> Unfortunately, Lenovo continues to implement a stupid network card whitelist that IBM started over 20 years ago on its ThinkPad models. If the card in the M.2 slot is not advertising a known PCI vendor and product ID in the whitelist contained in the BIOS (now UEFI firmware), the ThinkPad will refuse to boot.
Why?? Are there legitimate reasons for this sort of design behavior other than anticompetitiveness?
This is quite plainly nonsense. Every other manufacturer allows WiFi adapter replacements because every module on the market must be individually FCC certified.
Technically, the claim does make sense under a creative interpretation of the FCC rules. I think the real reason is likely so you'll buy replacement FRUs from Lenovo under your enterprise support contract, as well as ensuring you use a module that is known to work reliably with the software stack shipped on the machine.
Basically yeah, its an anticompetitive measure.
The former means that the assembly is assumed to meet UL specifications; the second means that it has been inspected by UL and confirmed that the assembly actually does meet specifications.
Making sure that things meet specifications is the entire point of the building department's inspections.
They likely wanted to just make sure that you hadn't done that. (And to do that, they had to send some fellows whose time was very expensive, because it takes long experience to build up an intuition for these things to the point that you're confident enough in your answer to not have to bother with the "measure everything and plug-and-chug the dynamics in a simulator" step.)
When I see situations like this, it's often because someone on the other side, or someone related, benefits from the arrangement. They would never admit so, but that's how things tend to turn out like that.
Unfortunately, Lenovo is actually correct in how the laws are written.
Whether or not they would get in trouble for it is a different question. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were put on notice for something 20 years ago by an over eager FCC person and they took the lesson to heart. Once a company gets threatened for something they rarely go back, even if other companies are getting away with it.
Perhaps every other OEM are running antennas through the case that have exactly the gain you'd expect on the bands you'd expect; while Lenovo are using better-than-average antenna designs together with lower signal amplification to achieve the same SNR with lower total power consumption.
If that's the case, then swapping out the wi-fi card for one that hasn't been programmed for below-standard signal amplification, will get you a system that's above the FCC limits.
My own ThinkPad absolutely has independent slots for WiFi and cellular cards, and they look similar but they aren't even electrically compatible. (One is a mini PCIe with PCI Express and without USB, and the other is mini PCIe with USB and without PCI Express.)
https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/29/5253226/nsa-cia-fbi-lapt...
Around COVID times, my then employer got stuck with about 40,000 devices, 30% of which had undetectable, counterfeit memory that would eventually cause a complete failure. Replacement was a $80M lesson for that vendor.