Why does my Mac restart with a problem message?

Just upgraded my 2013ish iMac 5K to an M5-Max Mac Studio. All in all, it looks like a fantastic upgrade, but I am seeing a couple of oddities. One is that Time-Machine backups are bonkers slow, but I'm hoping a reformat of the TM drive will cover that; trying that now.


The other one is a bit more puzzling though, and I was wondering if this sounds familiar to any of you: When I explicitly perform a restart, it takes ... 2-3 minutes or so ... with a blank screen, and when it does come back, it says that it restarted "because a problem occurred." It seems to be behaving as though my manual restart causes something to go wrong causing it to restart again one or more times "because a problem occurred."


[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Posted on May 3, 2025 7:12 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 4, 2025 6:09 AM

At this writing, the Mac Studio on offer with a MAX processor is the M3 Max.


Kernel panic is not One problem, it is one of Thousands of problems. We need more detailed information.


Kernel Panic Reports are stored in the Folder at:

/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports


If you copy and paste that string into:

Finder > Go menu > Go to Folder


it will take you to the Folder where those reports are stored.


Kernel panic reports are named with Date&Time and start or end in ‘panic’

If you find one, please post as much as you can here, by using the “additional text” Icon in the reply footer (looks like a paper with writing). (Once the report devolves into incessant software-names or incessant Base-64 dumps with lots of AAAAAA lines, you are done.)


Please don’t post more about 20 lines of any other types of reports — they are interminable, and any information useful for this purpose is on the first screenful.


If you post your kernel panic here in its entirety, using the additional text icon in the reply footer, we do have some Readers (typically with developer background) who can attempt to interpret those panic reports. Even if no clear symptom emerges, this can still save a step if you DO need to contact Apple support later, because Apple Support specialists can read the panic reports you posted here, if you tell them what discussion or what Avatar.o find out what's going wrong, we need the nt

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4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 4, 2025 6:09 AM in response to mr88cet

At this writing, the Mac Studio on offer with a MAX processor is the M3 Max.


Kernel panic is not One problem, it is one of Thousands of problems. We need more detailed information.


Kernel Panic Reports are stored in the Folder at:

/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports


If you copy and paste that string into:

Finder > Go menu > Go to Folder


it will take you to the Folder where those reports are stored.


Kernel panic reports are named with Date&Time and start or end in ‘panic’

If you find one, please post as much as you can here, by using the “additional text” Icon in the reply footer (looks like a paper with writing). (Once the report devolves into incessant software-names or incessant Base-64 dumps with lots of AAAAAA lines, you are done.)


Please don’t post more about 20 lines of any other types of reports — they are interminable, and any information useful for this purpose is on the first screenful.


If you post your kernel panic here in its entirety, using the additional text icon in the reply footer, we do have some Readers (typically with developer background) who can attempt to interpret those panic reports. Even if no clear symptom emerges, this can still save a step if you DO need to contact Apple support later, because Apple Support specialists can read the panic reports you posted here, if you tell them what discussion or what Avatar.o find out what's going wrong, we need the nt

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Why does my Mac restart with a problem message?

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