Catalina has much improved since its initial version. My development MacBook now only crashes a few times a week rather than a few times a day. The Apple Catalina developers clearly know what they are doing. /s
Sadly, my 2011 MacBook Pro won’t update to these later versions, so I just have to leave it running for months at a time.
Perhaps when the keyboard fails, someday, I’ll replace it, instead of just upgrading the RAM and drive.
Kidding aside, I would like to get a newer version someday with better screen resolution and size, but Apple seems to have many missteps to recover from the last 5 years or so.
I’m assuming an implied “/s” at the end of your comment.
FYI, You can replace the keyboard on a 2011 MBP; I've done it. Fiddly but not especially difficult. The 3rd party keyboard I replaced it with isn't as good as the original (in particular the backlight is very leaky) but it's not bad and gave the machine a new lease of life...
I also have a 2011 and still running El Capitan because I was concerned about how it would handle updates. What version are you running right now and how much RAM do you have?
I have a 2011 iMac that's running High Sierra (its last supported release). I upgraded it from its base 4GB to 20GB of RAM.
Since getting High Sierra, everything's been really smooth, but the Sierra -> High Sierra upgrade actually bricked my computer. It was perpetually stuck in the installation phase, bailing after 45 minutes because it couldn't unmount my partition. To Apple's credit though, after I used recovery mode to reinstall the OS, everything worked and my data was intact.
My 2017 Air crashed because it couldn't close Firefox. I just hit Cmd+q and it'd close...but remain open, drawing a ridiculous amount of power. I had to hold the power button down to keep it from running Firefox as if I was rendering a 4k video.
I have no clue why I never thought of that. I was kinda in a hurry and needed stuff up and running quick so I just went with the first solution that came to mind.
You are, doesn't mean it's correct. Look at it this way. It's been happening for a while, on multiple platforms, where other software isn't exhibiting the problem, applying Occam's razor suggests the issue lies with the software.
I accept your point of view, but the GP was suggesting this is another in a long list of bugs introduced into Catalina. Since, anecdotally, I have first hand experience of this affecting me on other platforms as well as previous macOS versions, logic and reason suggest that the problem was not in fact introduced in Catalina, but lies squarely at the foot of Mozilla. Not everything is fair and balanced. I believe, in this case, that Mozilla are solely at fault, not any of the OS vendors/distributors.
Apologies if this comes across as tetchy; I've been dealing with pettiness and unreasonableness all day. My intention was not to defend Apple (or anyone else) or to besmirch Mozilla. I was merely trying to be helpful by pointing out that this problem affects the same software in the same way on different platform.
The alternative interpretation is that Firefox is a particularly effective toolkit for finding OS bugs.
No OS should ever fall over because of a misbehaving application. That's one of their fundamental jobs, and failing at it is a defect. The fact that all the major OSes do doesn't vindicate them; nor is it particularly surprising that Catalina doesn't pull away from the pack. It is, however, disappointing.
> The alternative interpretation is that Firefox is a particularly effective toolkit for finding OS bugs.
That is one way of looking at it. I'd argue that it's not a particularly usefully of looking at it. Ideologies aside, your last sentence says a lot. The fact remains that buggy software from a cross platform vendor is causing this issue across the platforms they provide the software for. Be under no illusion, the issue is Mozilla's a no-one else.
Sounds to me like a hardware problem for the two of you. My MBP is running Catalina and I can count on one hand the number of times it has crashed since I bought it 3 years ago (obviously not running Catalina back then).
Oh, and one of the times it crashed I distinctly recall setting it on the table too roughly and hearing a ping sound emanate from the closed laptop. When I opened the lid I saw the kernel panic screen. I'm chalking that one up to shock. It's been completely fine since though.
It doesn't make it any better. The MacBook Pro came straight out of the box after purchase and during the set up, I foolishly decided to upgrade to Catalina. The reduction in kernel panic with subsequent minor releases of Catalina suggests that part of the kernel crashes are software related. If the remaining crashes are caused by hardware problems, I am thoroughly disappointed in Apple's hardware quality. This is my first MacBook. My company only bought it because they do not want me to run a Linux laptop, as they can't secure it. Too be honest, it is has been a poor user experience so far.
Have you taken it in for service? If it’s still under warranty then they’ll fix it for you at no cost. Every company has the occasional defective product.
I’ve been using Macs since 1996 and have not experienced regular kernel panics on any of them since the early 2000s when I started using Mac OS X Public Beta. Your experience is frustrating but it’s the exception, not the norm. The fact that you can find other people, on forums like HN, who have also experienced problems is indicative of the selection bias of the Internet, nothing more.
If AHT shows no errors, clean install macOS. As in, wipe it totally, and reinstall. This is tedious but I expect Apple support will recommend it anyway. And if you've already done it, it might save time.
Wipe the drive, clean install macOS. Tedious but suck it up, it might fix the problem. But at least it will likely skip a step when sending it for warranty support. I don't recommend hesitating, it's not normal.
That’s interesting, with both of these operating systems, I have to remind myself every couple of months to reboot just to be on the safe side, since the actual machines never crash or force me to. When you say your MacBook is crashing, what does that actually mean? I recently realized my Emacs had 300 buffers in it going back many many weeks, and I decided to finally reboot the whole machine and just get back to a blank slate.
My catalina mac mini has never crashed, nor when it was mojave, nor my macbook air.... Actually, I thought OS crashes were an extremely rare event on all operating systems these days.
