iMac crashes at least weekly, thoughts? (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

I mis-spoke. It's a 2017 iMac. So, no warranty.

Having zapped the PRAM and gotten things back to working again, I'm cautiously optimistic that I'm good for a while longer. I'm hoping this PRAM weirdness is the root of the problems I had previously, paritcularly with this Summer's Catalina and Big Sur upgrade problems.

If nothing else, I think I can get along now until new ARM iMacs appear. I don't want to upgrade after just 3-4 years, but that will be less painful than after two years that I was fearing.

 

[DaveF]

Disabled Sleep and reboted yesterday (i think this is the way to do it. It's like a double-negative checkbox instead of a clearer enable or disable sleep option.)

Will see how this goes.
View attachment 78349

iMac was self-rebooted from system crash today. Have upgraded to Big Sur since last round of crashes. This is a time marker to gauge dap between crashes, if it happens again.

 

[DaveF]

iCloud Tabs weren't appearing in Safari, so logged out. Rebooting sometimes fixes the iClouds tab problem. But given recent problems with booting, I thought log out and log in would be faster and safer.

Nope.

System hung on Log in.

Did a force off and tried to zap PRAM. Hung.

Did a force off and reboot.

Did a force off and zap PRAM, paying attention to do it right. System booted. Log in then proceeded normally.

There's something deeply but inexplicably wrong with my iMac. I suspect it has to do with the BIOS security feature (not the T2 chip, this iMac does't have that). I may have to upgrade sooner than I really want. This iMac is about three years old and I'd like to get at least five years out of it. But I might have to burn the money and get a new M1 iMac when they launch (presumably) in 2021.

For now, my best bet is to avoid rebooting and logging out. I need to turn off auto-updates, I guess.

 

[DaveF]

Foolishly rebooted this morning -- trying to get iCloud tabs back alive after dealing with a minor Messages catastrophe of my own stupid making.

And it won't reboot, even with repeated PRAM zapping attempts.

Long story short. Shut off iMac for a couple hours, unplugged all peripherals. Rebooted with zap PRAM (command option P R) and it came up.

1. Stop rebooting iMac
2. Buy M1 iMac in 2021

 

[Johnny Angell]

Foolishly rebooted this morning -- trying to get iCloud tabs back alive after dealing with a minor Messages catastrophe of my own stupid making.

And it won't reboot, even with repeated PRAM zapping attempts.

Long story short. Shut off iMac for a couple hours, unplugged all peripherals. Rebooted with zap PRAM (command option P R) and it came up.

1. Stop rebooting iMac
2. Buy M1 iMac in 2021

I haven an Image of you standing in front of a switch saying or thinking “Hold on to your butts.”

 

[DaveF]

I think I mutter that every time!

 

[Walter Kittel]

So my Mac Mini crashed earlier tonight and I thought about this thread.

It looks like it may have reset some of my preferences and I had to fix a Bluetooth Not Available error when it rebooted. (Deleted the .plist file, powered down, and reset the SMC and voila, so far so good. My Mini is pretty old, so maybe this is nature's way of saying it is time for one of those spiffy ARM Macs. Maybe not.

- Walter.

 

[DaveF]

I’m anxiously awaiting new M1 iMacs. I’m not updating or rebooting my iMac, at this point. I need new computers available so I can have the freedom to risk rebooting, knowing I can buy a replacement if my current iMac dies completely.

 

[DaveF]

My iMac seems to have had one of its 4 USB ports die.

I will be replacing it this year. This is very weird, early-life death for a Mac. Not happy about this degree of hardware problems on a $2500 desktop that's gently used.

 

[John Dirk]

My iMac seems to have had one of its 4 USB ports die.

I will be replacing it this year. This is very weird, early-life death for a Mac. Not happy about this degree of hardware problems on a $2500 desktop that's gently used.

Wow! You could buy 3 comparably equipped PC's for that price. Also, if this were a PC you could likely easily repair it. Sorry. I know this is not exactly helpful but just sayin....

 

[DaveF]

Wow! You could buy 3 comparably equipped PC's for that price. Also, if this were a PC you could likely easily repair it. Sorry. I know this is not exactly helpful but just sayin....

It's a bummer a very expensive computer is dying relatively young. My 2007 MacBook pro lasted 7-some years. My wife's 2015 (?) iMac is going strong (to be upgraded this year). Why is my seemingly dying after 3 or 4 years? Wish I knew.


But "comparable" is a funny word for shopping these days. When I bought, there were no PCs with a 27" 5k display. And for good or bad, "comparable" isn't just comparing speeds-and-feeds, but the total ecosystem. And since there's no Windows Phone or integrated Windows ecosystem, there's no really comparable PC alternative to have the same total integration with an iPhone and iPad and various other devices. (If I were a google-centric app user, that wouldn't be the case, but I've de-googled my life as much as reasonably possible.)

 

[Johnny Angell]

Yeah, but for the price difference there aught to be better long term results or failing that, support. People who pay these exorbitant prices deserve what they get (says the owner of 2 iPhones, 2 iMacs, 2 watches, 1 ipad, and I’m probably forgetting something). And that’s just current ownership.

 

[DaveF]

Yes, this my iMac should be having none of these problems at 3-4 years old. That was always part of the Apple (implicit) promise: good hardware that lasts. I don’t I know if that’s changed. Aside from the keyboard fiasco, I’m not hearing about these sorts of failures as common problem. Someone’s always going to be the six-sigma outlier, and that might be me.

