I bricked my new M5 MacBook Air

TidBITS Talk
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By “bricked” I mean that it is currently unusable. I hope that after I take it to the Genius Bar appointment in two days it will be working again.

I ordered a 15” MBA the first day that they were available, and it arrived at my home yesterday.

I thought it would be easy to set up: back up my old computer (Sequoia), move the Time Machine to the new computer (Tahoe), and use Migration Agent to set up the computer. Migration Agent appeared to complete without any problems. Then I went to System Settings and I found that Find My Mac was not turned on, and could not be turned on.

So after futzing with this for a while, I called Apple Support. We futzed with it together for a while, and he finally came up with a solution, but it turned out to not be a good one. (It would be a long digression to describe this).

So I figured, let me just return the computer to pristine state, and maybe set it up, get Find My Mac working, and then restore user files from my Time Machine.

Under Tahoe, you erase your disk from a new entry in System Preferences. I went through the steps and at the end, my disk was erased, but instead of booting into the “Welcome” dialog, it booted into “Restore” with the dialog “Activate this Mac.” This is where I got stuck. There is no icon for choosing a WiFi network from this Restore/Activate this Mac screen. Without WiFi, I can’t activate the Mac.

I called Apple Care back, got elevated to secondary level support, and my support agent said that this is an “emerging issue,” and the only solution would be if I had an Ethernet dongle for my MBA. I don’t. He indicated that others are seeing this same problem, and he hopes it is addressed in later version of Tahoe. But right now, there is no other solution.

I suspect that the first problem (no Find My Mac) was particular to my situation, and others won’t run into it. But I suspect that the second, no WiFi when trying to activate a Mac, is more widespread. It might be only in M5 laptops, since I haven’t heard of this problem before (I don’t know more than what I am saying here).

You might want to put off getting an M5 MBA, or if you do, don’t put yourself in a situation where you want to erase the Mac and start over.

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I found this YouTube link. I didn’t watch the movie, but comments say that I am not alone, and perhaps this is limited to M5 macs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZvv6DI4cHI

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So the video says

  1. Shut down the Mac
  2. Click and hold the Power button until the Gear icon labeled ‘Options’ appears
  3. At that point, you should see a Wifi icon in the menubar
  4. Connect to a WiFi network, and the Activate process should proceed.
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But the icon doesn’t show. For me, life is too short to watch YouTube videos. But the comments did confirm that others have experienced what I did.

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That 3 minute video might save you a 2-day wait and a drive to the Apple Store.

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Thanks for the info, and I hope it gets/got resolved. Thankfully my M5 install went perfectly. While I’ve used migration assistant before, for a laptop I always build from scratch, and this one went perfectly.

I’m keeping my old M2 as a backup/spare computer, as I always do (at some point I’ll get around to wiping my current backup/spare, a 10 year old Air, and trade it in for peanuts), and after getting the M5 set up, I’m thinking about wiping the M2 and setting that up from scratch as well, because there were some very minor issues I had with the M2 after a few years of macOS upgrades that weren’t working right (double-clicking an encrypted .dmg file does not place the cursor in the passphrase filed on the M2 - it works fine on the M5; in Preview, if I edit a PDF file and try to drag a thumbnail from the sidebar, nothing happens on the M2 - it works fine on the M5.) But if this is an issue with Tahoe 26.3.1, I may hold off for a bit.

That said, I do have an ethernet adapter that works…

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Apple genius used an Ethernet adapter and reinstalled Tahoe.

Surprisingly, Apple doesn’t seem to have an Ethernet adapter for its modern computers. The genius had to use a USB 3 to Mini Display Port adapter and then a MDP to Ethernet adapter. We both shook our heads at this.

Be careful if you need to erase a M5 MBA. It might not work.

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Funny that the Apple Store service people don’t have a few of these for their use, given Apple sells them both online and in-store!

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Sheesh–I carry a small cable bag when I travel with my MacBook Pro. There’s a USB-C -Ethernet adapter in the bag, as well as a short Ethernet cable.

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The last “Apple” Ethernet adapter was for Thunderbolt 1/2, which used the same connector style as Mini DisplayPort. They were likely using the Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter to connect to your system.

As @Halfsmoke points out, the Apple Store (online, at least) sells a Belkin adapter which should work as well.

I’ve also had success with a number of different brands like Cable Matters & Uni.

You may never need an Ethernet adapter again, but it’s a handy (and inexpensive) tool to have.

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If you are looking for an ethernet adapter have a look at a powered USB hub with ethernet. I needed a powered hub for running several peripherals via my monitor (connected to my Macbook Air). It happened to come with an ethernet port that I now find useful.
My USB-c hub is a Tekera model.

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When you erased the disk while booted normally is when you unknowingly shot yourself in the foot and bricked the MacBook Air. You effectively deleted the recovery mode system from the internal disk. What you should have done, was to shut down completely. Hold the power button while booting and enter into Recovery Mode. Then you can safely erase the disk and reinstall macOS as recovery (a minimal operating system is running as a RAM disk).

