I think it's entirely reasonable for a manufacturer to not provide access to every tweakable setting on a device. It's highly likely that some of those settings, if set incorrectly, could result in the device failing before the warranty is up. Even if they can determine that the settings have been tampered with; they provide some kind of prompt for the user to acknowledge that they're going to void their warranty if the set certain options in BIOS and can then stop warranty claims based on this, it's going to cost the manufacturer to handle such claims. They'll also probably have to deal with the odd law suit from annoyed customers who have clicked through the prompt, badly tweaked their BIOS and killed their machine. This puts up costs for the manufacturer and as a result puts up cost for the end user as it will be past on as higher prices. This potentially makes their product less competitive and thus runs the risk of losing sales to their competitors.
You get to tweak the settings provided. That's (probably) how it was when you bought it (i.e. It assumes such changes haven't been added in a BIOS upgrade or something after you've bought it, not that many people actually apply those anyway...). If you don't like it such situations, maybe you need to do a bit more homework before buying a unit and possibly buy something else that does provide you the room to tweak as you see fit.
That is not to say that they may not have been a bit zealous on the locking down here, but it sounds like a quick hack was introduced to hide advanced functionality in the BIOS that they didn't deem necessary for their target audience (read: not tinkerers). Expecting a manufacturer who are in the market of producing reasonably priced consumer units to allow everything to be tweaked is rather naive.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
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Date: 2016-09-24 08:41 pm (UTC)You get to tweak the settings provided. That's (probably) how it was when you bought it (i.e. It assumes such changes haven't been added in a BIOS upgrade or something after you've bought it, not that many people actually apply those anyway...). If you don't like it such situations, maybe you need to do a bit more homework before buying a unit and possibly buy something else that does provide you the room to tweak as you see fit.
That is not to say that they may not have been a bit zealous on the locking down here, but it sounds like a quick hack was introduced to hide advanced functionality in the BIOS that they didn't deem necessary for their target audience (read: not tinkerers). Expecting a manufacturer who are in the market of producing reasonably priced consumer units to allow everything to be tweaked is rather naive.