[captainmuon]

This is a cool project, and I love it when somebody "takes back" their hardware a little bit or keeps them useful through hacking instead of throwing it away.

But it shows how irrationally our society is set up in some aspects. In an ideal world, you could just send the Lenovo engineer a mail and ask for the firmware source. But the incentives are such that they keep it secret, probably because they make a lot of money with batteries. So hackers spend a lot of time reverse engineering stuff. It seems really inefficient.

[john61]

This is why my next laptop will be a MNT Reform, you can change the individual cells yourself:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform

[danbolt]

I just received my developer beta MNT Reform, and I've been really enjoying it. They keyboard takes a bit of getting used to, but everything's very cute.

[silly-silly]

Any chance you could host a 'sosreport' so I could get a look at the hardware config ?

[Waterfall]

What is irrational? These batteries have been cloned cheaply so they're already reverse engineered. You can find them all over eBay. If this works on the T430 and x230 it will be very impressive.

I don't think this generation had DRM on the batteries. The new ones did and they're not cracked.

[jmnicolas]

> I don't think this generation had DRM on the batteries. The new ones did and they're not cracked.

TIL that there are DRM even on batteries. What a sad state of affairs.

[jhanschoo]

DRM on batteries of expensive electronics seems consumer-friendly to me. Most consumers' experience with battery replacement would be sending it for replacement by a technician. Battery DRM would make it difficult for the consumer to end up with an unsafe battery in their device and pockets.

[morsch]

There's an alternate strand of reality where you're arguing for mandated licensing for kitchen utensils.

[jacquesm]

I've been replacing batteries in electronic gear since I was all of five years old. I think your average consumer would be able to handle it.

[jhanschoo]

It's no different if you replace it yourself, that's tangential to my point. You'd be sourcing a specialized replacement battery online and there's a risk that the battery you get is an unsafe knockoff.

[jacquesm]

That is a different problem.

I've also been able to buy non-knock off batteries for just about all electronics up to a few years ago when companies decided that soldered in batteries shorten the time-to-landfill of their products improving their revenues.

Seriously: there is no reason why there could not be a standard form factor for battery cells. If we can do hard drives, CPUs and RAM I'm sure we can do batteries too.

[thatcat]

Why not argue for better battery certification and quality control or more tolerant phone designs? You could probably detect low quality batteries with software and sensors and notify the user.

[spyridonas]

If the companies where open to repair the technician/end user would say "Hey Apple, i need a battery for the 6S" There's no need for DRM.

[zhte415]

It doesn't seem consumer friendly to me. Aside from laptop, phone is five years old, replaced (consumer serviceable) battery twice (<$20), re-soldered USB connector once because of worn-out charging ($5, bought on ebay, don't have a solder, friend did it), replaced screen once due to a crack on screen and heavy rain. SD card of course so 8GB phone boosted by very affordable 64GB. Phone was less than $300, upfront no plan, when new.

Very consumer friendly phone.

[chongli]

When counterfeit batteries can explode and cause serious injury or death, I consider any measures to have the device reject counterfeit batteries consumer-friendly.

[dt3ft]

Same here. What a wonderful world they've built for us, eh?

[6510]

While we sat here and watched. :P