Saturday, July 30, 2011

OS X Lion Random Crashes, Black Screen Reported by Users

Apple may have to push Mac OS X 10.7.1 out the door sooner rather than later, if it wants to tone down some of the threads actively discussing the various issues surrounding Lion, the company’s latest Mac OS version.

A quick trip to Apple Support Communities will soon reveal even to the untrained eye that something is going on with OS X 10.7 (Lion), the latest iteration of Apple’s desktop operating system.

Notably the most common complaint of all is Lion crashing randomly, followed by a black screen with the computer remaining unresponsive.

Customers have found that the only way to get the system working again is to shut it down by force.
“Lion crashes ever now and thenand [sic] stays on a black screen. Its totally unresponsive, all I can do is force shut down but I've done this about 4 times already today,” writes whetty101 in a thread that has racked up over 12,000 hits so far.

The discussion is ongoing, with most commenters sharing a similar experience. At 18 pages long, it appears these customers are not going to run out of anger fuel any time too soon.

While some are trying to troubleshoot the issues themselves, others are pointing fingers at Apple demanding a fix.

It is worth noting that “Lion randomly crashes - black screen” is just one of multiple ongoing discussions on the same topic.

Numerous threads containing similar (and sometimes almost identical stories) have recently emerged on Apple Support Communities, of which we can highlight the following:

iMac screen randomly going black after lion upgrade
Screen goes black after upgrading to lion!
OS Lion keeps randomly crashing. Anyone else?
Mac OS X Lion 10.7 black screen crashes (and SSD stalls again)

It is fair to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here, as many of these customers have “upgraded” from Snow Leopard to Lion.

These threads merely act as confirmation that a fresh install will always do an OS justice, but that doesn’t take the ball out of Apple’s court either.

It was the company’s job to ensure Lion would install properly on a large number of configurations with an even larger number of potential scenarios for failure.
Bear in mind that this is just one of multiple issues reported with OS X Lion. As noted above, we expect Apple to ship the first maintenance release of Lion (OS X 10.7.1) relatively soon.

The Mac maker is known to be actively testing OS X 10.7.2 already with a focus on iCloud services.

Have you upgraded to Lion? How has your experience been so far?