Updating the Firmware

After you've gotten all your stuff together (see the previous section), the first thing you need to do is update your Intel Mac's firmware. For those of you hearing "firmware" for the first time, this has nothing to do with lawyers or anything like that. Firmware is hardware-level software installed on your Mac's internal processor.

In case you're wondering what firmware does, it tells your Mac what to do when you press the On button. It loads some stuff that tells the processor to look on your Mac's hard drive to find an operating system to start. One way to look at firmware is that it's the hardware's operating system. For now, all you need to know is that you shouldn't attempt to run Boot Camp until your Mac's firmware is updated.

Once you've downloaded the firmware update from Apple's site (see the link earlier in this guide), follow these steps:

  1. Quit all running applications.

  2. Double-click on the disk ...

Get Running Boot Camp now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.