William Gallagher
An unknown number of Apple Silicon users who have two or more accounts on their M1 Mac are seeing their screensaver spontaneously start and them being logged out.
Apple's Fast User Switching — introduced in 2003's OS X Panther, and a convenient security feature — is reportedly causing problems with some M1 Macs. The feature lets users have more than one login account on their Mac, including a Guest one, and switch between them. However, that switching feature is reportedly activating unexpectedly.
What happens is that a user can be working at their Mac when, without prompting, it displays a screensaver — and logs the user out. More, it's not possible to clear the screensaver unless you:
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7 Comments
There are a number of issues with fast use of switching. Even on the Catalina there were problems using the touch ID button to switch between accounts. And a big Sur, there are further issues with the touch ID button system not working at all. Fast use of switching using Touch ID Used to work a treat, but now it’s well and truly broken. Interesting to see that It is even more broken and the M1. It used to be a fabulous system, but now the coders in that department are clearly asleep.
Maybe they’re having a slumber party with the people who code Apple dictate who are responsible for the errors in this message.
The problem is that hardly anyone uses it, so the few that do use it get a bad experience because Apple doesn’t pay any attention to it.
Glad I am waiting till the March MacBook Pros coming out. Was very tempted at buying the M1 Air. Maybe I will wait till the MacBook Air design gets updated since I like the idea of fanless notebook maybe in 2022?
Someone on a different site said that setting up a hot corner of the screen for sleeping the system is one workaround. If the glitch happens, just move the cursor to the designated corner and the system will sleep and waking will get you back to the desktop.