no people, this is NOT a firmware problem.
Here's my setup: Macbook Pro 15", 2.4GHz Penryn from early 2008, all standard equipment except I swapped out the harddrive with a 200GB 7200RPM one right after I got the computer
Here's what happened: When installing SMC 1.3, a window came up to prompt for restart, blah, blah... after ignoring it for an hour, i rebooted via that window's "restart" button. After an hour, I was still at the initial screen, after the apple-logo, now it displays a circle with diagonal slash, and a spinning thingy underneath.
Here's what I did: I called apple support, pressed 0 for customer service, yelled at the guy 'til she xfer'd me to a technician, at one point, the customer service rep was like "sir, you don't need to yell," and I effectively told her to shove it. I was furious with the technician too, who gave me some bs about warranty, and I told him that since it's an Apple update they forcibly pushed out, they have legal liability. Eventually, he said it may still be covered under your hardware warranty, and made an appt for me with an Apple genius at the local Apple store for next day when the store opened.
Here's what I tried after I got off the phone with Apple:
1. tried the usual stuff like PRAM, SMC zap, nothing
2. tried apple firmware restore 1.4, nothing
3. tried bootcamp and voila - by holding down "Option" at boot, you are given the choice to boot into Mac OS or Windows. I have Vista SP2, and figured might as well try that. It worked, which proves that it's not really a "firmware" problem. (was going to see if it can boot from CD, but didn't really bother)
4. took it to the apple store, the genius held "apple + s" at boot, to get into single-user mode, and saw the OS hanging at one point
5. he then booted from a firewire HD, since we established the bootloader is still intact when I booted into Vista
6. He ran disk-utilities, nothing came up (obviously)
7. He ran a system point-restore, restoring the OS to 10.5.6 (he quoted 20 minutes, I went to get lunch and when I came back, it was done)
now the computer is happy
8. I've updated everything once again via Apple Update, this time, SMC1.3 did not show up at all.
A bit of background about me - I do hardware, firmware, and driver development by profession, so I think I'm qualified to provide a guess as to what and where it went wrong:
for any computer, there's the initial "bootloader," which is what we commonly refer to as "firmware," and on the PC side it's the BIOS. This establishes the very basics of your motherboard, like "there is a CPU at address 0x0000 0000 0000 0000, there is 2GB of memory at address 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 0000, there is PCIe, there is graphics, etc..." When this gets screwed up, only way to restore the computer is via some "backdoor," often meaning a JTAG port. Some PC Motherboard has dual BIOS to make sure the updated BIOS will work before you can flash it to the "permanent" memory.
Next stage is the BSP (board support package) stage. This establishes basic driver things like "you can use 'writeToHD' function call to write to harddrive" etc. This will setup all the IO interfaces (harddrive, PCIe, whatever). This is where the "SMC 1.3 firmware" is inserted and went wrong... Since this BSP is also responsible to provide higher-level interface calls to the Kernel/OS, Windows and Mac OS uses different BSPs and we can boot into one but not the other. (If you've installed Windows XP via CD, when you first load the CD, there's tons of basic drivers it goes through before you can install, that's this stuff)
Next stage is the kernel, the all famous unix-based one Apple uses, or the Vista kernel. This provides stuff like TCP/IP stack, Bluetooth stack, etc.
At the end of the day, the "real" firmware wasn't really involved. Usually, when a BSP is updated, the entire BSP has to be recompiled and the Kernel should be recompiled with the new libraries provided by the new BSP. During the BSP compilation process, someone probably forgot to test some configuration (be it different HD, extra RAM, or whatever) and released it, causing the problem. This kind of bug is unacceptable and should result in someone getting fired if you ask me. I worked in Satellites and airplanes, these kind of errors could cause either billions of dollars or even lives! Judging by the fact that I had a restored BSP/Kernel and SMC1.3 did not show up, my guess is that this happened to enough computers and Apple had to pull the update.
