Also i don’t think many people would trust any guy with a manual to repair their warranted mac instead of going to the closest apple store, and personally, i will not take a screw driver to a g5 any time soon.
Too much fuss about a little problem if you ask me.

D Pat
Digital Vastoo – For All Your iPod Needs
http://www.digitalvastoo.com

My point is, do Sony tell you how to crack open a Viao? No of course not, and even if they did how far would they go? How much would they tell you?

You see every company cuts corners every now and again but they don’t all scream and shout about it do they?

Apple’s biggest threat (and Honda’s and Boeing’s for that matter) are its competitors who have entire departments devoted to reverse engineering and counterintelligence. Each seeks to gain a competitive advantage over the other, so everyone is trying to learn about everybody else’s products to identify things like the state of technology, costs, and profit margins.

Apple’s competitors already know MacTel inside-out. That is a foregone conclusion. What’s puzzling is that they would go to these lengths to shield information from consumers, only a small percentage of which would be willing to void their warranty for DIY repairs.

Personally, I think the cover-up is an attempt to hide manufacturing foibles from prospective buyers.

Trademark law would apply if someone else was using Apple’s trademarks (name, logo, tag lines, etc.) in a way that implied Apple sponsorship, approval, compatability, etc. without their approval. A simple example would be Xerox going after other copier manufacturers that used “xerox” as a verb for “copy” in their advertising implying that their machines produce copies identical in quality to copies made on a Xerox machine. In this case, the other copier maker is trading on the public trust in Xerox’s trademarks (the company name in this case) to make their products look better to potential customers. In the case of trademarks. To keep trademark protection, you have to actively work to inform infringing parties and pursue all cases.

I’ll assume that Apple doesn’t want to widely distribute the service manuals because they may have technical details they don’t want to release to their competitors and they may sense a potential conflict with their warranty because the user manual clearly states which components are user serviceable/upgradeable (e.g., RAM) in the MacBook Pro. The service manual provides information on parts that are not user serviceable under Apple’s warranty. If they were to distribute this information to end users it could be argued that they are giving tacit approval for customers to service their own machines in ways that would normally break the warranty coverage. Then someone sues Apple when they deny the warranty repair on a machine that is fried due to the misapplication of thermal paste by the customer. In court, they argue that Apple provided them with the information on how to perform the thermal paste fix and didn’t properly notify them that this would break the warranty. Something like that, I would guess.

Some EVIL EVIL person STOLE your COPYRIGHTED manual and pointed out a MISTAKE. Even tho ‘evil’ and ‘stole’ and ‘copyrighted’ are important words, ‘mistake’ is by far the one that stands out to me.