The IT Nerd

Yesterday Apple released macOS Monterey 12.1, and I of course tried to install it on my new 16″ MacBook Pro. The thing is, that it seemed that the MacBook Pro didn’t want it. At first, I couldn’t get it to show up in Software Update. A quick look at Twitter indicated that I wasn’t alone in that department:

His experience mirrored my experience. But there were others:

In my case, I briefly saw the update. But when I tried to download it and install it, the update failed and then caused my CPU to spike with a service called “NRDUpdateD” chewing up a massive amount of CPU time. And rebooting the Mac wouldn’t fix that. My guess was that my operating system was in some state where it couldn’t perform the update properly because the service in question was going haywire. Thus I needed to take action via reinstalling the OS.

Now the best way to reinstall macOS is via recovery mode. The reason is that the Mac boots to a completely separate OS which makes it way less complicated for the installer application to install the OS as any customizations or applications like anti-virus applications don’t enter the picture. This document details how to enter recovery mode. And once you’re in it, I started the macOS installer.

Now here’s where things get time consuming. Once you get into this installer, it will download roughly 12.5 GB as this installer always installs the latest version available. So you need to have a fast internet connection or you will be waiting a very long time. In my case, it took about an hour to download and reinstall the OS. After that, I was on macOS Monterey 12.1 and everything worked.

I am now starting to do some testing. Specifically, to see if the memory leak issue is fixed. Apple didn’t specifically say so on the release notes. But here’s hoping that it is fixed. I do notice that my MacBook Pro is running slightly cooler with less CPU being used. I’ll follow up on that front and with whatever else I find.

UPDATE: A reader asked if my data remained intact after the reinstall. It did. But it goes without saying that you should have a backup just in case.

This entry was posted on December 14, 2021 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Tips with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.