Your Apple hard drive, do you have the final say?

Image source: Oriental IC

Less than two weeks before 315, Apple is once again on the hot search for being sued by consumers.

According to the expression of netizens "not so perfect circle" on Weibo, he bought an Apple computer in the Apple official store in early 2020, and went to the Apple Store store to check after the computer motherboard was damaged in 2021. According to Apple's current warranty policy, the motherboard will be replaced directly to the computer, rather than repairing the motherboard. However, due to the integrated design of the Macbook hard disk motherboard, if the motherboard is replaced, the data in the hard disk cannot be recovered. If the user chooses to keep the data on the hard disk, they can only seek a third party to repair the motherboard, but the consequence of this is that Apple no longer provides a warranty for the computer. The netizen believes that he is caught in the situation of choosing one of the two data and warranty, and Apple's warranty policy is very unreasonable. So he sued Apple at the Dongcheng District People's Court in Beijing on the grounds of a "dispute over a sale contract," which went to trial on Feb. 21. As of press time, the netizen did not disclose the progress of the trial.

Image source: Weibo

The first thing to note is that regarding the hard disk data recovery and warranty part, Apple has an official explanation in 2018: "If the hard drive does not work under normal use and it has been restored through a third-party company that provides data recovery services professionally, you (the user) can send the hard drive back to Apple for warranty service... It is entirely up to the customer to decide whether to carry out data recovery through a third-party company that specializes in providing data recovery services. Such companies are not Authorized Service Providers by Apple, and Apple does not warrant any of the services they perform. This part seems to conflict with the case description of the above-mentioned netizens.

The technical reason why users face a choice between the two is not the integrated design of the hard disk motherboard, but that the main version of the MacBook has a T2 chip developed by Apple. The chip was first used in the new iMac Pro in December 2017, and all of Apple's Mac computer products since then — MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, and Mac mini — have built-in chips.

Source: Apple

According to Apple's official statement, the chip can implement a variety of security protection functions, including protecting the boot process, device keys, and processing system-level functions. To put it simply, in the past, when the old MacBook was repaired, users and third-party maintenance companies had the ability to disassemble and replace the hard disk and save and export the data, and the existence of the T2 chip blocked the road.

On the other hand, Mac computers with built-in T2 security chips must run the AST2 (Apple Service Toolkit) system configuration software, perform repair inspections on hardware and systems, and submit repair inspection reports by connecting to Apple's cloud servers, so that the entire repair process can be completed. Skipping this step will cause the computer to automatically lock down and your Mac won't work.

The AST2 system configuration software is only available in Apple's direct store repair department and Apple's authorized service providers.

Without discussing Apple's motivations, before the T2 chip hardware-level encryption, in the field of consumer-grade computers, the BIOS system that is indispensable to each computer has long realized hardware-level encryption, some of which are technologies provided by BIOS manufacturers, and some of which are developed by computer manufacturers. At the operating system level, As early as the release of Windows 7Vista in 2006, it comes with bitLocker function, which can realize data encryption at the level of storage volumes (which can be simply understood as partitions or disks). Basically, the hard disk data cannot be illegally read after encryption and cannot be copied illegally.

Leaving aside the strength of encryption technology, the most important difference between these encryption security protection measures and Apple's T2 chip encryption is that these methods/measures are not turned on by default, while T2 encryption is started by default and cannot be modified by the user.

It should also be noted that at present, almost all electronic product companies, including but not limited to computers, mobile phones, storage products and other fields, even if the maintenance engineer is very familiar with their own products, at the company level will not promise that in the maintenance process, the user's data will not be damaged. At the same time, even professional electronic data recovery companies do not have the ability to guarantee 100% recovery of damaged data lost by users.

In addition, regarding the ownership of the user's equipment storage data, in legal terms, it certainly does not belong to the equipment enterprise, so he is not obliged to ensure the integrity of the user's data. However, whether it can break the wrist with Apple on the grounds that it causes "product defects" because of the built-in T2 chip, more legal people need to explain it.

In my personal opinion, this lawsuit is actually a good consumer education. Let Apple Mac users and potential users make choices in advance: Users who are willing to trust the security of Apple products can continue to use the purchase. Users who are not willing to bear the risk of data loss will consider the products of other manufacturers.

In addition, in other countries and regions, legislation has been enacted on the serviceability of electronic products.

Last November, the European Parliament voted in favor of a new policy to "develop and introduce mandatory labels that provide consumers with clear, immediately visible and easy-to-understand information on the estimated life expectancy and serviceability of products at the time of purchase".

Beginning in January, France began rolling out serviceable labels for smartphones, laptops and other electronics. The label's serviceability score is 10 out of 10, and the higher the score, the easier it is to repair. According to the data released on the project's official website, Apple's MacBook series products scored between 6.2-6.5, and the other three laptops, Lenovo ThinkPad L450, ThinkPad P50 and Dell XPS 13-9350 scored 9. Although the score of maintainability is high or low, it does not deduce the strength of the product in the data security protection ability. However, the adoption of legislation and the introduction of a scoring mechanism will have a positive guide for users when purchasing products, which will also promote enterprises to consider the convenience of users when designing products.

Finally, I would like to remind all users who care about their data security, usually back up more data, whether it is to buy cloud services such as iCloud, or to use external storage devices to back up, hurry up.

Author/IT Times reporter Lin Fei

Editor/Hao Junhui Kicked Sister

Typography / Ji Jiaying

Photo/Weibo Apple Oriental IC

Source/IT Times public account vittimes

"IT Times" jointly complained with black cats, collected complaint clues, exposed cases of bad businesses harming consumer rights and interests, and gave full play to the role of media supervision and public opinion guidance. Do not forget every tiny voice, protect every legitimate rights and interests, and build a new environment for harmonious consumption.