Press and hold the power button on your Mac to completely shut it off.

NVRAM, as Apple describes it, is “ a small amount of your computer’s memory that stores certain settings in a location that macOS can access quickly.” It also happens to hold kernel panic information, which is what we’re tapping into and especially trying to reset here. If there is no avail, continue onto the next solution below.

Press Command + L again to see if macOS is still installing.

When the Mac is completely off, press and hold the power button again.

Hold down the power button and wait for about 30 seconds.

Let’s try to give the install a little kick by refreshing it. If you are positive that the install is indeed frozen, you will want to take the following steps, and the following steps consecutively after this step, until the issue is resolved. Big system updates (sometimes) take a whole lot of time! 4. Grab a coffee, do some other work, run some errands, do whatever you need to do to burn some time and let your Mac do its thing. Some users have reported their update taking upwards of ten hours. If this doesn’t appear, still let the update sit for a while. We can verify that the system is still updating by pressing Command + L to bring up the estimated install time. Some update processes will take much longer than others, resulting in a seemingly stuck progress bar. Sometimes, the update could be stuck in a lull but not completely frozen.

Sit it OutĪs painful as it sounds, you may just want to let the Mac sit for a couple of hours and see if it is indeed frozen. If it’s red or yellow, then you’re just going to have to sit out the problem until servers are back to normal. If the bubble is green, then they’re fine and the issue lies elsewhere. Look over at the status of “macOS Software Update” to see whether the update servers are working as they should. Here you’ll see the status of just about every Apple service you can think of. Check the Apple Systems Status PageĪ very quick and easy thing to do that could save you a lot of hassle with stuck updates (or other malfunctioning Apple services) is to go to the official Systems Status page. From here, run the macOS update as you normally would to install the update – hopefully without a hitch. The Apple logo should appear on your screen with a loading bar, and after that you should boot into Safe Mode. There are several ways to do this, but the simplest is by holding the Shift key as it’s booting. Once you’ve done this, boot your Mac into Safe Mode. If it’s clear that your Mac update isn’t going anywhere, then hold down the power button to turn off your Mac.

How to update software on mac laptop