It makes me sad to think that first a group of engineers spend time writings this complex system of checksums, partially encrypted firmware images, proprietary challenge-response handshake and communications with the battery so that another hacker must spend days to allow himself to make a fix as simple as replacing the battery in his own laptop. Is this because of fear? Money? Greed? All three? How much money does Lenovo make out of Lenovo batteries to make this all this extra complexity worth its salt in the first place? Consider that maintaining all that complexity is a recurring cost: it's not just writing the authentication scheme but making sure it works for each future firmware release.
I haven't let go of the 80's and I still think if you buy a car, phone, laptop, compact disc or a video disc, then it's yours because you paid for it in your own money. From that standpoint it's simply inexcusable for manufacturers to try to re-own parts of a device they've already sold to someone.
If a battery works with the laptop, it's guaranteed to be a tested compatible one. Quickly slapping up a counterfeit and selling it as a brand-name thing won't work.
A battery ua a critical device, prone to fires or blasts if made improperly. One such incident would significantly tarnish the brand. Thus the over-reaction.
I wish there wad an open spec for certified batteries, to allow for third-party fixes and replacements, though.
Agreed. As we've seen from. The USB typeC stuff, seriously screwing power cables and batteries is really bad.
If you put a crap SD card in a laptop it might be the wrong size. If you put a bad counterfit battery in and it explodes and permanently disfigures someone you've got a PR nightmare before people have figured out the real reason.
Especially today when a single tweet can spark that PR nightmare and social media sites will take a title and run with it without ever doing any fact checking.
If i were lenovo, i'd be doing the same exact thing, and i'm honestly surprised we don't see more of this stuff in things like cables, chargers, etc...
By applying this logic a computer manufacturer should not allow any non certified OS to run on their machines.
Writing this on a ThinkPad running Linux. If this comes true I will stop buying Lenovo products. Until today I continue buying ThinkPads because their Linux support is among the best - and for the trackpoint and a good keyboard. But I definitely do not like how they behave lately.
I am watching very closely for alternatives, every time I or any of people I know need to buy a new computer.
As soon as the brand security will become more important as the requirements of their customers I will jump off the brand. A brand without customers is not worth anything.
There was a thread[1] recently in which a Linux (specifically systemd) bug was capable of bricking motherboards. ACPI bugs can cause overheating, failure to enter sleep mode, etc. In a perfect world of open source firmware this wouldn't be an issue, but until then the cover-your-ass behavior makes sense.
Does the cost of replacing a few bricked machines outweigh the reputation cost? Probably not, but it's easy to understand the liability issues that arise from non certified OS's.
The way I see it the firmware has been implemented incorrectly - I don't think there's anything in the spec but shouldn't clearing all values == a reset to default, not a non-booting device?
> One such incident would significantly tarnish the brand.
Ahem, as if there were no reported cases of genuine Apple/Dell/HP/Sony/... batteries catching fire. Seems all those significantly tarnished brands are doing quite fine.
A user could put a Lo Pan Six Demon Bag battery in their laptop and then it bursts into flames. The user is going to complain that their Lenovo laptop burst into flames. Everyone else is going to parrot that statement because almost no one looks into anything anymore. Once someone does dig into it and find out that it was actually the shoddy Lo Pan battery, its too late. "Lenovo" and "third degree burns" has been plastered all over the Internet and good luck finding Lo Pan to hold him accountable.
Every news outlet that prints the article about a Lenovo laptop catching fire isn't going to check to see if that is a Lenovo battery in it.
And then the user will sue Lenovo because Lenovo didn't tell him he couldn't put a Lenovo battery in it. Even though that has nothing to do with it, it will still cost Lenovo possibly millions in legal defense costs, unless they opt to settle out of court, and anyone who doesn't bother to learn the truth will simply conclude that Lenovo laptops are dangerous because one caught on fire.
It's the same reason McDonald's coffee cups now say "Caution: Contents Hot" on them.
Even if they came through it unscathed, it still must've been a PR nightmare for them at the time. Sometimes things like that stick in the public mind, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the media can make these types of stories much bigger than they actually are, and sometimes the media ignores stories that ought to be much bigger.
You probably know people who are convinced MSG is bad for you, decades after the anti-MSG scare. The MSG scare could've been a tempest in a teapot that blew over immediately. Instead it lingers on decades later, more from the currents and tides of random crowd behavior than anything else. Ditto for scares surrounding pop rocks, vaccines, gluten, witchcraft, marijuana, fluoride, Dungeons and Dragons, Satanism, mind control via backmasking, UFOs, all sorts of things.
Lingering public perception is (very) loosely correlated with media perception, which is (very) loosely correlated with reality, and you can't predict which falsehoods will linger in the public imagination (snopes.com wouldn't have anything to write about otherwise!).
Apple iPhone chargers are not inherently unstable and only kept from bursting into flames while charging by the circuitry attached to them.
A lithium ion battery is prone to a runaway thermal reaction if you charge it or discharge it too fast or too far. [1][2] Circuitry in the charger and usually directly attached to the cells in the battery permanently break the circuit if the battery voltage or current exceeds a pre-set range.
This is not like the Keurig k-cup DRM where they are 'ensuring quality' by forcing usage of Keurig-only supplies. This is a life safety and brand protection issue that an improperly built battery can jeopardize both. The consequences are not a bad cup of coffee.
It makes me sad too. I've been through 4 thinkpads (x23,x60,x201i). They all work fine with 3rd party batteries although the more recent ones give a warning message. I think this is probably the end of buying Lenovo for me.
I haven't let go of the 80's and I still think if you buy a car, phone, laptop, compact disc or a video disc, then it's yours because you paid for it in your own money. From that standpoint it's simply inexcusable for manufacturers to try to re-own parts of a device they've already sold to someone.