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March 25, 2009 2:39 PM PDT

Apple posts graphics update for new MacBook Pro

by Tom Krazit

Owners of Apple's most recently released 17-inch MacBook Pro are encouraged to install a new graphics update.

(Credit: Apple)

Apple has issued a fix for the graphics problems suffered by some owners of the company's new 17-inch MacBook Pro.

The firmware update was released Wednesday for owners of the MacBook Pro announced at Macworld and shipped in February. Some owners had reported problems with vertical lines polluting the display, and Apple says the new firmware should fix the problem.

Please let us know if you had any problems installing the update, or if the firmware update doesn't fix the problem. Based on the release notes for the firmware, it 's not clear whether this fix is related to the instability issues noted by some 17-inch MacBook Pro users when running Nvidia's discrete graphics cards.

Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom.
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by Vegaman_Dan March 25, 2009 3:05 PM PDT
nVidia's solution in the past to this problem on other machines affected in this manner was to make the CPU or GPU fans run at a much faster and louder level to keep up with the cooling requirements. On a desktop, that wasn't a problem, but on a laptop, it resulted in a much noisier system with poor battery life.

It will be interesting to see how this affects the Macbook in real life experience.
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by RompStar_420 March 25, 2009 3:28 PM PDT
I own one of these laptops, got it about a week ago, has anyone applied this firmware patch yet ? I am not having any issues.
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by eric.l March 26, 2009 6:39 AM PDT
yeah I'm curious about this as well. Just bought a 17" MBP a couple of days ago. Have nothing but good things to say about the display so far.
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by sanenazok March 26, 2009 7:21 AM PDT
I don't understand why a story about screen artifacts has the publicity shot of the Mac computer instead of a demonstration of what these screen lines look like. It's quite attractive really:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/annieee/3305611222/
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by odowd80 March 26, 2009 9:19 AM PDT
The link you supplied is irrelevant since it is not a 17-inch unibody macbook pro. Here is a link that shows the problem that this update is supposed to fix:
http://www.macnn.com/articles/09/03/05/17.inch.mbp.video.errors/
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