Mr. Macintosh now has more details.
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Howard Oakley has a great article on why the screen stays black for so long.
And over in the MacAdmin Slack, user stottmj has a great summary of the situation. Sounds like it can hit High Sierra Macs too, which makes sense, though I hadn’t heard of any being impacted before this.
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Good explanation.
Sure sounds to me like there would have been much less mayhem if Apple had not removed the tiny LED that indicated your MBP is running. With no indication left to the user, people are assuming it’s off when actually it’s still updating. They then proceed to “turn it on”, which has catastrophic consequences. Really poor design choice in my opinion.
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I had a recent problem with an iMac Pro having some bad third party ram (as determined by the Geniuses) but the worst part was the diagnosis process. I would turn the computer on and could only tell it was on by the accessory external drive, which had a small light on it. Of course in working out the problem, I had to unplug all the peripherals to make sure they were not the problem. Then I could not tell if it was on or off as there was no chime and no lights. Modern minimalism taken to the extreme.
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Just to add a data point: I have a MacBook Air (13-inch, 2017). After I clicked Restart on the Mojave Security Update the screen went totally black for about 2 minutes, and then (finally) the little rotating progress indicator appeared for a while and then it finally started to look like a normal update with a progress bar. The whole thing finished in about 25 minutes or less.
Am I wrong that it was version 10.14.6 both before and after this update? That bugs me.
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And that Mac doesn’t have a T1 or T2 chip, so it will theoretically be a bit different anyway.
This is just a security update, so it should stay at version 10.14.6 afterward. However, if you click on that version number in About This Mac, it will show you the build number, which should have increased.
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