For a lot of people, yesterday’s 10.7.3 update for OS X Lion went without a hitch using Software Update, but for a sizable (and understandably annoyed) minority, the update resulted in the widescale crashing of apps and the replacement of stock Lion UI elements with a mysterious “CUI?” error.
If you’ve been bit by this error, you have our sympathies, but buck up! In most cases, it’s a pretty easy thing to fix the update and get Lion working as it was.
The excellent OS X Daily explains how to rid yourself of CUI? Errors:
The simple formula is this:
- Download Mac OS X 10.7.3 Combo Updater (direct link)
- Run the 10.7.3 Combo Updater on top of the existing 10.7.3 installation
- Reboot
If you can’t get to the desktop of the Mac in question, you can boot it with Target Disk Mode(Firewire or Thunderbolt required), and then point the 10.7.3 Combo Update at the troubled Mac and install it that way.
None of us are afflicted, so we can’t vouch this works, but OS X Daily’s users are reporting some success. Give it a try and let us know how it turns out for you.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
12 responses to “CUI Error? Here’s How To Fix Crashing Problems With OS X 10.7.3 Update”
How did such a bug get past Apple? Astonishing error.
I updated an MBP and MBA with no issues. I wonder what kind of setup these folks that are having problems had.
With a major update, affecting at least 16 aspects of the OS, it is not unexpected that one might run into corrupted permissions. Just run Repair Disk Permissions in Disk Utility and this problem and raft of other annoyances are likely to clear up.
How do we know it is a bug? For some time now there have been lots of posts about “problems” with Apple products – like the mysterious battery issue. My wife and I have had none of these problems , like the battery one nor did we have any problems whatsoever to update – and neither have *any* of all our friends who have a number of Apple products.
As far as I am concerned it is simply FUD – which Apple has been plagued by for years – cll coming from Apple haters and competitors
Most likely they have installed some utility that hacks the OS.
Nope, I am running a standard install on my 5 month old 2.7GHz Core i7 on a 13″ MacBook Pro and had the same problem yet my 27″ iMac was fine. I had to restore from a Time Machine backup and let that run overnight. Nothing “hackerish” on my computer.
(If anything I have something like that on my iMac)
Please, lol! I own iMac, 2 MacBooks, 2 iPads & 2 iphones. I love Apple products. This “event” is not a positive. It’s real. People actually experienced it on their machines. Tain’t FUD, just real life.
What is CUI anyways?
Carbon (Cocoa) User Inferface…?
but’s that’s totally a guess…
I installed this on my MBP last night. Halfway through the install it failed and rebooted. After I logged in, it says the update is installed… Not sure what that’s about…
Happened on my Macbook Air. Fortunately I backed up. This is very un-Apple-like, to have such a major problem. Is Apple turning into a PC without Steve? Apple users are accustomed to being frustrated with very minor problems. Major ones like this are not supposed to happen here. I’m very dissappointed. This doesn’t bode well for the new guy, whatever his name is… oh right, Tim Cook. Steve knew how to create great Apple products, but he sure didn’t know how to trust the right people. That idiot biographer that enjoyed mocking Steve throughout his biography is a case in point. Tim Cook should never be more than a right hand man.
“It didn’t happen to me therefore it cannot happen” is a bit blind implication… The risk of an update failure usually grows exponentially with the number of tweaks and installed software.