Wow, Apple.
I fired up iTunes to dutifully backup my iPhone yesterday when it asked if I wanted to update to 10.5.3. Sure, I might as well stay up to date… I clicked. It took me to the Software Update process, which also noted an OSX 10.7.3 update.
Oh goodie! I thought. Maybe this will finally fix some of the awful bugs in Lion!
I sat back, waited for the install to finish and reboot. Everything looked good until I got back to the desktop and was greeted by a deluge of crashing applications, with bizarre graphical glitches:
Every single application, including the Finder, crashed with these bizarre error messages.
After finding this thread (CUI CUI CUI Error 10.7.3 All Apps Crash) on the Apple Support forums, I found that the fix was to run the “Combo Update” rather than the “Delta” update that gets installed via the Software Update process. Problem is, I couldn’t launch the Finder with my system the way it currently was, let alone Safari and an installer package.
Thankfully, due to suffering through a FileVault decryption error earlier in the week that had required a full Time Machine restore, I was being extremely diligent with my TimeMachine backups and had one just prior to the install. I have a 750GB drive in my MBP, however, and didn’t want to wait the 9 hours to do a clean restore from Time Machine. Here was my solution:
- Install OSX Lion on a spare hard drive (I have a few extras, and needed a better recovery partition than what is installed with Lion anyway.
- Download the 10.7.3 Combo Update.
- Launch the Combo Update installer, targeting my SNAFU’d boot disk.
- Wait ~15 minutes for the instsall, then boot back into my original disk.
While I had the resources and knowledge to come with a workaround, this is a problem that’s primarily going to fix home users who may not have an extra hard drive lying around, and, due to the nature of the problem, unless they have a spare computer or mobile device, they may not even be able to access the web to determine a fix.
I worked in QA for a tech company, so I understand despite the best efforts of everyone involved, bugs (even serious ones) sometimes slip through. What is unexcusable is, as far as I know, at least 24 hours into rolling out this update, it is STILL showing up, unpatched, on Software Update. At the very least, they should pull this update and prevent the problem from becoming worse than it is.
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