I don't get a crash either (but I am on Windows).
If you want to bypass the unit interpretation you can use "Inches" and "Meters" since these are built-in (like many standard units). They don't require a round-trip to the Wolfram servers for interpretation and work just as well (and faster, since there is no server calls):
UnitConvert[Quantity[1, "Inches"], "Meters"]
For me, the timings are 0.002 seconds (no server round-trip) and 3.084 seconds (with server round-trip).
