A couple of months ago, I got on of the first Apple M4 Pro Macbooks, with the fastest processor configuration and 128 GB of DRAM. I only write about OOBE’s (out of box experiences) when they are interesting, and this one was utterly Apple-simple.
I’m not a newcomer to Apple computers. My first PC was an HP 2114A, but my second was an Apple II. Using Logo, I taught my kids how to program on that machine. Later, when I was working for IBM, I got the company to buy me a maxxed-out Quadra 950 that I used for image processing (it wasn’t easy to slip that by IBM purchasing, but I succeeded). When I was CIO for Echelon, I was responsible for a mixed PC/Apple environment and dealt with the OS 7.x lows and the OS 9.6 highs. About 15 years ago, I bought a MacBook mostly to run Iridient Developer. I had difficulty in getting that machine to play nice with the Windows Domain and was put off when Apple Support said that it should work just fine, but they wouldn’t help troubleshoot those kinds of networking problems.
About a year ago, my wife got a MacBook. Then she started asking me questions I couldn’t answer. I bought the M4 MacBook as a self-education device. After I got it running, I did some benchmarking and found that it was much faster than my 64-core, 512GB DRAM workstation on scalar tasks, albeit slower on highly parallel ones. In particular, the new Mac ran the Puget Systems Photoshop benchmark quite a bit faster than the big workstation.
I got to thinking that I might actually want to use the new MacBook for work. I’d keep the old workstation for doing image processing with the Matlab programs I’d written, but I contemplated transferring the Photoshop, Lightroom, and InDesign work to the Mac.
I bought a 27 inch Apple Studio Display, and started to work the new machine pretty hard. At first, it went well. Then I noticed that Zoom sessions started to empty the buffer and drop the frame rate. Using the activity monitor, it appeared that there were no resource hogs, and there was plenty of Internet bandwidth, so I couldn’t figure out why that was happening. Rebooting fixed it.
Then I started seeing the Spinning Beachball of Death (SBBOD). This is an indication that the user should wait for something to happen. But the SBBOD would spin for hours if I let it. Rebooting fixed the issue at least temporarily, but it kept coming back.
I paid attention to which programs invocation caused the SBBOD. There didn’t seen to be any pattern. Lightroom, GoodSync, Finder, System Settings, Time Machine, and lots of other programs could get it started. I also noticed that sometimes when I got the SBBOD, I couldn’t launch any more programs, and the machine refused to perform an orderly shutdown, forcing me to do a hard power-cycle. Also, force quit didn’t work a lot of the time.
Those times when I could launch the activity monitor to take a look at resource usage, everything appeared normal. The window server seems to eat up a lot of cycles, but for all I know that’s usually the cse.
I had the Mac hooked up vis Thunderbolt to a QNAP NAS. I’d read somewhere that Macs don’t always get along with NASs, so I disconnected the NAS, installed an OWC 32 TB SSD array using SoftRAID, and spent two days transferring over 20-some-odd terabytes of data. The new array worked fine, but the SBBODs continued.
I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the now unconnected NAS was the source of the hangs, so I removed all references to it from the Finder.
After that, the system ran fine for a while, but I got a hang when I launched Lightroom for the second time.
However, there still seem to be plenty of CPU cycles available:
I forced quit Lr:
Lightroom passed its own compatibility tests:
But I couldn’t relaunch it:
I tried to restart the computer, but it wouldn’t shut down. I did a hard shutdown. Upon reboot, the machine ran fine for almost a day. Then I got an error while using Goodsync.
I tried to reboot:
Goodsync refused to quit. I forced a quit.
Goodsync hung again. I rebooted, and this time I removed the QNAP Qfinder app, trying to get rid of the vestiges of the NAS.
I tried quitting Qfinder again, and the system shut down properly.
When the Mac came up, I couldn’t see any of the local NASs. Web browsing worked fine, though. I opened up System Settings and looked at the Networking section. The Mac had logged itself onto the wrong WiFi network. I logged it onto the right one and things appeared to be normal again.
After working for half an hour, I tried to empty the trash and got the SBBOD again. I had to force a hard shutdown, then I reinstalled the OS.
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