Mac Studio - All USB & Thunderbolt ports no longer working
I've got a Mac Studio M1 Max. I had been using it plugged into two monitors, one via the HDMI port and one via one of the Thunderbolt port on the back going to a DisplayPort on the back of the monitor. Everything worked fine for a month or so. Then the Mac started failing to see the monitor upon waking from sleep. I would remedy this by unplugging the Thunderbolt connection on the back of the mac and plugging it back in, getting it to recognize the display. Recently I went to wake up the mac, and upon having the same problem found that the solution didn't work. I tried several other ports with no luck. The next day I noticed my mouse was out of battery. I attempted to charge it and reconnect it via USB and found it did not do anything. Then I started inspecting all of the USB ports and found that none of them worked. I simplified my test to just determine if the port was active (not whether it recognized a device) by plugging in a simple USB powered LED booklight. It would not light up in any of the ports, even though it lights up near instantly in every other port of every other mac I've tried it on. Here is a list of the things I've tried to fix it, which have all had no results.
- Reboot
- Reboot into safe mode and back
- Boot into recovery mode (booklight still would not light)
- Install updates (ended up upgrading to Ventura)
- Perform a Revive
- I used an iMac Pro and Configurator to connect (to my great surprise) to the Mac Studio. The revive process was successful. It reinstalled the firmware. I had the booklight plugged in the entire time and it did not light up once.
I was starting to think this is a physical hardware problem, but since Configurator could send data to the thunderbolt port during revive, that port must still work (though I'm not sure about power). I have since plugged in devices just to test if they can transmit data (devices that are self powered and don't rely on power from the port), but they have not been recognized when plugged into the same port used for revive.
I have not performed the full wipe and recover yet. I've been trying to avoid that step if possible. I'm not sure how wiping the OS could help anything when booting into recovery mode or performing the revive process is effectively independent of the OS that I'm running on my hard drive. The booklight not lighting up during those processes would only make sense if the USB port is disabled during recovery and revive, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case, especially since when booting my macbook pro M1 into recovery mode with the booklight plugged in causes it to light up.
Has anyone seen this behavior before? Does anyone have any ideas on what could fix it? It seems like the ports have been permanently disabled, but at a really low level. Not sure if that makes sense. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Mac Studio