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A comment on Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown. Parent comment

Re:Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown by PhasmaFelis on Friday November 09, 2018 @10:09AM (#18414900)
Has that changed in the current generation? On the XBox 360, you could physically stick any standard IDE drive in the drive bay, but the console wouldn't mount it unless it had a hidden file verifying that it was purchased from Microsoft, which charged well over market value.
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Re:Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown by cvwright on Friday November 09, 2018 @12:19PM (#18416035)
IIRC they were also using a clever (sneaky) application of copyright law to enforce this. They used a few special sectors on the disk to store an image to which they hold the copyright. The Xbox checks to make sure the image is there in the right spot before it will use the drive. So you can't pass off another drive as valid without violating their copyright.
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Re:Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown by LgWoodenBadger on Friday November 09, 2018 @07:44PM (#18419224)
That was tried with early video game consoles, and did not succeed legally.
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