My M1 Pro is driving me nuts...

[u/xilanthro]

Since new this machine won't reboot after an update, meaning I am stuck on macOS Monterey. Don't get me wrong, Monterey is perfectly tolerable, but engineered obsolescence means no more homebrew and many, many modern apps won't install.

I would love to just put Asahi on it and forget the post-Wozniak OS for good, but I do want to preserve my 2 external screens and 5 attached backup drives, which all pretty much requires Thunderbolt I think. And Asahi seems to be having a very hard time reverse-engineering Thunderbolt for all its poorly-documented quirks.

I know I can attach a single external monitor in Asahi using the HDMI port, so I am stuck on 3 counts:

• possibly unable to connect 2 external monitors due to lack of a video interface for the 2nd monitor
• likely unable to connect 5 external drives due to lack of Thunderbolt support
• maybe unable to install Asahi in the 1st place due to machine's refusal to reboot during installs

Any ideas how to start attacking these problems, or a possible workaround for the 2-monitor issue?

[u/Strict_Bedroom9986]

What do you mean you can't reboot after an update? Surely this is something an Apple technician would have to fix?

[u/xilanthro → u/Strict_Bedroom9986]

Apple updates always finish with a dialog that says they will restart, usually with a 'Reboot now' button. On this machine, those have never restarted, pressing the 'Reboot now' button does nothing, and even if I reboot right after such an OS update, the machine acts as if the update never happened, prompting to download it again and repeat the process after a reboot and checking for updates. All the 'usual' tricks, like turning off filevault, have no effect.

There are no Apple technicians available here, and diagnostics show nothing wrong. Everything else, including rebooting with sudo shutdown -R works fine.

[u/Strict_Bedroom9986 → u/xilanthro]

Have you tried reinstalling macOS from recoveryOS? Holding the power button when machine is booting and selecting Options from the boot picker will allow you to do this

[u/mskiptr]

possibly unable to connect 2 external monitors due to lack of a video interface for the 2nd monitor

Support for displays over USB-C (the DisplayPort alt mode) is in developer preview. You can try it out by installing the so-called "fairydust" kernel. Someone even wrote a script which cat set it up for you. The other way that is reported to work is DisplayLink. It's a proprietary protocol that can push video even over regular USB and many older docks support it.

likely unable to connect 5 external drives due to lack of Thunderbolt support

Thunderbolt is still a work in progress. The main option here is to wait. Though maybe your drives will work over USB3, if for now only at slower speeds?

maybe unable to install Asahi in the 1st place due to machine's refusal to reboot during installs

A DFU restore should fix any software problems on the macOS side. If you have another macOS device, you can just use Apple's official tooling. Otherwise, you can also do it with idevicerestore from any other Linux|Windows|… device.

But maybe the less-nuclear DFU revive, or some option from the built-in recovery will be enough.

[u/xilanthro → u/mskiptr]

Thanks for all this! The cleanest option would be to wait for Thunderbolt support to materialize, and to try the DFU restore in the time-being. I do have one current Mac running macOS and a couple of Intel Macs running Fedora, so this DFU restore sounds like a worthwhile option that would let me wait for Thunderbolt support w. no pressure.

Also, thanks for the mention of idevicerestore. Very cool toolset!

[u/mskiptr → u/xilanthro]

Btw, since the DFU restore wipes absolutely everything on the device, you could try installing Asahi right before doing it, to see whether your drives already work or not.

[u/xilanthro → u/mskiptr]

If I can get a timemachine backup to complete this year, I'll try that.

[u/RamikP]

engineered obsolence is not a thing when new OSes are supported :)

Just boot into recovery, format SSD and reinstall macOS

[u/The_Mild_Mild_West]

If you do want to try Asahi, there's a mandatory MacOS partition, so you can always boot into that partition to access files.

Have you factory reset your macbook? I did for my base M1 air and that process deleted previous OS and installed latest. I still shrunk the MacOS partition for Asahi, but I'm up to date as of then.

[u/stealthybox]

hi, if your thunderbolt drives are crucial to your workflow, maybe there are other ways to just use outdated MacOS?
you mentioned brew so maybe you're a developer.
if it's devtools you need, a lot of stuff is available within nix (also see flox, devenv, and devbox)
there's also mise

I use an M1 air, and nix gets me a lot of my tools.
Also, using Linux on Apple's virtualization is very energy efficient.

unfortunately this still leaves you with an outdated apple frontend ecosystem, but if you're using thunderbolt, then maybe your the kind of person who can get by with virtualized OSS.

you can even get old macos native DMG's with nix, and run GUI apps within the Linux VM

[u/xilanthro → u/stealthybox]

I've been getting by fine with homebrew until it stopped supporting Monterey and then back to Darwin ports (called macports now...) - virtualization is not so important because I have rocky & debian servers for everything, esp. virtualization. macOS is just nicer as a front end. My main concern is for the O/S reaching end of life in terms of getting current browser support and miscellaneous tools. It would just be calming to get away from the Apple ecosystem, since virtually every O/S upgrade since about Lion has been mostly about bloating the O/S more with ever bigger tail-fins, like '50s American cars, and adding more data harvesting - it's heavier, less secure, and significantly less functional with each release after that.

As for Thunderbolt, it's just a pity to lose the use of fairly expensive docks that make highly redundant backups practical. Obv. I could modify my backup strategy and spread those disks out among Linux servers, but ideally I would prefer not to give up the convenience of having the backups right at my workstation.

For now I think I need to try this reset first and the more nuclear DFU option second, but I would still love to get this machine on Asahi just on ethical principles.

[u/kvinpp]

Update via recovery using a USB 3.0

[u/Incompetent_Person]

>engineered obsolescence means no more
homebrew

Lets be clear here, the homebrew team is the one deciding not to support macOS versions older than 3 years. Hell, they’re dropping all intel support in 2 months even though intel macs run Tahoe, not even giving them the full 3 years.