MacBook Air Flash Storage Drive Replacement Program

[derek_peterson]

MacBook Air Flash Storage Drive Replacement Program
http://www.apple.com/support/macbookair-flashdrive/

Apple has determined that certain 64GB and 128GB flash storage drives used in the previous generation of MacBook Air systems may fail. These systems were sold between June 2012 through June 2013. Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) will replace affected flash storage drives, free of charge. To see if your drive may be affected, go to the Mac App Store, click on Updates and choose the MacBook Air Flash Storage Firmware Update 1.1. The firmware update will test your drive to see if it is affected and take you to an Apple website with instructions if you are.

Ideally I would like to find a way to determine which systems in the environment are impacted by this without the users being involved. Unfortunately Apple has not published potentially impacted serial numbers we could query via inventory. Instead you must run the MacBook Air Flash Storage Firmware Update 1.1 on the system to determine if it is impacted. I am trying to round up an impacted system to determine if there is a way this could be scripted and stored via an Extension Attribute. Obviously reporting on MacBook Air systems with the 64GB and 128GB drives would give you a rough ideal of potentially impacted systems.

Thoughts or feedback as to how others are doing this would be greatly appreciated.

[gregneagle]

"Ideally I would like to find a way to determine which systems in the environment are impacted by this without the users being involved. "

If you run `softwareupdate -l` on a system and the MacBook Air Flash Storage Firmware Update 1.1 is not offered, the machine does not have the issue.

If it is offered, the machine may have the issue. You won't know for sure unless/until you attempt to install the update.

-Greg

[cgordy]

this issue has me curious.
We are a school district deploying MBAs with Casper.
Software Updates are running automatically via the local server.

The good position I'm in is - there are only about 30 MBAs in the field that fit this recall criteria.
Bad postion I'm in is - there are over 1000 units just arrived that fit this criteria and we won't know until they get built and in the hands of the end users....

Then again, will "I" even know?
What is stopping Software Updates from running this Flash Storage Firmware, detecting a problem, Safari directs the user to the repair page - and the user ignores the message?

With Casper, can we find machines which this specific update has already run on?

[stevewood]

You can scope a Smart Group to look for the receipt of that update. You'd have to figure out what the receipt is named by looking at the receipts on a machine that already has it installed. I just checked on my 8.62 JSS and it works.

Locate a machine that has already installed this FW update. In your inventory, go to Package Receipts. Scroll through that list and you'll find a section for packages installed by Installer.app or SWU. Locate the com.apple.x.x info for the FW update. You can then use that to scope a Smart Group.

Hopefully that makes sense. The difficult part will be identifying the com.apple.x.x criteria to scope on. If you have a machine that has not run the FW update, you might screen cap that receipts list before running it, run the update, and compare the list after. If you figure it out, post back to the list so others can do this.

[JPDyson]

Perhaps I'm overlooking something wrong with this approach, but how about searching for "Model is MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2012)" or "Model is MacBook Air (11-inch Mid 2012)"?

Edit: Potential advantage: If you haven't made the aforementioned firmware update available, and do not intend to do so immediately, you can still scope on model.