Pages, Keynote, Numbers Crashing

mstydel
Contributor

Two days ago we had a user's M1 MacBook Air brought to us that wouldn't open Pages, Keynote, or Numbers. All three will open for about 2 seconds then crash and macOS will give the "Application closed unexpectedly" message and offer to send an error report. The error report begins with something like there being an exception with "fontassetdownloadmanager". I know Preview crashes when opening sometimes and has to have the Saved Application State cleared so it'll stop trying to open the file that's crashing it, but this doesn't fix this issue. We ended up wiping this M1 Mac with Big Sur 11.4 (previously was 11.2.3) and the apps suddenly work.

Since then, we've had a second M1 Air user report he same issue, same error report, Big Sur 11.2.1. We've asked her to hold tight as we noticed there has been a recent update to Pages, Keynote, and Numbers about a week ago and we figured that update might've broken something.

This morning I had a retiring teacher come in that purchased an M1 Air after having to turn in his computer at the end of the school year. He is experiencing the same exact issue, same error report and all. I didn't get a chance to check what version of Big Sur he was on. That kind of eliminates it being a possible issue with our MDM managed machines since his unmanaged device is doing it.

We install Pages, Keynote, and Numbers as automatic VPP apps during setup, however our M1 Air's are new and are still using the apps that came default on them. So Pages, Keynote, and Numbers are from the App Store, not our VPP account, so they aren't VPP installs from Jamf yet (except the first one that we wiped with 11.4 above).

The interesting part is that my M1 Air (managed) doesn't have this issue. I am running the updated apps as well as Big Sur 11.4. I think the next step will be to update the second MacBook Air to 11.4 and see if it solves it. We were hoping (and have planned/scheduled) to not wipe our M1 Macs this summer as they were just deployed about 2 months ago.

Is anyone else experiencing this? I've looked online but don't find any recent posts. I was hoping after finding out about the third machine affected by this that maybe there would be some posts now from others getting the same thing, as it doesn't seem to be limited to just our devices. We have been sending error reports to Apple from each machine, not sure how much good that really does, though.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

mstydel
Contributor

Looks like updating to Big Sur 11.4 fixes it.

View solution in original post

2 REPLIES 2

user-fHvjMNITno
New Contributor

Yes, one of our other schools has had 3 M1 Macs with the same issue

mstydel
Contributor

Looks like updating to Big Sur 11.4 fixes it.