Big macOS and Pixel bugs

Given this site focuses on consumer-level news, not sure why Paul or the team haven’t covered these fairly-notable bugs that have been recently-reported elsewhere for both macOS and Android 14 on recent Pixel devices.

But to summarise:

14″ and 16″ MacBook Pros fail to boot post-update if ProMotion is disabled

There’s a bug in recent macOS updates/releases where 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pros with Apple Silicon chips can be rendered unbootable if you disable ProMotion and then do a macOS update. The affected devices will then only boot to a blank, black screen.

So-far, only the 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro devices that use Apple Silicon chips appear to be affected.

Seems to occur if you update to Sonoma, or the 13.6 Ventura update or later.

To recover, you’ll need to do a Device Firmware Update (DFU) recovery.

References:

debugpointnews.com/asahi-linux-macos-bugs

github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/macOS-Sonoma-Boot-Failures

howtogeek.com/macos-sonoma-has-a-boot-failure-problem

theregister.com/2023/11/01/asahi_linux_mac_black_screen

(There is also a very-recently reported issue where macOS Sonoma doesn’t update the volume used for System Recovery fully, meaning a mis-match between the firmware that volume then expects and your current firmware can cause the “recoveryOS” to fail to boot, making the System Recovery feature unusable. I don’t use macOS so not sure if you could perhaps create a USB installer to work-around that, as you can on Windows if you’ve deleted the Recovery partition?)

Loss of access to files on some Pixel devices following Android 14 update

If you have a recent Pixel phone (most reports I’ve seen mostly reference Pixel 6 or 7 models) and you use the “multiple users” feature then hold-off on updating to Android 14.

There are MANY reports so-far of people who do use multiple-user logins on such devices where after updating to Android 14 they have lost-access to some of the other user-accounts and as such all of the data on the device that was stored inside that user account.

References:

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/google-promises-a-rescue-patch-for-android-14s-ransomware-bug

support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/241474288/issues-accessing-storage-after-updating-to-android-14

theregister.com/2023/10/30/google_android_14_pixel_bug

Maybe such issues are out-of-scope for this site, but, I don’t know… kind of feels like things that should be covered to me, given both macOS and Pixel devices are consumer-targeted devices. 🤷🏻‍♂️