vga256 on Nostr: haha so. i've got this wonderful mac pro 6,1 trash can. it's everything I want in a ...
haha so.
i've got this wonderful mac pro 6,1 trash can. it's everything I want in a desktop machine except for one thing: every week or two, it freezes and hard crashes with an error about WindowServer no longer checking in.
the overwhelming response from the apple community for the past 5+ years is that it's a case of a failing trash can GPU. that never made any sense to me, as the machine never crashes under load of any kind.
one person said that once they turned off sleep, the machine was rock solid for months. i confirmed this. it was a sleep issue of some kind.
so on a hunch, I checked the firmware version: it was nearly 8 years old. that seemed impossible to me because I had recently upgraded to Monterey, and macOS auto-upgrades old firmware with each update.
🤔 i remembered that I had installed a samsung ssd to replace the ancient apple ssd the machine shipped with. could that have anything to do with it?
i had apparently forgotten that at boot, macOS updates check to see if you're using an *apple ssd*. if you aren't, it *does not* upgrade the firmware and silently continues with the install. i'm not sure if this applies to other machines, but it is certainly true of the mac pro 6,1.
if you're running a mac with an upgraded non-apple SSD, check your firmware. there's a chance that yours is running a very old firmware.
the upshot: i stuck in an old original *apple* ssd, ran the Monterey installer, and it silently upgraded the firmware. i'm now running fw 481.0.0.0.0 and the system is rock solid. no more random crashes.
#macOS #apple
Published at
2025-05-01 21:15:37 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "haha so.\n\ni've got this wonderful mac pro 6,1 trash can. it's everything I want in a desktop machine except for one thing: every week or two, it freezes and hard crashes with an error about WindowServer no longer checking in.\n\nthe overwhelming response from the apple community for the past 5+ years is that it's a case of a failing trash can GPU. that never made any sense to me, as the machine never crashes under load of any kind. \n\none person said that once they turned off sleep, the machine was rock solid for months. i confirmed this. it was a sleep issue of some kind.\n\nso on a hunch, I checked the firmware version: it was nearly 8 years old. that seemed impossible to me because I had recently upgraded to Monterey, and macOS auto-upgrades old firmware with each update.\n\n🤔 i remembered that I had installed a samsung ssd to replace the ancient apple ssd the machine shipped with. could that have anything to do with it?\n\ni had apparently forgotten that at boot, macOS updates check to see if you're using an *apple ssd*. if you aren't, it *does not* upgrade the firmware and silently continues with the install. i'm not sure if this applies to other machines, but it is certainly true of the mac pro 6,1.\n\nif you're running a mac with an upgraded non-apple SSD, check your firmware. there's a chance that yours is running a very old firmware.\n\nthe upshot: i stuck in an old original *apple* ssd, ran the Monterey installer, and it silently upgraded the firmware. i'm now running fw 481.0.0.0.0 and the system is rock solid. no more random crashes.\n\n#macOS #apple",
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