In a move to fix an issue with the drive interface of its newly-released MacBook Pro line, Apple Monday released firmware upgrade - the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7.

Apple said that the upgrade comes in response to some reported complaints by "a small number of customers," who were using drives based on the latest SATA specification with the this month-launched MacBook Pros. The customers said that due to some inadequacies in some units, the SATA drive interface ran at a paltry 1.5Gbps speed - even though the non-Pro 13-inch MacBook supported two times the speed.

However, despite that fact that Apple has released an upgrade to address the problem, the company has cautioned that it has not shipped drives operating at the higher-speed specification. The company said that the download is 3.35MB and requires Mac OS X 10.5.7. An apple statement about the upgrade said: "While this update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbit/sec, Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported."

According to Macworld reports, another upgrade released by Apple - an iMac EFI Firmware 1.4 Update - fixes some issues with 20-inch and 24-inch early 2009 iMacs, related to the devices using ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards, as well as issues with waking from sleep while in Boot Camp.