Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

I received my MBP 2020! Yay!

It's faulty! Wait wut?

Yeah, my first ever Mac... and the fault goes like this...

I have a USB 2 keyboard (Filco) and a USB 2 mouse (Razer) and a USB 3 camera (Elgato)... so I need an external hub... this is OK, I have 3 hubs at my disposal:

• A StarTech.com 7 port USB C hub (5 USB 3, 2 USB C)
  
• A Satechi USB C hub (3 USB 3, 1 Eth, 1 HDMI, USB C power pass through)
  
• An Anker USB C hub (4 USB 3)
  
  

Great... I have hubs.

So I plug all the things in the Satechi, connect it... and after a while the keyboard and mouse stop working. They worked for a while (not obviously hardware issue) and then they stop working. Yet... the camera still works and it's connected to the same device!? Strange.

I try StarTech hub... same thing happens. After a while, 5 minutes... 2 hours... whatever... the keyboard and mouse stop working. But the camera still works! That too is all in the same hub... so the hub is fine, and it's now a different hub, so the common delimiter is the MacBook Pro 2020.

I do all of this again without the mouse... same shit.

I do all of this again without the keyboard... same shit.

I do all of this again without the camera... same shit.

Each time, a reboot will bring the USB devices back for sure, but sometimes that do magically start working, but this is not common.

So now I go online and I learn about SMC reset...

• Left Control + Left Option + Right Shift
  
  

Same shit.

Then I contact Apple, and they have me do:

• Press d whilst it boots, run diagnostic... all good.
  
• Left Option + Left Command (or was it Control?) + P + R - this is Twister on the keyboard, whatever this is did not work - I think this was Safe Mode!?
  
• Disk Utility > First Aid
  
• Create a test user, login as that and does it still happen? Yes it does.
  
  

Exhausted... another 2 calls later and I've made a discovery!

If I put the keyboard in one USB C hub, and the mouse in another USB C hub and the camera in the other USB C hub... then the keyboard and mouse still fail at the same time, and the camera keeps working.

Additionally, in System Information under USB devices, I can disconnect the camera and refresh and the camera is gone, I can plug it in to another device and it's there again... so USB 3.1 works via any hub all the time.

But... when either the keyboard or mouse fail, which are both USB 2.0 devices... then System Information shows them as being connected even if I disconnect them. Even if I move them to another hub they still show as being connected to the original hub.

Weirder still is that this discovery led to something else... it's only the USB 2.0 devices... these fail regardless of whether they utilise the same or different USB C hubs and thunderbolt ports.

At this time they've escalated to an engineer with all this information.

My hypothesis though: The MacBook Pro has a USB 2.0 controller for all devices connected to the system bus regardless of which thunderbolt / usb-c connection it is connected to. And something is wrong with that.

I appear to have a motherboard failure on a brand new MBP 2020. And boy is that frustrating for my first personally owned Apple laptop ever.

I await the engineer, which is probably next week.