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MacBook Airs in Black Screen of DEATH terror: Apple responds

No, paranoid fanbois, display failure wasn't punishment for installing Windows

MacBook Air users who faced a black display when they attempted to install Windows can breathe easier: Apple has issued a patch that should assuage their torment.

MacBook Air EFI Firmware Update 2.7, released Thursday, is a fix for a quite convoluted problem affecting the versions of Apple's Ultrabook precursor that were introduced at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference this June.

It turn out that if you tried to use Apple's Boot Camp Assistant to install Windows 7 or Windows 8 on one of these babies, and you happened to have both an external optical drive and a USB thumb drive attached to your MacBook Air, there was a chance that your screen would go black.

No more, Apple says – and as a bonus "feature", the EFI update "ensures that the system will boot by default into OS X after installation of Windows 8" – we assume that the update doesn't change the ability to have your MacBook Air boot straight into Windows after that, should you so choose.

This isn't Apple's first fix for a problem with the new MacBook Airs: in July, after a chorus of complaints about dodgy 802.11ac Wi-Fi connections, Apple distributed a OS X Mountain Lion update that apparently did the trick, along with fixing a bug that could cause screen flickering in Photoshop, and another that could cause audio to fluctuate during video playback.

We now await the inevitable round of bugs and subsequent fixes that will accompany the release of OX 10.9, likely to occur later this month. ®

Bootnote

Should you prefer your update to present itself in a language other than English, know that it it also available in Magyar, Čeština, العربية (مصر)‏, Deutsch, Français, 日本語, Español, Italiano, Nederlands, Dansk, Norsk Bokmål, Polski, Português, Português (Brasil), Pусский, Suomi, Svensk, 简体中文, 繁體中文, and 한국어.

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