developed OUTSIDE the Apple fogzone.
It's really a pity they didn't go with BeOS instead. That was some fresh new design, again from people who had escaped the Apple fogzone.
Pink/Taligent, like Copeland, was a cluster because it was trying to half-ass the rewrite.
And BeOS had its problems, too.
Re: (Score:2)
AFAICT the only problem with BeOS was the lack of multiuser support, but frankly that is really not that difficult to solve. I mean, we honestly got pretty good multiuser support for goddamned AmigaOS, and that was a teeny tiny little thing. You could have a complete multiuser system with TCP/IP in under 20MB. I know, because I did. It was a nice place to run UUCP.
Re: (Score:2)
What problems did BeOS have?
1. Lack of applications
2. Lack of users
3. Lack of a compelling reason to use it
Re: (Score:2)
1. Lack of applications
NeXTStep had the same problem — by the time Apple adopted it, most devs had long-since abandoned it.
2. Lack of users
NeXTStep had the same problem — by the time Apple adopted it, most users had long-since abandoned it.
3. Lack of a compelling reason to use it
NeXTStep had that problem, but BeOS did not. NeXTStep is just BSD with ObjC (which statistically nobody was using at the time) and a Microkernel being used as a HAL (since all process management is done by the BSD kernel, not the Mach kernel.) and with Display Postscript providing display-independe
Re: Time to go back to the drawing board (Score:2)
Didn't get their money's worth?
They went from 60 days from bankruptcy and just about having their official name changed to "beleaguered Apple Computer" to one of the most valuable companies there ever has been, a brand that is more recognized and respected than practically any other (except here) and revenues that, if they were a country, would rank them around Finland.
I think they did just fine after all is said and done.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, Taligent was/turned into a joint venture together with IBM. That can delay, half-ass and grow-to-unusable-proportions anything.
Ahhh, fond memories of an intensive Taligent programming course at IBM in Austin, where a GUI Hello World program took ~10 min to build on a then pretty-much-state-of-the-art Pentium 100MHz. That course turned out to be a not so good investment for my employer. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Also, Taligent was/turned into a joint venture together with IBM. That can delay, half-ass and grow-to-unusable-proportions anything.
Ahhh, fond memories of an intensive Taligent programming course at IBM in Austin, where a GUI Hello World program took ~10 min to build on a then pretty-much-state-of-the-art Pentium 100MHz. That course turned out to be a not so good investment for my employer. :)
Interesting anecdote!
Re: (Score:2)
It's really a pity they didn't go with BeOS instead. That was some fresh new design, again from people who had escaped the Apple fogzone.
Maybe they would have if the asking price wasn't so high. At least that's how I recall the story from news reports at the time. Be Inc had a nice OS but it was far from a finished product even at the R5 stage of development. Sure, it booted and ran but that's not a complete product. BeOS may have been a complete operating system but without development tools, libraries to build on, and so forth, it was not something valuable to developers.
Near the end they started to add in open source software to make
Re: (Score:2)
Your fifth sentence contradicts the first two. As does Apple's adoption of or compatibility with Intel/PCI/SATA/SDRAM/USB/Samba/FAT/NTFS(ro)/OpenGL....you know, most of the things.
Re: (Score:2)
MacOS really needs a complete rewrite from the ground up. At this point it is a Frankenstein pastiche of this and that culled from here and there. It's architecture has long been eclipsed, a cousin to GNU Hurd, and just as ancient. Apple engineers have kept things afloat with some pretty good hacks. But they are hacks nonetheless.
MacOS is long in the tooth, and chock full of ugliness. It is time to start over with a clean new 21st century design.
Name a major OS for which those same words cannot be said.
I'll wait.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There are really only 2 major OSes: Windows and Android. Both have more than 80% market share. All other OSes are, in fact, bit/minor players.
And what does that have to do with my statement?
We all know that Windows could use a ground-up rewrite. And even Google thinks Android should be abandoned at the earliest opportunity in favor of Fuschia, or whatever it's called...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You asked about major OSes, and implied that MacOS was a major OS. It is not.
It is to over ONE HUNDRED MILLION Active Mac owners worldwide:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/... [theverge.com]
Now, something like AmigaOS, ReactOS or BeOS, now THOSE are decidedly NOT "Major" OSes.
And Mobile OSes don't count, sorry. That's more akin to Embedded Firmware than a proper OS, even if it plays one on TV, and has pieces-parts of a real OS included.
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's not. It has less than 9% market share [netmarketshare.com]. Not even double digits. Windows has ten times that amount, owning nearly 90% of the entire market. There is, in fact, only a single major OS in desktop - all others are small, specialty offerings.
And if you want to discount mobile, that's fine - then it's just Windows as the only major OS in the world. If you want to include mobile, then it's a duopoly - Windows and Android (which also has a Windows-like market penetration with iOS a vastly far behind 2nd
Another perspective (Score:5, Funny)
”This is an embedded operating system used by Apple's stand-alone T2 security chip, which provides the iMac Pro with a secure boot, encrypted storage, live "Hey Siri" commands, and so on.”
