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

  • 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.

    • Mac users, and actually most laptop users, don’t give a shit about the things you mention. They buy it, use it for some 2-5 years, then sell it and get a new model. Upgrading hardware is way too complicated for most people. They don’t know or care what a BIOS is. It comes with the OS installed and that’s the only thing they would ever want. Turn it on, use Safari, outlook, and office 365, maybe some tool like Photoshop/Ableton/etc, that’s it.

      I mean iPhones are the same right? They lock down everything so it’s idiot proof and they control the environment exactly so they can maximise the smoothness of the experience.

    • 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.

      • 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 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

    • I couldn’t imagine buying any laptop other than a Mac because the performance to battery life ratio on everything else is awful. Plus if you want a UNIX system, it’s an easy buy.

      After owning an Apple ARM laptop I’d never go back to anything else.