Apple updated Lion this week, officially bringing it to 10.7.3. Great! Only one little problem; it’s apparently causing lots of application crashes and weird visual bugs. Here’s how to fix it if it’s all gone wrong for you.
MacRumors reports on the problem, which appears (I’ve not had it hit my own Macs this way yet, in other words) to happen if you use software update to automatically apply the update, rather than downloading it by itself. The bug can cause random application crashes and graphical glitches in the crash window with a repeated image of a question mark and the letters CUI repeating.
Fear not, though! There is a solution at hand. If you’ve applied the update and it is crashing on you, grabbing the combo update directly from Apple and applying it over the top appears to clear things up, although if your system is so unstable you can’t get that far, you’ll have to rely on Time Machine backups. Which sucks, but does highlight the fact that you can’t have enough backups. [Macrumors]
Image: Macrumors
Symo
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 9:05 AMWaiting for the Apple fanboi’s to chime in on how stable and secure their ‘holy grail’ of OS is and explain this one…
Drew
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 9:09 AMApparently it only happens if you have a Windows PC within a 100km radius of your Mac… Proof that Microsoft is sabotaging Apple.
Nick
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 9:22 AMThis comment has been deemed inappropriate and has been deleted.
olearymo
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 10:16 AMreally? I was waiting for some sadsack whinger to come in and rant about ‘fanbois’. Looks like my wait is over.
Luke
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 9:15 AMIt’s probably happening with PITA auto updaters like MS Office.
Jamie
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 9:27 AMSo, do you have to pay for the update again if you need to download it directly from Apple?
MotorMouth
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 9:30 AMWhat!?!? Are Apple now charging for minor updates as well as point updates? Man, they really have the market cornered on stupid sheeple, don’t they?
Richard
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 7:48 PMThey aren’t and they didn’t charge for the previous updates (relevant to this article).
The only charged update in recent times was to 10.7, which was a major release.
Alex Kidman
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 9:31 AMNo, you don’t — but then you never did. Presumably it checks for the existence of Lion in the first place to update from.
TonyInTsv
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 9:47 AMBut hang on. All the mac fanbios out there tell us that macs dont crash!!! What is this? from everything all the fanbois have said mac>Windows I’m confused!
David Shears
Saturday, February 4, 2012 at 1:50 AMMac releases patch with a bug that causes the OS to crash for some users. Gets reported in GIZMODO
Microsoft releases patch with more bugs in it than it fixes. No one bats an eyelid
charles222
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 9:57 AMBeen a happy mac owner for 5 years now and have never had one crash. Never had a Windows machine crash (besides one time in like 2004 when I caught a nasty virus) either. Anyway, got 10.7.3 last night and haven’t had any problems.
olearymo
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 10:18 AMGod, people. Macs crash sometimes. Windows crashes sometimes. Windows users pretend theirs don’t. Mac users pretend theirs don’t.
Get over it everyone. Can you imagine if Ford and Holden drivers, or coffee and tea drinkers, acted like complete children?
Jamie
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 10:48 AMBwhahahahaha…. Do you wanna re-think that statement? Dude, they have a televised race about Ford vs Holden drivers!
Oh hang on… My sarcasmdar is off today…
TSH
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 10:59 AMDon’t get me started about Ford vs. Holden fanbois…
olearymo
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 12:27 PMok maybe that example was a little too similar to the mac/pc rivalry :P but you know what I mean.
andyfitz
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 10:23 AMscrew this, i’m going back to linux as the baseos.
I thought OSX would give me a stable base to run desktop VM’s on top of.. i was wrong
Owen
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 11:01 AMhaters gonna hate, no issues with 10.7.3 so far. Network Utility and Safari? pffffffffttttt
Heisenburg
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 11:06 AMI must admit I get a slight chuckle about anything that might knock the wind out of a Mac Zealots sails. (only because I’ve been on the receiving end of some pretty die hard mac users rants) Computers are not perfect, their made by humans. In the end the competition is good for everyone.
Matt Riddell
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 12:49 PMNo problems with 10.7.3 here – has anyone actually seen that crash themselves?
Sam
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 4:45 PMYeah, I had my net not working but Wi-Fi was connected and outlook crashed, but a restart has seemed to fix all that, I also did the combo file update in the first place anyway, seems a good idea when it’s a big update, not to mention I can use the same file on the 3 mac’s here and not have to DL 3x. I also did a disk permissions repair in case. I see no big issues with this.
PS just for the haters, I was hardcore PC all the way back to DOS, I have used every windows since the beginning, I jumped ship when XP was getting tired and vista sucked, it was then or never, I was scared, but I HAVE NEVER LOOKED BACK! I still maintain about 15 windows PC’s from XP to 7 and my god they suck ass. Why did I take so long to change…oh I’m not a gamer…
Richard
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 7:49 PMI don’t doubt the validity of the claims but no, I’ve been fine. Only upgraded yesterday evening however.
Gareth
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 7:53 PMI haven’t had any new issues. Although my wifi still is randomly d/c on my MBA.