Black screen with white Apple logo

[ashleykaryl]

Late last night my daughter phoned me to say her 2 month old MBP had suddenly crashed while she was on YouTube and left her with a white apple logo on a black screen. I walked her through resetting the SMC and PRAM, but nothing seemed to help. This morning she tried it again and it logged in normally. After about 3 minutes it crashed again in the same way...

I've just come back to the house and now and my father called me with exactly the same problem on his aged Mac Mini, which also happened late last night. Both recently upgraded to 10.13.1, but have run without issue for the last couple of weeks until last night. They both have pretty plain setups with very little third party software.

Neither computer is connected in any way, so I'm pulling my hair out trying to understand what might be going on. I don't know at this point if it's software related or a freak coincidence with both computers suffering similar hardware failure at the same time.

My Mac Pro is also running 1013.1, but is working fine. Mine was a clean install though, whereas they both had upgrades from Sierra. It's one one those cases where everything seems unlikely, but there must be a cause here. Any ideas?

 

[ferrarr]

Three things to try;

1 - Safe mode, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262, see if that helps.
2 - Recovery, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314, if/when booted, try Disk Utility > First Aid.
3 - Apple Hardware Test or Apple Diagnostic, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257, this link is for Apple Hardware Test, the link for Apple Diagnostics is on that page.

 

[ashleykaryl]

Thank you for your suggestions. I tried all of these on the Mac Mini, but it was very strange. In recovery mode, disk utility showed zero problems, so I tried reinstalling but nothing changed.

I ran the hardware test that showed no problems and eventually concluded the computer hardware was fine, yet clearly something wasn't right, so I went back to disk utility and wiped everything, before doing a clean install. Now it's fine.

Tha MacBook Pro is coming here tonight, so I'll take a look at that one separately, but the black screen with a white logo looked a lot like being caught in a system upgrade cycle with nothing actually happening. My daughter tells me she can start the computer after several hours rest and use it normally for about 3 minutes, before it goes wrong again.

Why this would happen to two unconnected computers on the same night is a complete mystery. I'll follow up once I have some news on the laptop.

 

[ashleykaryl]

I looks very much like the MacBook Pro is DEAD. No amount of coaxing or recovery attempts would illicit any response and it's with Apple now. Not good for such an expensive new computer.

 

[ashleykaryl]

I've just heard back from Apple and they are installing a new logic board on the MacBook Pro.