If you make your way through iFixit’s Retina MacBook 2016 teardown, you’ll see some tamper evident screws holding the hinge to the aluminum body.
Tamper evident screws are treated with a compound, after assembly, that makes it obvious if anyone applies force to the screw.
Why do this?
From this ZDNet post:
My best guess is that these fasteners take a fair load from the hinge, but at the same time are only screwed down into soft aluminum. That leads me to believe that they need to be tightened down – or more accurately, torqued down – with a specific force that’s enough to hold them in place but not enough to strip the threads. As such, if a third-party messes with them, and the hinge later becomes loose because the threads have stripped because of improper torquing (which I’ve come across a lot over the years), Apple will know about it.
Interesting.
Update: A little birdie told me that the compound is Loctite, not an attempt to detect user tampering.
With all due respect to ZD Net, this is another example of why we need more real engineers in tech reporting.
Here’s the thing – True, torquing down screws into soft aluminum makes it vulnerable to thread-stripping. But there are ways to treat the material to make it less vulnerable.
Second, it’s quite easy to identify stripped threads resulting from over-torquing. There’s no need for this method.
I don’t know why this is just being picked up on now as Apple have been doing this on their machines for many, many years. It is not something that has just been introduced in this new Macbook.
For example, here’s someone mentioning it in 2012…
http://superuser.com/questions/441049/why-are-the-screws-of-the-macbook-pro-blue-on-one-side
…and here’s someone mentioning it in 2008…
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1523841?start=0&tstart=0
guess you better draft a memo to Apple’s hardware engineers — let them know you’ve got it all figured out!
There is nothing inside of any of Apple’s recent laptops that you can “repair”. The new Macbook has NOTHING a user can repair.
Opening a machine like this is foolish.
I thought it was referring to the thread locker too at first (and yeah that’s nothing new and no big deal), but reading it again the “tamper evident” part is some filler in the screw head:
“Torx heads are filled with some sort of substance that disintegrates when you insert a screwdriver.”
Unless one simply curious about how it’s all put together. Lots of us can understand that curiosity.
LOL, I’ve been using Loctite since the 60s.
Read the story first, before commenting.
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