Russell's Blog

I bought Mimi a new laptop for her birthday. I suppose it's also for Christmas/Hanuka, since they are close to her birthday and I didn't have much money left over. I bought her a cute little coffee maker thingy for $WINTER_HOLIDAY, but it's sort of a weak gift. The laptop is a white MacBook.

As anyone who has purchased a Core Duo MacBook recently knows, there are hundreds of megs of updates to install, including at least two firmware updates. I successfully applied the EFI update, but after many monotonous hours of updating, I failed to notice that the instructions for the SMC firmware update are different. The EFI update requires you to shut down the machine, and then hold down the power button until it beeps a couple of times. The SMC update just reboots the machine and runs automatically. Recalling the instructions for the EFI update, I clicked the pulsing blue button, waited for the machine to go dark, and then reached for the power button. Naturally, I pressed it just in time to shut down the machine as the update was starting. Update fails, firmware breaks. Whoops.

The annoying thing is that although the machine still boots (it can't find the battery or control the fans), there is no clear way to recover. The firmware restoration CD on apple.com doesn't work. The restoration CD seems to be intended to fix a worse problem (i.e. -- no booting at all). If Apple is going to automatically push firmware updates to users that can potentially brick their machines, they should have a universal firmware-fixing CD. I would be perfectly happy if it reinstalled the factory firmware, and I had to re-apply all the updates.

As it is, the best I can do is bring it back to the store. Fortunately, I have to do that anyway to buy Office and more RAM.