MacOS Big Sur Unstable

Your local Apple Store or authorized service agent has access to a pretty sophisticated set of diagnostics Apple makes available to them.

That doesn't guarantee they'd find issues, but certainly whether your system passed those diagnostics or not would be a good data point to have.

Have you run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up" or anti-virus apps on your Mac?

Yes, and without any data about your system or what crashes you are seeing, literally no one could help you.

If you want to post an Etrecheck report, someone here may be able to help you further.

I’ve ditched Chrome and have had no problem since then with Big Sur .... using Firefox primarily and Safari occasionally.

Well, no one here is from Apple, so no one here is denying anything.

However, there are indeed millions worldwide using Big Sur without issues, and reports of your particular issue aren't prevalent, so that seems to indicate either an issue with your particular hardware configuration or perhaps a hardware issue.

Regardless, only Apple Support can pass the information Apple engineers will need to investigate or solve your problem.

In the mean time, could you follow the instructions given above and download and install EtreCheck and post your results here?

If you click the "Additional Text" icon at the bottom of the reply formatting frame you should be able to paste the saved text output from EtreCheck to a post, though be sure to remove any personal data like your serial number.

That way I and a few others here can double check for anything we've found problematic before.

ironhide1975.2 wrote:

The major concern I have with this is WHY ARE THE APPLICATIONS NOT CLOSING? It's as if they need to report home that the applications are closed before they fully quit. An application should not need an Internet call to close, that makes no sense and tells me Apple is not being clear about the data they sending. If I quit or force quit an application the network should have nothing to do with it.

That depends upon the application, not the operating system, and it's easy to test your phone home theory:

1. Disconnect any wired Internet
2. Turn your Wi-Fi off
3. Run your program

Does it work? Can you exit it? If so, the operating system does not require the application to "phone home."

Now which application isn't quitting? A great example is Mail; it won't quit because for most your accounts are set to do something like empty the Trash upon close.

If you compile and run the following C program, it does not need to "phone home" to close. Were it a macOS feature, it would:

int
main()
{
	return 0;
}

For example Quicken will continue to say 'backuping up file before close' message. Until the Internet is available it will just hang there.

Yes - the Quicken application needs to connect to the Internet. Not the operating system.

I am not a network engineer but I would love for someone to do a scan on my ports and tell me what is happening when an application closes. Once again all signs point to an internet calls is attempting to be made, and unless that call is finalized the applications will not close and hang the machine. Either way the Networking protocol should not be integrated with the basic functionality of the Operating System. If so, that is just devious programming.

Networking protocol is part of the operating system, and has been for every OS - macOS, Windows, UNIX, Linux - it would be nearly impossible to run the networking stack in user space.

There is a macOS application named "Little Snitch" that I do not endorse but will tell you every time anything on your computer tries to connect to the Internet and what address it's trying to connect to; perhaps that will address your query; a free trial download is available.

What is much more likely to have been the case in your situation is that the applications in question were stuck waiting on a system resource that was unfortunately locked by something that was performing a network operation.

My view is that the issues are unique to Big Sur so that should help diagnose the cause but confusingly some reports are for new M1 macs with out of the box Big Sur - but I wonder if that is a red herring. There is clearly a valid point that the slow downs, freezes and runaway processes we are experiencing is not universal to all Big Sur users. So that does point to something previously installed that is perhaps incompatible with Big Sur that may be running in the background and is compromising performance generally, and is the catalyst to triggering a runaway process, heat, fan and freeze if we are doing something routine like Mail, photos, chrome, safari. Safe mode doesn't cure the issue - so how can that be? What is the common factor that links us all?

It maybe the common theme is we have installed (but unsuccessfully uninstalled) a dodgy app - say Clean My Mac for example, at anytime in the past 5 years and now we discover Big Sur is sensitive to whatever that has done to processes in the background.

So my question is, has anyone done a complete clean install of BigSur on an old mac and NOT migrated their third party software across? If so, what was the outcome?

I hear fans on all my Macs go to higher speed during an upgrade because there is a lot of work being done behind the scenes - searches of file systems, manipulation of logs, and in general it's one of the more processor and I/O intensive things your system is ever asked to do other than perhaps export 4K video from an editor.

I regularly see a new OS release or driver break due to flaky hardware as it's all about the way hardware is accessed, memory patterns and timing, which is critical.

I once had to work directly with a hardware vendor whose disk drive was sold by the tens of thousands into products sold around the world, but failed with the driver I had written. Other devices worked flawlessly with it, but theirs failed. They of course blamed my driver, but I knew it wasn't.

Back then I worked for a large company and was able to leverage the threat they would lose our future business if it was ignored, so the vendor flew a team in from Japan to work with me on diagnosing the issue.

They attached their protocol analyzer and I demonstrated the issue twice in a row. The team spoke to each other briefly and then left, as they immediately saw the issue and I got new firmware the following week that completely resolved the issue.

I could also tell you tales about chip errata and timing issues in bad FPGAs, but I don't want to bore everyone; timing issues in particular are fun, as anyone who's ever debugged hardware with a can of freeze spray could tell you. (Cooling a chip with freeze spray causes timing to shorten and thus timing falls into or out of spec.)

So no, the fact that the OS changed in no way exonerates the hardware from being at fault, and the easiest way to narrow that down would be for Apple to try to reproduce the issue on a copy of your hardware, which if they have not yet fixed the issue I suspect they have tried and failed to do.

I will then state the obvious next steps:

1) Contact Apple Support directly if you have not as of yet:

Contact - Official Apple Support

2) Take your machine in to be examined to rule out a hardware issue:

Genius Bar Reservation and Apple Support Options - Apple

Why haven't you updated to macOS 11.3 yet?

Your cure is reverting to Mojave. I did that after Big Sur killed my Intel Mac. Couldn't be happier. See my post above.

Now, if you have a M1 unit, beats me. I tried one and it went back.

Just because you are having a strange issue does not make the operating system - used by millions every day without issue - either "immature" or "bad quality."

Without knowing precisely what is going wrong with your machine and detailed logs, it would also be impossible for Apple Engineering to "learn from" your experience without so much as a sysdiagnose being performed when the system is in that state. (Even if no keyboard input is recognized, it's often possible to connect via ssh from another machine.)

I would recommend that you contact Apple Support directly so they can work with you in further diagnosing your issue:

Contact - Official Apple Support

2015 Macbook 12". Started with El Capitan, then Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina, and now Big Sur. By far Big Sur has been the most unstable of them all, freezing and crashing multiple times a day using nothing but Safari, and 11.1 did not help. It doesn't surprise me though - the big change this time is support for a completely new non-Intel architecture (ARM), and our Intel machines are no longer priority, especially my 5-year-old Intel machine (sad face).