Perhaps the T2 chips intentionally trigger kernel panics because they find Siri as aggravating as the rest of us do.
Re: (Score:2)
A pattern is emerging (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
It's almost like Apple never has made good products and never will.
No way, man. The Macintosh IIci was a triumph of engineering. That was one of the best machines ever made, IMO. Granted, it was overpriced AF — paying five grand for a 68030@25 was some Sun Microsystems level shit. But still, it was a fantastic, durable machine that was trivial to work on. You could swap the power supply without any tools, for example.
Since then, though, it's all been downhill, starting with the Macintosh IIfx with its nonstandard SCSI termination...
Re: A pattern is emerging (Score:1)
I have a Max IIci in my collection. It's also chock full of National Instruments data acq. cards and the original version of LabView.
Re: (Score:2)
I have a Max IIci in my collection. It's also chock full of National Instruments data acq. cards and the original version of LabView.
Back when LabView was Mac only. Back when it was good.
Re: (Score:2)
It's almost like Apple never has made good products and never will.
No way, man. The Macintosh IIci was a triumph of engineering. That was one of the best machines ever made, IMO. Granted, it was overpriced AF — paying five grand for a 68030@25 was some Sun Microsystems level shit. But still, it was a fantastic, durable machine that was trivial to work on. You could swap the power supply without any tools, for example.
Since then, though, it's all been downhill, starting with the Macintosh IIfx with its nonstandard SCSI termination...
Let it go, will ya?you just use the Black terminator and all is golden.
Re: (Score:2)
Let it go, will ya?you just use the Black terminator and all is golden.
Golden? I thought you said it was black.
Re: (Score:2)
Let it go, will ya?you just use the Black terminator and all is golden.
Golden? I thought you said it was black.
Ha ha. That's very logical.
Re: (Score:2)
Let it go, will ya?you just use the Black terminator and all is golden.
Golden? I thought you said it was black.
the gold part is refering to the price.
I was expecting a Skynet joke... (Score:2)
maybe along the lines of trying to save Steve Jobs via time travel, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
They had a good run with the macbook pros and mac pros... up until the trash cans anyhow. Now, we enter the shitshow....
Re: (Score:1)
Back in 2006 all the iMacs I saw with that tiny little vent overheated constantly in any ambient temp above 75F. Then there was the iphones and their death hold, touch death, sapphire lens purple flare, bending, battery issues, artificial performance degradation, purposeful bricking due to 3rd party hardware. Then there's the macbook that can't run at the speed they claim under any circumstances other than inside a freezer because they made it too thin. Now their rushed-out unnecessary feature chip is failing. It's almost like Apple never has made good products and never will. Why can't anyone else see this pattern?
There is a pattern of nothing else on the market being consistently better...
Re: (Score:3)
My 2011 MBP is the best laptop Apple has ever made.
Re: (Score:2)
Same here, agreed.
Jonny Ive is an idiot, pushing form over function. New Macs are more of a pain in the ass than old Macs.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, the best one is still the latest. The latest that Jobs supervised the construction of.
A pattern...of Hatorade (Score:1, Troll)
You're operating on anecdotes and confirmation bias, which together can be used to prove just about anything. But Apple has been at or near the top of hardware reliability survey's since the Precambrian age of computing.
Re: (Score:2)
Both. But thank's for helping prove my point on confirmation bias and anecdotes. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Around 2006 was when Apple was applying 5x too much thermal paste to CPUs. You could dramatically improve cooling performance by replacing it with the correct amount.
As I recall those were also the first generation of the plastic, glued together hinge clips where the glue would be heated by the exhaust heat and eventually fail.
The shark has been jumped... (Score:3)
... it just keeps getting worse. My 2017 macbook pro likes to turn of the magical touch strip. Comes back on if you reboot, but...
I really don't want to go back to windows... maybe I'll have another run at linux. It's been 10 years, and it was almost tolerable on the desktop back then.
Gonna miss this sexy lookin package though.
User base is too small to matter (Score:2)
Past peak-product. Now form over function. (Score:1)
Seems since the release of the A1502, things have just gone downhill. Losing useful/viable ports and declining options for repairs (both consumer and microsoldering). The MBPro Retina 13" / A1502 covered all areas well, and you could still change your SSD and still connect to items without requiring dongles. We should have seen Apple bring out the next one with USB C + USB A (3.x) but instead we ended up losing everything, even the laptop-saving magsafe.
Likewise on the iPhone market, iPhone 6S/6S+ was
Same thing happened with 2011 MBP (Score:2)
Well of course! (Score:3)
After seeing all the trouble the T2 [wikipedia.org] caused to John Connor, it doesn't surprise me.