Apple should have restraint with monolithic responses like “cease and desist,” because enough will reach a tipping point in people’s minds, and there will be a backlash. Apple enjoys a loyalty that is rare in the computing industry, and it could be damaged if it is cavalier with its legal doings.

Apple designs their laptops to be quiet. The Something Awful article points out that less paste results in a noiser laptop. The laptop with less paste is cooler because the fan runs longer.

This is what is known as an engineering tradeoff, not a manufacturing defect. It might also be called a trade secret, as it is covered by a Non-Disclosure Agreement.

Apple Legal is currently in court defending their ability to protect their NDAs in the Think Secret case. They would weaken their case if they didn’t do something about every public violation brought to their attention.

The manual *is* proprietary information created by Apple. The manuals are used by their certified service techs. Apple runs a certified tech program so that they can ensure that the people working on the hardware have received a certain level of training. That way people don’t claim to be Apple service techs and Apple gets blamed when someone fries a motherboard. If a certified tech does it, I’m sure there’s some insurance policy that covers it.

As far as I can tell, Apple is the sole provider of training, and the testing is run by Prometrics and maybe some other companies. (Go to the Apple Store and search for “training.”) So Apple is protecting something alright: they’re protecting a revenue stream for themselves and their partners; they’re also protecting their reputation and their customers’ purchases and wallets. The last training class I took (not an Apple one) had copyright notices on every page of the textbook.

If Apple were to allow pieces of the manuals to be published, without challenge, then they could not prevent publishing of the entire manual. Even if you argue that one page is not the same as the entire manual, what’s to stop 200 people from each publishing one page of the manual, thereby releasing the whole thing to the world. Someone could then read the manual and claim that they are now able to service Apple hardware. The first time they damage a computer though, the customer is going to blame them, but they’re also going to blame Apple.

Apple is behaving like a corporation, it’s true. But I highly doubt that something as exotic a manufacturing defect coverup is behind this. Apple is sometimes slow to rectify defects, but I think (could be wrong) that true defects are acknowledged and addressed. Hope this is some food for thought.