€4000 MacBook Pro crashes when watching YouTube videos

You would say that you can play HDR videos undisturbed on a MacBook Pro of €4000, but strangely enough, the laptop just crashes…

Reviewers are raving about Apple’s new MacBook Pro series. This fall, the tech giant released a series of new laptops with lightning-fast M1 Pro and Pro Max SoCs. But apparently it was not the best choice to make your own processor, if playing a movie can already cause a serious crash. And that’s exactly what’s happening with an unknown amount of users right now.

MacBook Pro crashes with videos

Playing movies should not be a problem for even the most basic laptop. But according to users of the MacRumors forum that’s definitely a problem for the laptops, which can cost at least $3,000 and up to nearly $7,000.

While watching 4K videos in HDR on YouTube, an unknown number of MacBook Pro laptops crash for no apparent reason. This is a kernel-level crash that crashes the entire computer; not just the browser in which the content is viewed.

Speaking of which, both Safari and Chrome seem to have the problem. Users with varying configurations of the M1 Pro and Pro Max MacBooks also say they experience the problem, although the $4000 configuration is most often mentioned. It is not known whether other video platforms also cause a crash. Reportedly, it has to do with the AV1 decoding of 4K HDR videos. As far as we know, Apple is not yet working on a solution.