Apple's Proprietary Software Locks Kill Independent Repair on New MacBook Pros
This is an excellent step for protecting MacBook Pro users against hardware invasions (such as US and China border authorities). If you trust the user to replace hardware, you permit the user’s hardware to be altered by malicious actors. By restricting final approval of hardware replacement to a vetted subset of all humanity, you ensure that it’s vastly more difficult for the vast majority of malicious humanity.<p>Yes, in a theoretical world, you could set up your own crypto authority and sign your own device repairs, assuming Apple were to build support for this. But if you brick your CA you’d brick your laptop if it ever needed repairs someday, which would leave you thousands of dollars poorer and in need of a laptop.<p>I trust Apple to run this CA and gate access to it _far_ more than I trust my personal self to do so. This security improvement will make me safer, as well as my non-engineer coworkers, and my mom.