I had to disassemble our relatively new Roborock vacuum to clean it fully (it found a piece of dog waste and made a lovely mess). I removed every screw I could find and still couldn't remove the bottom cover. That's when I noticed what looked like a hole with a plastic filler, but was actually a bit of wax covering the final screw. I presume this was a simple way to determine if the device had been tampered, for warranty purposes.
Gives me memories of heating the tamper-evident sticker with a hairdryer to open up my xbox 360 so that I could flash DVD drive firmware so that I could load... backups as a child who couldn't afford games.
That xbox took forever to save for, so voiding the warranty wasn't an option. Luckily, the ole hairdryer defeated the tamper evident destruction of the sticker.
I love things like that. Microsoft pays for manufacturing of a security sticker to prevent tampering. On a device that runs a hypervisor (wild at the time) to prevent tampering.
And some dude on the internet realizes that you can just heat it up with a hair dryer and carefully peel it back with tweezers, than flash firmware to your DVD drive that reports "yep, this is an official Xbox 360 disk" to the locked-down-and-totally-secure OS.
Just a friendly reminder for everyone: in the United States, companies cannot legally void your warranty for removing "warranty void if removed" stickers or similar (like wax seals).
Companies can only void the warranty on specific items that you damage. As long as you don't damage anything when opening up electronics, ask them to put in writing why they are voiding your warranty (chances are they'll "help you just this one time" instead).
The FTC is finally cracking down on companies that use such warnings.
(Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act - same law that lets you or third parties do work on your vehicles without voiding the manufacturer warranty.)
I've seen those stickers on hard drives. I always assumed that maybe the internal mechanisms were in a vacuum or super-clean and opening the case would allow air or dust into the moving parts.
> As long as you don't damage anything when opening up electronics
Considering the nature of hard drives, I think that would fall under damage caused by opening.
My understanding is that they are not in a vacuum, but they are super-clean. The air/gas inside is an important part by preventing the read/write head from touching the platters as they rotate. If a consumer opens it up, then dust is introduced which will cause problems.
The higher-end and larger drives today are filled with helium (or vacuum in some exotic cases), and opening the case at all completely destroys the drive's ability to operate.
I'm pretty sure the helium-filled hard drives are incredibly difficult to seal, and IIRC are welded shut. I don't see how you'd open it in the first place without a dremel anyway.
Most hard drives today are ultrasonically welded shut (metal to plastic) and hermetically sealed. The helium drives are not much harder to get into than normal hard drives today. The difference in processing is actually only a few steps where they insert the helium and then close the final hole.
