[spuggy]

The points made here are good, regarding the lack of critical thinking and the credibility of information, purely because you're reading it on a computer/spreadsheet/them thar interwebs.

I'm not saying this isn't true (after all, it's why Snopes exists at all - the wide-spread gullibility of people who don't check their sources).

However, this is, I believe, a bad example to illustrate a valid point - because some things are unfortunately very, very, easy to believe.

Anti-tamper screws? Nothing new there - the first Compaq 386 Portable in the mid-80's was about the first time most folks had ever seen a torx fastener at all, much less used to hold a computer together...

In fact, the entire industry - and Apple is no exception (and perhaps somewhere near the top of the league table) - is no stranger to restrictive, anti-competitive practises designed to confound folks who mistakenly believed that, having paid good money for the darn thing, it now belonged to them and they could do what they liked with it....


Apple, at one time, used industry-standard drives (Seagates, actually). Nothing special about them. Same drives as everyone else. But they enforced a firmware check so that their computers would only recognise drives with Apple firmware. So you could only buy (lower capacity and higher priced) replacement drives from them. Using any drive without the magic string in the firmware meant it wasn't recognised/couldn't be used (at least, not without special drivers/tricks to fool the firmware into giving it a thumbs-up). Nice.

Apple aren't the only ones to do that trick - HP and Dell have both done it; the disk drive thing is kind of defensible for servers and enterprise-class disk arrays (where you can argue you need to be sure it's compatible and thus can be supported) - but for laptops and personal electronics? Not in my book.

(Dell at one time even used a power supply in certain desktops that used standard plugs and form-factor - looked identical to an industry power-supply of the time - but if you just blithely replaced the original power supply with a generic one, you'd blow the motherboard, because they'd re-wired some of the power lines into non-standard locations on an industry-standard plug...)

The 5th/5.5 generation iPods (the Video ones) are easy to open (once you've done it once or twice and have the correct tools - and thus you can replace an old battery, or upgrade to a Toshiba drive of up to 240GB (largest drive Apple ever offered in those was 80GB).

Apple evidently preferred that folks didn't replace their own batteries for $15 when they wore out, they'd prefer that they spring $100 a pop to them for it.

So the 6th generation ones (the "Classics") have a so-called sarcophagus clip - where the little metal tangs you need to release are covered - yup, specifically designed to prevent you releasing them. Thus, you have to pretty much render the back cover non-reusable to get it off (and the smart move it is to then snip off those metal clip covers on the replacement before fitting).