Serious Discussion Boot Failures affecting 14"/16" MBP with ProMotion displays running macOS 14 and 13.6

[Ink]

macOS Sonoma and macOS Ventura 13.6 were released with multiple serious bugs in their upgrade and boot process. Combined, these bugs can create conditions where a machine always boots to a black screen, no matter what power button press combination is used. This leaves users stuck, and the only solution is to use DFU recovery.

This bug can affect users both with and without Asahi Linux installed.

There are two bugs:

macOS Sonoma upgrades use the previously installed version as System Recovery. This makes some sense, but does not consider backwards compatibility problems between older RecoveryOS and newer firmware. If this mismatch causes recoveryOS to fail to boot, this will leave System Recovery unusable.

For 14" and 16" models: Once System Firmware is updated to the macOS Sonoma version, if the display is configured to a refresh rate other than ProMotion, that system will no longer be able to boot into older macOS installs nor Asahi Linux correctly. This includes recovery mode when those systems are set as the default boot OS, and also System Recovery at least until the next subsequent OS upgr ade.

Find out more:

macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

Hardware and software docs / wiki. Contribute to AsahiLinux/docs development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Discovered by Asahi Linux Team for Apple Silicon.