If you heard about the Lion Internet Recovery feature that came out last year for the new MacBook Airs and Mac mini models and hoped it might come to your device then you could be in luck. Apple has now released firmware updates to bring the Recovery feature to some 2010 Mac products.

Lion Internet Recovery was well received when it arrived at the same time as Mac OS X Lion last July and the three EFI firmware updates now available from Apple are for the late-2010 MacBook Air, mid-2010 iMac and early-2010 MacBook Pro. However there is no EFI update for the Mac Pro and Lion Internet Recovery is not even on Mac Pros currently being shipped, according to this article. Once your device has Lion Internet Recovery, if it hits problems, for example hard drive failure, then the feature automatically takes over and begins the full Lion OS recovery via a broadband Internet connection from Apple servers. It’s a useful fallback option for installing Lion.

You can access the firmware updates at the following download links -

Late-2010 MacBook Air – EFI Firmware Update 2.3 (2.98MB)
Mid-2010 iMac – EFI Firmware Update 1.8 (3.02MB)
Early-2010 MacBook Pro – EFI Firmware Update 2.6 (3.18MB)

It’s worth noting that the MacBook Air update will also fix an issue whereby on waking from sleep the laptop system could restart if the power button was pressed straight away, so if that has affected you there’s double reason for installing the new firmware update. If you want to read much more about Lion Internet Recovery head to this Apple page, which introduced the feature and explains how it works. You can also see the 4-minute video below this story showing the Recovery feature.

Will you be downloading the firmware update for Lion Internet Recovery to your 2010 Mac device? Maybe you already have, in which case you can tell us if the procedure all went smoothly.

Tags: Apple Lion, Macs, Updates