Laptop wifi card whitelists - what might be one of the dumbest things ever.
Fun fact - I took the wifi card out of an HP 8440p (circa 2010 Westmere) and put it into an HP DM1 (circa 2011 Brazos) and the DM1 complained that the wifi card was unsupported during POST and would disable it.
…of course, if you put a “supported” wifi card into the the DM1, boot into your OS of choice, put the laptop into S3 suspend “sleep mode”, remove the wifi card and replace it with the wifi card from the 8440p, and then wake the DM1 back up, the OS will see and use the “unsupported” wifi card from the 8440p without issue (drivers notwithstanding… unless you’re in Linux, because the kernel supported both out-of-the-box).
So yeah, unsupported my foot. They’re both even from HP within like a year or two of each-other!
(half off-topic fun fact: did you know you can remove a SATA drive from a PC that’s in S3 suspend “sleep mode”, connect it to a different PC and, as long as you only read data from the disk and not write anything, you can put it back into the PC that was in S3 suspend “sleep mode”, wake it up, and continue without any issue at all?)
You’re gonna get “The FCC requires…” They don’t actually. (Laws elsewhere I don’t know.)
If you sell a wifi product, it must be tested for regulatory approval as sold. That means cards and antennas get approval. If you have a card and an antenna and you wish to sell them as a paired product (such as a laptop), it too must be approved—but that approval’s a lot faster because your paperwork to the FCC is, “approved transceiver + approved antenna”, trivially also approved.
If you swap one of those pieces out for another also approved piece, ensuring compliance is now your job, not the vendor’s. But you’re also trivially already in compliance.
(It’s slightly more complicated than that on the corporation end, but … you get the idea: The FCC isn’t stupid. Most of the time.)
Yeah, the first thing to do when getting a thinkpad is biosmod it. The second thing to do is send a letter to the people who make and enforce anti-trust/competitive laws. I need to check if the EU has something close to applicable on the matter.
I wasn’t aware Thinkpads were now coming standard with that kind of stupidity. I knew HP engages in this kind of lock-in, but I’m greatly disappointed if Lenovo is going down the same path.
You should not have to do something as low-level as hack or replace the BIOS on your hardware to unlock compatibility that is already present in the hardware.
If companies like Lenovo and HP seem to want to insist that we do (or continue producing crap which is locked in such a way that we do), the real answer kinda needs to be that we as customers shop elsewhere. Ultimately that’s the only way this gets solved: You produce hardware that is broken by design, we won’t buy it.
Not sure about the current state of whitelists for lenovo (I think it possibly varies from model to model), but it was present for my ancient Thinkpad W520, from back in 2011.