Now I have seen everything in the realm of software stupidity. Fortunately, it is not Microsoft who’s at fault! Surprisingly, it’s Apple. I have one of the very first MacBook Pro 15″ laptops ever made. I purchased it the day Boot Camp came out – and never looked back. The machine has been flawless – until now.

I have religiously installed Apple’s software updates as they have been pushed to me. This weekend, one of those updates was the SuperDrive 2.1 Firmware update. And now the optical drive in my laptop is dead! You literally cannot even install a disk. After searching the issue on Apple’s forums, it appears that I am one of many that this has happened to – and there is no fix short of hardware replacement.

My machine is out of warranty by a few months. It seems that this is being handled on a case-by-case basis both at the Apple stores as well as by Apple’s phone support. I am going to have a long, stupid chore ahead of me regardless – and no absolute promise of a fix (yet).

Sigh. The moral of the story – don’t push firmware updates unless you are 110% sure they work. This one sure didn’t – and now I’m going to look at all such fixes much more carefully before allowing them to be automatically be installed on my hardware.