My Mac mini (M1) crashed a bunch of times today. I’d be working on it, the screen would briefly flash magenta and it reboots. Good thing about macOS is that it opens all your windows just as they were before the crash, so it’s quite seamless in that respect, but it sure is irritating that it crashed so many times.
I think I mentioned earlier that it crashed a lot due to Karabiner Elements. That ton was similarly seamless and most times I hadn’t noticed it crashing because it happened when I was away and the only thing I noticed upon returning is that I can’t unlock with the Apple Watch and that unlocking took slightly longer as it had to reopen all the windows. Today’s crashes were much more irritating as they happened when I was working.
The errors were about kernel panics and corrupt memory (I don’t recollect the exact message). Googling on it got many posts that said it was due to faulty RAM and replacing one of the sticks helped. Can’t be the case here due to the unified RAM I think, and if it is faulty unified RAM indeed then they’d just have to give me a new model I suppose? Eugh.
Twice it happened when I clicked on something with my Trackpad. Once in Todoist, another time in Firefox or Bear. The Trackpad stopped responding while the Mouse worked fine – and it crashed after a few seconds. After the second of these I turned off the Trackpad and worked but then it crashed again. All this began after I moved my sole external HDD to a different side, and I remember fiddling with the HDD earlier too (during the Karabiner crashes) so I wondered if the HDD was causing an issue – loose cables or whatever. So I disconnected that and worked a while, but nope.. still crashed!
My latest theory is that it must be some Intel app running in Rosetta2 mode. The only apps I had running this way was Docker Preview, Visual Studio Code, and some Apple Music visualiser program. So I quit Apple Music (don’t use it much anyways can always reopen later and see how it goes); switched to Visual Studio Code Insiders (that has the M1 version), and uninstalled Docker Preview (will revisit it once the stable version is out). Hope that fixes it 🤞🏽
Irritatingly my iMac too crashed twice this week. Today I found it shutdown after a crash (I wasn’t working on it) and earlier this week it crashed while I was working. The only change to that was the Asus ROG enclosure – I hope that isn’t causing any issue. Would hate to find it being the culprit. 😲