Comment by pessimizer

Actually, the mercenary garbage that Lenovo started doing was absolutely hateful. I'd been tearing my hair out forever trying to figure out why nothing I could do would make my bluetooth work right on an old T430, even when I upgraded the chip. Assumed it was a Linux bug.

Turns out that Lenovo put awful bluetooth in the laptop, and made it ignore any other bluetooth chip you installed (you can get around this in Linux by force ignoring what the system reports.) I have no idea why you would do that except out of spite; I don't remember them selling bluetooth upgrades or anything. They were just keeping their options open? This is aside from having to hack the bios in order to upgrade wireless or use generic batteries.

I would be awesome if the people that sold me products weren't awful people. They don't have to feel bad about it, but they should.

I don't care that you're angrier at Apple than at Lenovo. I'm angrier at the electric company, but I don't bring it up to defend my local alderman. I also don't care that FOSS hasn't solved all your problems for free like they apparently promised you they would.

I use a T530, which is the larger brother of the T430. My overall impression is that it's a fine machine. (A lot of that opinion is motivated by the fact that when I bought it, it represented the very last of the plain black business-ey 15" PC laptops that wasn't cursed by the inclusion of a numeric keypad. Nowadays, Framework might fill that niche.)

Anyway: IIRC, a lot of the reason for locking down wireless hardware support is the FCC. AFAIK, the machine is tested and certified as a whole: The entire combination of its chassis and antennas and shielding and transmitting radios forms the item-under-test.

It's not just the sum of its parts; the whole thing gets tested. Deviation by end-users can result in having a non-compliant device, and the BIOS seeks to restrict that deviation.

And no, I don't like that aspect either.

But it only cares about the radios[1]. The rest of the guts are pretty freely exchanged: Upgrade to a different optical drive? SSD? Hard drive? RAM? CPU? Hack in a different keyboard? It's not picky at all about those things; have at it. (They could have locked down the entire system so that only parts matching a secret sauce would work, but they didn't.)

Anyway, Bluetooth module is garbage even under Windows. It's a bad design.

I bought my T530 from some random seller on eBay. It was obviously rebuilt by an outfit where they have a pile of variously-destroyed computers and take the cleanest chassis and put it with the fanciest screen and the nicest motherboard and sell it with some manner of RAM and an SSD for as much as they can get, even if that particular combination of stuff was never sold by Lenovo.

And that's fine, except: The Bluetooth module didn't work. I became convinced that it didn't even have one, even though it was advertised as including Bluetooth. So I bought a Bluetooth module (after validating the correct Lenovo FRU from the service manual, of course) and tore the thing apart to install it.

And once I was in there, I discovered that there was already a Bluetooth module present. It just wasn't installed properly.

IIRC there's one screw, one alignment pin, and one board-to-board connector for that part. The screw was tight, the pin was lined up fine, but the connector wasn't quite seated. It looked OK at a glance, but the whole module, in-situ, was very slightly bent by doing all 3 of those things concurrently.

That was annoying because only a bad design would have allowed for this to happen in the first place.

But I put my "new" non-bent module in and... it worked. (I haven't used it in Linux yet, though. Day job requires Windows software that talks to external hardware and I don't like dual-boot systems, so I'm kind of stuck.)

In terms of upgrading that part: It looks like the next wireless card is almost certain to also include Bluetooth by default, so after I hack the BIOS (I have a flashy-tool to poke at it with and an entire spare motherboard) to get around the trickery and plug a different wifi card in, I'll also have a newer Bluetooth radio.

[1]: I deliberately didn't mention batteries. My T530 still has the official Lenovo-minted BIOS; I've even updated it myself at one point using a Lenovo download. But it came to me with an aftermarket battery that worked great for a couple of years, and it now has a different aftermarket battery that also works great. I've heard the storied ruminations about aftermarket battery woes but simply have not experienced them myself. Indeed, the positive reviews on the Amazon listing I bought from suggests that it wasn't an issue for any of those folks, either -- it was like a sea of people who were just blissfully unaware of the issue.