Context: this is a legit screenshot I took on my workplace around 1.5 years ago. Hopefully it's been patched by now? Completely ridiculous behavior
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Not to talk shit about Mac users, but in this day and age with how advanced technology is, you have to be insane to buy a Mac. What kills it for me is that nothing is upgradeable on the damn thing, like zero. If your internal drive dies, you're SOL. And if I got this correctly, they now have the bios OS on the same drive, the Internal. So, you won't even be able to get to your bios. You won't be able to install the OS on external hard drive in case you needed to. This is insane and I can never understand why anyone would buy into this shit.
M1 and M2 Macs have some of the worst pre-boot and recovery options I have ever seen.
If a BIOS update fails on them, they don't have any redundancy to fail back to a working BIOS. This has been standard on every business machine for at least 5 years. On any Dell or Lenovo machine, if your BIOS becomes borked, it either auto-recovers from a previous BIOS that is stored on your HDD/SSD, or it allows you to insert a USB drive with the BIOS on it and recovers from there.
The Mac BIOS can update during a standard OS update without indicating that you'll brick the machine if it powers off for any reason.
I had someone with a failed update on an M2 Mac that left the machine without a BIOS entirely. To recover, you need another Mac machine with USBC so you can plug them into each other and run Apple Configurator 2 to start a complete redownload of the OS to recover from.
It's at least an hour long process for something that should take 5 minutes to fix. Also, it requires another Mac, you can't run the recovery from any other OS.
Absolute baloney from Apple.
I hate Apple, but my Lenovo does exactly the same. It fucking installs BIOS updates automatically without any warning. Once, after a reboot it was hanging too much on a black screen and I thought it just froze, so I forced a shutdown by long pressing the power button. Luckily the BIOS restored via the fallback, but that wiped the TPM for some reason and because windows 11 on laptops automatically encrypts the drive with bitlocker I might have lost everything (luck again, I'm part of the 1% of the bitlocker users that actually keep an offline backup of the encryption key)
At least (I'm guessing, never bought any M1 Mac and will never do it) apple should be smart enough to disable the power button during BIOS updates, and maybe postpone the update on a low battery, leaving the danger only to desktop users
That's not necessarily a lenovo specific thing, windows can update bios if enabled (has been enabled by default of every modern windows device I own). When vendors push a new bios to the update catalog it's going to get automatically installed by default. Look for a setting in the security panel of the bios to turn this off, can't remember exactly what it's called.