Just wondering if anyone has received the update to 8.8.0 on an Apple Silicon Mac?
I've had Norton for Mac running in a Parallels VM since the announcement but haven't been updated yet.
Wondering how long it will take to get the update?
Got it today for my MBP too, so far so good. Let's see
I got it today via a manual live update so they must be turning it loose. So far so good
Yes. And it wasn't pretty (which is par for the course for Norton updates on the Mac).
My M1 Mac mini running Monterey 12.5.1 all of a sudden today started to consume massive amounts of CPU time. After reading that Norton 8.8 was released I decided to peek under the hood. The culprits were installd and com.symantec.mes.systemextension each hitting 100% Cpu time (on the efficiency cores). The Mac wasn't doing any other installations from the system or Mac App Store.
I guess I was one of the lucky (?) ones that got the update.
After waiting for seemingly an eternity watching these processes sit there and do nothing, I restarted my Mac and logged into it as the administrator account that I installed the product with (I run with a non-admin account as a matter of normal practice). This of course suspecting that Norton was up to its tricks again.
Guess what? Norton pops up and says that it's finished with an upgrade. Not surprising.
Rebooted again.
com.symantec.mes.systemextension still decided to consume 100%+ CPU time. I've seen this movie before. Ran Live Update manually to make sure I had the latest AV definitions. Then dropped into a sudo shell, kill -9 the com.symantec.mes.systemextension process. It restarted and now is all is well again.
Norton has had a problem for years now where it goes wonky when either a product and/or AV defs update have been applied. It either sits there and consumes CPU, locks up the Mac, or causes a kernel panic. I have gotten used to assuming that when my Mac locks up I immediately suspect Norton has run away behind the scenes once again. I force a reboot and after restart almost 100% of the time I find that Norton has said it applied an update "a minute ago" which means it completed after I rebooted.
A coincidence? I think not.
It's a finicky beast and tests my patience at times.