Re: Strongly discouraged
My guess is one of these happened:
Option 1:
Manager: Let's prevent people upgrading their drives so they have to buy a new product when they run out.
Engineer: That sounds fun. I can think of several ingenious ways to make them break weirdly by messing with the firmware.
Option 2:
Manager 1: Let's prevent people upgrading their drives so they have to buy a new product when they run out.
Manager 2: Good idea, but having an engineer mess with the firmware would be expensive. Let's just say things that make it sound like we did.
Manager 1: What if people try and it works fine?
Manager 2: The paranoia of expecting that an engineer will have messed with the firmware so it will break later will get to them soon enough.
I'd also like to know whether these are any different from normal hardware. The article notes that the ones for the Surface Pro X are a little different, but doesn't comment on these, perhaps because IFixit hasn't gotten any of them yet. I really hope they haven't taken a standard part and forced it into a slightly different package just to lock people in.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
