Constantly crashing/rebooting MacBook Pro after lock/sleep

TidBITS Talk
1

I’m away on vacation in Switzerland, using my 2019 MacBook Pro to ingest and edit photos, read email, and “surf” the net in Safari. When I’m done, I either lock or put the MBP to sleep, and when I return to it, pressing the power key to awaken it, I get the start up chimes. This never happens at home, but it’s happened almost every time I reach for the computer here in Europe. (I know the location has nothing to do with it.) After I’ve logged back in, I get a MacOS message stating that the computer has unexpected rebooted due to a crash (or something like that). It happens with being both plugged into AC and not. The battery is usually pretty close to a full charge.

Is there anyway to determine what’s causing the crash, so that I can remedy it? I have minimal apps open and running, but several menu addons.

Cheers

2

I just realized that I was down to about 20 GB of disk space, so that may have been an issue. I’ve since freed up a bunch and about 150 GB of disk space now available. We’ll see if that resolves anything.

3

Do you have to press the power button to wake it?

My (admittedly old) MacBook Air is almost never shutdown - I close the lid to put it to sleep. It wakes when I open the lid or (if it was sleeping with the lid open) if I press a key.

Does this work for you. If so, then perhaps your use of the power button is causing it to power-down while it’s asleep.

If a lid-opening or key-press doesn’t wake it, then something may have happened to it while it was asleep.

You may want to check the log file for information about the cause of previous shutdowns to see if anything there might help:

$ sudo log show --predicate 'sender == "AppleSMC"'
Filtering the log data using "sender == "AppleSMC""
Skipping info and debug messages, pass --info and/or --debug to include.
Timestamp                       Thread     Type        Activity             PID    TTL  
...
2022-09-12 08:30:01.845566-0400 0x26181a   Default     0x0                  0      0    kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous sleep cause: 5
2022-09-12 22:59:33.705543+0000 0xd1       Default     0x0                  0      0    kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: 7
2022-09-12 19:03:02.495563-0400 0xd1       Default     0x0                  0      0    kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Log      - Default:         28, Info:                0, Debug:             0, Error:          0, Fault:          0
Activity - Create:           0, Transition:          0, Actions:           0

and:

$ pmset -g log | grep shutdown
2022-09-12 19:03:16 -0400 ShutdownCause       	SMC shutdown cause: 1: Normal warm reset

In my case, there have been no problems. September 12 was when I upgraded my Mac to macOS 11.7. Shutdown cause 1 is (I assume) when I clicked “Restart” to begin the upgrade. I think cause 7 is when the upgrade completed and the system restarted itself to go back to normal operation.

See also:

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