hoakley Macs, Technology

Which EFI firmware should your Mac be using?

⚠️ This article is now superceded by Which EFI firmware should your Mac be using? (version 2)
It is out of date. Please refer to that more recent article instead.

Apple doesn’t provide a list of the current EFI firmware versions which should be installed on each model of Mac. At least, it didn’t until it released macOS High Sierra. Because this latest version of macOS includes a new tool, eficheck, which performs a weekly check on firmware, there was a list of known firmware versions included in that.

You can obtain the latest list by typing the following in Terminal:
ls /usr/libexec/firmwarecheckers/eficheck/EFIAllowListShipping.bundle/allowlists
which displays the recognised EFI firmware versions known to the eficheck tool (High Sierra only).

Since the initial release of High Sierra, I have maintained this list from those firmware updates included in each system software and security update.

iMac:

  • iMac10,1 00D0 00B
  • iMac11,1 0039 00B
  • iMac11,2 005D 00B
  • iMac12,1 004F 00B
  • iMac12,2 004F B00
  • iMac13,1 0115 B00
  • iMac14,1, iMac14,2, iMac14,3 0130 B00, or 0122 B00 for El Capitan?
  • iMac14,4 0189 B00
  • iMac15,1 0217 B00
  • iMac16,1, iMac16,2 0219 B00
  • iMac17,1 0154 B00
  • iMac18,1, iMac18,3 0158 B00

Apple doesn’t list the iMac12,2, but Ariel in a comment below reports it as being 004E B00 following 10.13.4, and I expect that to have risen to 004F B00 following installation of 10.13.5. Of these, only the iMac10,1 was not updated in 10.13.5.

MacBook:

  • MacBook6,1 00CC 00B
  • MacBook7,1 003F 00B
  • MacBook8,1 0173 B00
  • MacBook9,1 0169 B00
  • MacBook10,1 0161 B00

Of these, the MacBook6,1 and MacBook7,1 were not updated in 10.13.5.

MacBook Air:

  • MacBookAir3,1 0069 00B
  • MacBookAir4,1, MacBookAir4,2 0080 B00
  • MacBookAir5,1 00F8 B00
  • MacBookAir6,1 0107 B00
  • MacBookAir7,1 0177 B00

Of these, only the MacBookAir3,1 was not updated in 10.13.5.

MacBook Pro:

  • MacBookPro6,1 005D 00B
  • MacBookPro7,1 003F 00B
  • MacBookPro8,1 0050 00B
  • MacBookPro9,1 00DA B00
  • MacBookPro10,1 00F6 B00
  • MacBookPro10,2 010E B00
  • MacBookPro11,1, MacBookPro11,2 0146 B00
  • MacBookPro11,4 0183 B00
  • MacBookPro12,1 0176 B00, may be 0177 B00 with latest betas
  • MacBookPro13,1 0220 B00
  • MacBookPro13,2, MacBookPro13,3 0244 B00
  • MacBookPro14,1, MacBookPro14,2, MacBookPro14,3 0175 B00

Neither Apple nor Duo list the MacBookPro11,3, but iawhciwc in a comment below reports it as being 0142 B00; I suspect that this should now be updated to 0146 B00. Of these, only the MacBookPro7,1 was not updated in 10.13.5.

Mac mini:

  • Macmini4,1 0047 00B
  • Macmini5,1 0080 B00
  • Macmini6,1, Macmini6,2 010E B00
  • Macmini7,1 0231 B00, or 0224 B00 for El Capitan?

Of these, only the Macmini4,1 was not updated in 10.13.5.

Mac Pro:

  • MacPro5,1 0085 B00
  • MacPro6,1 0124 B00

Apple doesn’t list the MacPro5,1, but Jay in a comment below reports it as being 0085 B00 following 10.13.4. I don’t know whether this changed with 10.13.5, but no EFI firmware update is listed there for that model.

Observation: in Apple’s initial list of versions for High Sierra, the minor versions were universally B00. In its revised list, included within the Supplemental Update, some of those changed to 00B, as noted above. The significance of this is unclear, but it suggests that the first EFI firmware updates for some models had problems, and have since been replaced with 00B versions in that supplemental update.

If you’re not sure how to discover the model code of your Mac, use the About This Mac command at the top of the Apple menu, and click on the System Report… button. In System Information, in the Hardware Overview listing, this is given as the Model Identifier.

The Boot ROM Version given in that Hardware Overview typically looks like
IM171.0151.B00
In that, IM171 is the model identifier, here iMac17,1. The firmware version is then given in hexadecimal, with the major version first, followed by the minor version. So in that case, the major version is 0151 (337 decimal), and the minor version is B00 (2816). That is a higher number and thus more recent than 010F.B25, as the major version is greater, even though the minor version is lower.

If your firmware version is more recent than those given above, please let me know in a comment, so that I can improve the above listing for us all.

If your EFI firmware version seems out of date, download the last Combo updater and/or subsequent Security Updates for the version of macOS / OS X which it is running, from Apple Support. Install those, and check the firmware version again. Consider upgrading to Sierra or High Sierra as appropriate. EFI firmware updaters are now only distributed as part of macOS / OS X updates and upgrades: Apple does not provide them separately.

I strongly recommend that you consult Duo’s excellent report on EFI firmware security and updates, from which I have extracted initial data for this article. We should all be very grateful to Duo for carrying out and publishing that research, and to Apple’s EFI firmware engineers for their efforts to keep us on the straight and narrow.

⚠️ This article is now superceded by Which EFI firmware should your Mac be using? (version 2)
It is out of date. Please refer to that more recent article instead.

(Updated 1 June 2018 with macOS 10.13.5 update, Sierra and El Capitan Security Updates 2018-003; 19 June 2018 with beta update for MacBook Pro 12,1.)