Apple eliminated the Internet Recovery feature which was used on Intel Macs. With Apple Silicon you cannot boot directly off an external disk including a flash drive without the internal SSD containing the necessary system partitions. This is due to security and chain of trust.

The way to recover your Apple M5 MacBook Air now requires another working Mac and a Thunderbolt data cable (not merely a charging cable). The working Mac requires installing Apple Configurator from the App Store. Then you need to force the bricked Mac into DFU mode which can be a bit tricky and will require multiple attempts. Once achieved, the bricked Mac will appear in Apple Configuration and you can choose to revive and restore macOS onto the bricked Mac. I am sure the Genius Bar will do this for you.

As to Time Machine backups, it is very risky to restore an older Time Machine backup made with a prior macOS version on top of a newer macOS version. That is the root cause of your initial trouble. As you indicated, restoring data is not a problem. I would even go so far as to avoid restoring the ~/Library or /Library files as well. That would mean manually mounting the Time Machine backup and restoring data files manually. Then installing all your software and reconfiguring all your settings for the OS and applications.

Apple doesn’t exactly make this easy. New hardware cannot run the prior macOS in many cases depending on timing and when the hardware was manufactured. The M5 MacBook Air is very new and it comes with Tahoe so you can’t downgrade it to Sequoia to allow for a smooth Time Machine restoration and then upgrade to Tahoe. Even if the hardware was capable of being downgraded to Sequoia it ships with Tahoe. Apple hides prior macOS versions in the App Store where you need to find their unique links to the hidden versions on the Apple Support documentation or use the command line softwareupdate command to force the installation of a prior release version. On top of all that, new hardware shipping after a major macOS such as the M5 MacBook Air ships with a dot release version that no other Macs are running. Such as Tahoe 26.3.2 where older hardware is still on 26.3.1.

Very confusing for consumers while being light years ahead of the competition. Microsoft Windows 11 has been pushing out firmware updates via Windows Update and bricking many computers. This requires extreme measures to fix. There are settings in the UEFI firmware to disable automatic firmware updates and it’s highly recommended to do so. Yet at the same time, there is some very nasty UEFI malware that originated as nation state hacking tools to now being openly sold on the black market. So it is important to upgrade firmware to close the loopholes that allow these attacks. But then you are risk of being bricked because of human or perhaps A.I. error due to buggy software and firmware updates. Never a dull moment in computing.

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You don’t need Apple Configuration, nor do you need a Thunderbolt cable. A USB-C data and charging cable (NOT a Thunderbolt 3 cable) and another working Mac running Sonoma or later (Intel or Apple Silicon) is what you need. Sonoma added the ability to do the firmware refresh in the Finder. You only need Apple Configurator if your “other” Mac is running a macOS release earlier than Sonoma.

It’s also critical that you plug the USB-C cable into the DFU port on the target Mac. Apple’s support articles tell you how to identify the DFU port since it isn’t externally marked. Get the wrong port and the refresh won’t work.

See Apple’s support article How to revive or restore Mac firmware - Apple Support for all the gory details.

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Just to be clear, I think that you are incorrect. This is what @alanterra said he did:

That’s Settings / General / Transfer or Reset.

That’s the official way to do this - he didn’t erase the recovery system. I just did this with my old MacBook Air M2 and it worked just fine, except for me I was able to connect to WiFi at the Activation Screen that shows when the Mac restarts - @alanterra said that he could not. If he had an ethernet adapter, he would have been just fine, and, as he reported later, the technician at the Apple Store was able to activate his Mac for him by using an ethernet connection.

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Correct, Doug

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That’s right. Thunderbolt 1/2, it just looks like Mini Display Port. Do people stay up at night finding new ways to confuse us?

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No different from today’s USB-C connector, which (depending on cables and what’s connected to them) might carry:

  • USB (at a wide variety of different speeds)
  • Thunderbolt (any version, 1/2 via an adapter)
  • DisplayPort video (either via Thunderbolt or standalone)
  • Other video formats (proprietary, via adapters)

TB1/2 used the Mini DisplayPort connector because it (like later versions of TB) can carry DisplayPort video to displays without any adapter more complicated than a cable with the correct connectors.

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For many Apple products, especially iPhones and iPads, a trip to Brussels might answer your question…
;-)

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Curious. I wouldn’t have thought about using a Time Machine backup to migrate to a new Mac. Last time I did was moving from an Intel Macbook Air to an M3 Macbook Air. When I got the new laptop I simply followed the on-screen guidance and it copied all it needed from the old laptop.

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The same thing happened to me. I don’t remember exactly what led me to wipe & reinstall the OS (something went awry while trying to use Migration Assistant with my old MacBook Air) but I ended up at the activation screen with no WiFi. Fortunately I do have a USB-C Ethernet dongle & that got me out of the jam; I’m pretty sure this is the first time I ever used it but it paid for itself that day.