this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Programmer Humor

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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

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] Nahdahar 1 points 1 year ago

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.