Why macOS updates might brick your Mac

[1PW]

I apologize for using & quoting the hyperbolic headline...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/why-macos-updates-might-brick-your-mac-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/01/macos-monterey-bricking-older-macs/

This might be the price to pay for a new macOS working with Intel/Apple silicon and not enough beta testing.

I'm fairly certain the next macOS Monterey update, after 12.0.1, will be immense.

HTH

[alvarnell]

Based on detective-like efforts from several Enterprise IT's in a Slack MacAdmins forum to address update issues, I would guess that most of bricked Mac issues could have been avoided by simply waiting for the black screen to go away. There are cases where that can be an hour or so. They did identify a specific issue with Mojave and Catalina updates to Monterey where hundreds of thousands of empty folders associated with the mdworker process being terminated were being copied to a Previous System folder during the black screen period. Apple has acknowledged the problem and there are plans to fix it, but reportedly was not done with either the most recent 12.0.1 or 11.6.1 updates. So I reject the suggestion that there was not enough beta testing as the problem was found and reported to Apple during beta testing, but not soon enough for Apple to react.

There are some terminal commands that will both predict whether you might have such an issue as well as some that will eliminate these empty folders if you are in a rush to update now. Otherwise, I'll echo the recommendation to wait for the next macOS Monterey update (reported to be 12.1) before updating from Mojave or Catalina. I've heard of some different issues updating from Big Sur that supposedly isn't vulnerable to the same issue, but haven't been enough to focus an investigation yet.