It hadn't been more than a couple months since I got the newly released 16-inch MacBook Pro with a keyboard that promised to finally resolve the horribleness that was the 2016-2019 keyboards, when my brand new Mac starts to kernel panic. Constantly. I mean, at least once a day I had to re-open everything on my computer because it had shutdown without warning or (knowable) reason. What surprised me the most was just how disruptive this was to my work (I wouldn't have anticipated that; having grown up in an era where computers rarely crashed, this was a new experience for me). I made a post about this on MacRumors and people started to congregate (fun fact, it's now the second most viewed post in the macOS Catalina (10.15) category at 300,000 views and over 1,000 responses). I was able to reproduce the issue very reliably and started to share with others how to reproduce, when I was given a final warning that I was about to be banned from the Apple Support forum for "inappropriate posts". Pissed off, I forwarded the email to Craig Federighi. He was very kind and helped me with some debugging. Although he was unable to fix the issue for me, he did give me a new Mac which I wasn't able to reproduce the issue on (thank god).

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Hi Craig, it saddens me that these are the conditions under which I have to first contact you.

For the past several months I and countless others have been having daily kernel panics on Catalina. Here's a video of me getting the kernel panic 7 times in 21 minutes using iMovie. A lot of conditions cause the kernel panic, including simply leaving the machine idle for several minutes, but I believe I've figured out how one can reliably reproduce it: just watch a 4k movie in QuickTime with your dedicated GPU in use.

I just tried to share the steps with others on the most popular Apple Support thread about this issue and after a couple back and forths, I just received this final warning that my Apple ID would be blocked if I continued. Frankly, I do not understand why posting steps to try to reproduce the issue we're discussing could be anything other than helpful in debugging it.

I'd like to make sure that 1. you're working on this issue and 2. that my story was heard.

Best,
Joe Puccio
Co-founder, Coursicle
joe@coursicle.com