Recent systems Apple MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini equipped with Apple M1 SoC may suffer from a bug that suddenly stops user activities by starting randomly and the screensaver and prevents you from regaining control of the system.

It is a problem that several users are reporting all over the network, starting with Reddit, on the official Apple support forums and on the community forums dedicated to Apple. such as that of the MacRumors website.

New Macs: the screensaver starts randomly and locks the system

The only way to resume activity, at least on portable systems, is to close the screen and wait a few seconds . On Mac mini, you need to put the system to sleep using a keyboard shortcut. Currently there does not seem to be a recurrence of the problem in specific situations, with most of the reports having in common the fact that the problem would occur in a completely random way . The problem would arise even if the user has chosen to never activate the screensaver under any circumstances.

The extent of the problem is not clear and whether it is actually limited only to Mac systems with M1 SoCs, as on MacRumors a user indicates that he has also encountered the same behavior in a MacBook Pro 16 inch equipped with Intel processor. It is likely, at this point, that the problem is mainly attributable to the operating system.

The cause has not yet been precisely identified, but it seems that it may be related to the Quick User Switch functionality or ” Fast User Switching “: a user on the MacRumors forum has in fact reported that by deactivating this feature the problem no longer occurs, even if the two elements at least apparently shouldn’t have no connection.

We await an official patch that can restore the correct functioning of both features.