MacBook users were happy to welcome back the SD card slot on the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. Unfortunately, some owners are having issues with the SD card slot.
MacRumors reports that users on its forums have posted that they are having issues with some SD cards. Some SD cards crash and cannot be accessed at all, while others show unusually slow data transfer speeds.
MacRumors reader Wildct explains the issue they’re experiencing:
Same issues with 14″ M1 Pro. Just seems to be super flakey and inconsistent. Half the time it’ll recognize the card successfully (though it takes anywhere from 30s to 1m) and half the time it’ll throw an error. These are all Sandisk Ultra cards, both XC and HC, that were formatted in my camera. I tried reformatting them w/ the MBP and that didn’t seem to make a difference. All my cards work as expected in my 3 other USB card readers.
Other users report they see an error message when attempting to access the SD card, with Finder sometimes crashing, and sometimes minutes will pass before the SD card becomes accessible.
From MacRumors reader 2Stepfan:
It’s very frustrating. I was hoping that import from SD card including preview of images would be quick on my new 14″ MBP. I have a fairly new 64GB SD card which had been working fine. But Photos on the MBP using the internal SD card slot takes minutes to show photos and sometimes crashes half way through. Sometimes the Finder crashes too.
Formatting of the card doesn’t appear to be the issue, although it could be related. No obvious common thread between which cards do or do not work. However, many users have reported that using an SD card over USB-C works when the SD card doesn’t
From MacRumors reader Wilberforce:
I tried many cards, and could find no pattern of brand, size, type, format, age. Seems to be completely random. The only thing that is consistent is that if a card works, it always works, and if a card does not work properly it never works properly. Reformatting, even to all other possible formats, makes no difference. Sandisk, Sony, Samsung, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, UHS-I, UHS-II, micro-SD, FAT32, exFAT, makes no difference. 100% of my cards work perfectly via a dongle.
Users that have contacted Apple support have been told that the company is aware of the issue and that a fix is on the way in a future software update. While this indicates a software fix, it could still be a hardware issue. Users that received a replacement for their affected MacBook Pro did not continue to see issues.