It has BIOS, it's called UEFI for some years now. When we say BIOS we mean UEFI for modern systems. If you want you can run all the tools that have EFI versions without the use of Bootcamp/Windows if Apple's UEFI allows booting from external devices. I about SMC as I just have no experience with it.

It is by belief that the firmware update should just fine. However, since I have never heard of someone with a MAC trying to do it, I don't know. Also, it is a little weird that I have never seen v9.5.3.1526 before (probably because it's old). So, I cannot guarantee anything.

Let's see if @CodeRush has any insight regarding updating the ME firmware on Apple hardware since I know he has done some work with Apple computers (UEFIPatch). It is safe to update the ME firmware on such systems or not? It should be safe but let's check his opinion first.

Well v9.5 firmware is relatively new (Haswell, 2013) so it makes perfect sense for your laptop to have such a firmware version. Also, most OEMs (except Lenovo or maybe HP) rarely update the ME firmware as they are bored to do so or don't believe there is any actual benefit for their system.

Either way, if you end up with a "problematic" laptop when it comes to fan control etc (which I highly doubt) you can always go back to your current firmware if you make a backup of it. Use FWUpdate and -save ME.bin command for that. Can you attach this firmware update file to us here as well?

Thank you very much for the reply Coderush. So as I said a lot of times, an Intel system is an Intel system. You should have absolutely no issue after updating the ME firmware. I do not blame you for being careful though, good thinking. It's safe, especially with FWUpdate because it does a lot of checks to verify that what you are trying to flash is compatible with your system. The one exception is updating to v9.1 (9-series) firmware in 8-series machines (ME v9.0) which is allowed but leads to problems. But that has been added as a warning for some time to the main thread and truthfully does not concern your machine.

I didn't know that Apple does not lock the flash descriptor. It's weird if you think that we are talking about Apple with all the security and rules they have in place. If that is true then we can find out very easily: Run fptw64 -d BIOS.bin -ME command. If it does not show any error, you have an unlocked descriptor which gives you more liberty to do other things in the feature as well if you want. For now though, do it and upload the result here so that I can check that ME region of yours. It's definitely exactly the same as everyone else's but why not check?

Regarding how old your current firmware is, you can clearly see that it's not new even for your December 2013 made machine:



Regarding downgrade, all ME firmware have a SVN, VCN & PV number. The rule of thumb is that you cannot downgrade a higher SVN/VCN ME firmware to a lower one. Intel has given more attention to this number since TXE firmware was released. Details:

Alright, go ahead and update your 1.5MB ME firmware from v9.5.3.1526 (10/05/2013) to v9.5.41.1904 (22/09/14) using ME v9.5 FWUpdate tool. The exact command in your case is:

FWUpdLcl64 -f ME9.5_1.5M_Production.bin

After it has finished successfully, restart your MAC and boot into Windows again. Now you should run the ME v9.5 MEInfo & MEManuf tools to verify that everything checks out. The commands are:

MEInfoWin64 (post a picture if you want, it should not report any errors)
MEManufWin64 (it should report MEManuf Operation Passed in green letters)

If you are talking about AHCI/RAID drivers this is neither the thread nor the sub-forum for it. If you are talking about ME:

a) It has nothing to do with AHCI/RAID
b) Download v8.1.52.1496 1.5MB firmware and v10.0.30.1054 drivers (no software needed)

Originally 6-series came with ME7 but some of them could be later upgraded to ME8 in order to support Ivy Bridge processors. Your Z68 machine has been updated to ME8 so you need to update that version. Check the * near ME8 which takes you to the bottom of the main topic.