There are so many blogs written to criticize Apple, how big, arrogant and control freak they become over the last pas years (some will say they always have been control-freak…) that I wanted to write this post to actually say “Kudo Apple ! & Thank you”
I am using MacBookPro’s since the last 6-7 years or so. The last one I acquired is the Late 2008 model. This machine suffered from day #1 of a serious display issue : the upper part of the screen flickers under some load / heat condition.
Problem has been reported numerous times to Apple and the discussion about this issue on Apple’s Support Community forum contains more than 1500 messages posted and close to 190.000 views !
Yesterday, Apple quietly release an EFI firmware patch to address this issue. Yes, you read it right, Apple did release a firmware patch for a 4 years old machine. This is so unusual in (consumer) IT industry to mention.
I applied the patch yesterday after having spent an hour or so reading comments from early adopters and I have the pleasure to work on my machine since then without any single screen flickering.
Thank you Apple to take care of old customers, old machines and continue to improve your products.
#1 by david on 01/03/2012 - 10:17
On the other hands, one could ask why did Apple wait 4 years to fix an (annoying) recognized bug?! 😉
#2 by glenn on 22/03/2012 - 15:05
Its more likely that an employee couldn’t live with the fact that this was happening to his code that he spent 4 years fixing it… poor guy … apple gets all the credit.
#3 by tps on 22/03/2012 - 16:41
TIL, Apple employees use four year old laptops.
#4 by Tristan on 22/03/2012 - 17:19
As a software developer, with some hardware programming experience, let me say from experience that some bugs do actually take years to solve. But usually only if they’re low priority. But as an owner of a 2008 MBP, I’m very happy with this fix and thankful to whoever figured it out.
#5 by Michael on 22/03/2012 - 18:22
As an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician, I began to doubt my eyes after replacing my display and logic board in attempts to remedy this issue on the internal display. Of course they would release a firmware fix after I’ve gone and sold it…
#6 by anonymous on 23/03/2012 - 04:38
What I want to know is why are tens of thousands of people getting white screen of death errors on multiple devices all made by apple all recently off warranty?