MacBook SMC Firmware Update: Does it fix the mooing?

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
August 18th, 2006 • 8:23 am

Sven-S. Porst, who owns a (white) MacBook that occasionally moos, although the noise doesn’t bother him much, has let me know that Apple has just released a firmware update for the MacBook, similar to the ones released for the MacBook Pro a while ago.

The big question as far as I am concerned is of course whether this firmware update does anything to address the mooing noise that, according to a MacInTouch survey, affects up to 20 percent of all MacBook laptops, and that caused me to return the black MacBook that I had purchased for my wife.

As part of the MacInTouch survey, some readers had mentioned that a firmware update had fixed the problem for them. Obviously these readers (or the MacInTouch staff) were confused and were actually talking about the MacBook Pro (which can also be affected by the mooing), because no firmware update was available for the MacBook (not Pro) at the time the MacInTouch survey was conducted. (In that respect, Apple’s new naming scheme really doesn’t help. Too many people think that “MacBooks” refers to both MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops.)

But now a firmware update is available. Does it make any difference for those MacBooks suffering from a bad case of mooing? Obviously I will not be able to verify this myself, since I no longer have access to a mooing MacBook. So I’ll have to rely on other people’s reports.

If the report speculating about the role that the make of the MacBook’s internal fans might be playing in the mooing is right, then there might not be too much hope for those who have a mooing MacBook. After all, a firmware update cannot by itself cause an internal fan to switch brands… But who knows? The firmware update might help bring the misbehaving fans under control, for those who have them.

In other words, I’d be very curious to know. But for that I need to find a brave soul who was as distressed by the mooing as I was but chose to keep his MacBook just the same…


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