BW_JP on 25 April 2010
Its very rare that any software update can cause hardware failures. Remember, the update had nothing to do with the blu-ray write/read routines. It's not related. I think people are just having bad luck or lying.
It's very very difficult to write something that would cause a hardware failure into your firmware update because you're simply building upon existing code that is tailored to run on that hardware... firmware that doesn't work? sure. Firmware causing hardware failures? It's just not very common.
I really don't think this is the case, it would be nearly impossible to write something that would cause a select few ps3s to fail and not the others.
