alt Hacker NewsI think this is misunderstood - everybody points out that how evil BMW is for trying to be proprietary, then immediately points out any Chinese factory can produce a compatible tool for pennies - which one is it?
I think this is a pretty good mechanical design in general because:
- large contact surface (like hex or torx)
- no chance of slide-out (like flathead) or torque-out (like Philips)
- you can use a different size screw bit than the screw, and it wont slide around, or destroy your nut like torx does with hex
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> everybody points out that how evil BMW is for trying to be proprietary, then immediately points out any Chinese factory can produce a compatible tool for pennies - which one is it?
Just because there's a workaround for an unnecessary annoying thing doesn't mean the thing ceases to be unnecessary and annoying.
> which one is it?
Which what? I honestly don't understand what the comparison is or what is misunderstood as there is nothing to misunderstand - it's a proprietary screw designed to defeat self/unlicensed repair - FULL STOP. Fuck the technical merit. And the point of mentioning that Chinese factories can produce cheap knock-offs is to demonstrate how absurd of a anti-consumer measure this is.