Fortunately, it still works. I can use my USB hub to work around the seemingly dead port. My boot up problems are manageable by not rebooting.

The big unknown will be what I do with it when I replace it. Normally I keep a computer so long, it has no resale value. This is new enough it would be worth a little bit, except for its issues. If Apple has any sort of buy back, I’ll probably do that.

 

[John Dirk]

And for good or bad, "comparable" isn't just comparing speeds-and-feeds, but the total ecosystem. And since there's no Windows Phone or integrated Windows ecosystem, there's no really comparable PC alternative to have the same total integration with an iPhone and iPad and various other devices. (If I were a google-centric app user, that wouldn't be the case, but I've de-googled my life as much as reasonably possible.)

I've never been one for brand loyalty myself, especially when that loyalty begins to become one-sided and taken for granted. Similarly, the whole ecosystem concept is totally lost on me. Now if I were in your particular situation I might replace my system and let my wife continue to use the one she has for awhile longer, as she could care less about a computer beyond it's ability to serve web pages, play card games, and play music videos.

 

[DaveF]

As I did when I quite Microsoft / Windows circa 2007 when it became too boring, too burdensome, too not what I wanted anymore, I’ll quick Apple / Mac when it’s more pain than pleasure. But the totality of the solution outweighs a single bad machine.

Do you not use multiple devices, or software solutions that span multiple devices and are integrated in some way?

At this point, I‘m losing the perspective to see a computer as just a box in the office that gets turned on to do a spreadsheet and turned off when done. I’m increasingly wondering how someone doesn’t invest in an ecosystem to get the best solution, be it Apple or Google or Amazon or Microsoft.

For me this integration enables things like:

• Create a spreadsheet on the desktop and edit it later on the tablet.
• Take photos with the smartphone and they’re on the desktop minutes later to categorize and share on HTF.
• Copy some text on the tablet so I can paste it into a web form on the smartphone.
• Open tabs and bookmarks are synced across all devices.
• Create a workout routine on the smartphone, and its synced to the smartphone which I use when I exercise.
• And a growing array of home automation devices in my house that I control on desktop and mobile

None of this is unique to Apple. But I’ve found their total ”ecosystem” the best suited to my tastes and goals.

But this growing integration makes it harder to cut out an individual device.

 

[DaveF]

Unrelated to crashing but related to frustrating performance problems, maybe I just fixed a Spotlight issue that's been bugging me:

Turn off indexing by Spotlight for external drives

Here's how you can prevent Spotlight from indexing external drives and Time Machine backups.

www.computerworld.com

I use Spotlight as an app launcher and lately it takes 10 to 30 seconds for it to respond and I hear my backup drives spinning up. So I just added them to the Privacy section of Spotlight settings and fingers crossed spotlight will be fast again, only searching my SSD.

How have I missed this all these years?!?!?

 

[will_0407]

@DaveF Assume you didn't get anywhere with this? Been having the same trouble on my Dad's 2017 imac (16GB/1TB SSD). Updated from Mojave to Big Sur 11.4 last night but same issue today. He sent me pics of the crash report (I asked him to copy/paste next time!) so I've just typed out the first line of it which seems to pretty much match yours. Tried to usual suggested fixes, with the exception of a complete reinstall of the O/S. Considering just biting the bullet and ordering an m1 imac. This one is still under warranty as we've got Applecare+ until Nov 2021

panic(cpu 0 caller 0xfffffff801bfd4e77): “AMDFramebufferVIB::setPowerState(0xffffff7fb6747c1c, 0 -> 1) timed out after 46327 ms”@/System/Volumes/Data/SWE/macOS/BuildRoots/e90674e518/Library/Cahces/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xmu/xnu-7195.121.3/iokit/Kernal/IOServicePM.cpp:5382

 

[DaveF]

@DaveF Assume you didn't get anywhere with this? Been having the same trouble on my Dad's 2017 imac (16GB/1TB SSD). Updated from Mojave to Big Sur 11.4 last night but same issue today. He sent me pics of the crash report (I asked him to copy/paste next time!) so I've just typed out the first line of it which seems to pretty much match yours. Tried to usual suggested fixes, with the exception of a complete reinstall of the O/S. Considering just biting the bullet and ordering an m1 imac. This one is still under warranty as we've got Applecare+ until Nov 2021

panic(cpu 0 caller 0xfffffff801bfd4e77): “AMDFramebufferVIB::setPowerState(0xffffff7fb6747c1c, 0 -> 1) timed out after 46327 ms”@/System/Volumes/Data/SWE/macOS/BuildRoots/e90674e518/Library/Cahces/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xmu/xnu-7195.121.3/iokit/Kernal/IOServicePM.cpp:5382

I turned off sleep and it no longer suffers the problem. But I never found the root cause problem.

 

[Johnny Angell]

This one is still under warranty as we've got Applecare+ until Nov 2021

I’d be getting it fixed under warranty, unless you just want an excuse to upgrade.

 

[DaveF]

I’ve stopped running macOS updates the past 3 or 6 months. But I’ve got some issues accrued, I’m behind on security updates, and really need to reboot my machine.

So I updated from 11.1 to 11.4 this morning. And remarkably my iMac updated successfully! No crash and hang at the reboot! I left it updating and went to the gym. Came back and it was waiting at the login screen! Whew!

I was prepared to go buy a 24” iMac if this did it in. But, it lives to see another day, and I bought some more time for possible 27“ M1 iMac release.