Lenovo has whitelists for both wifi and cell cards. It's highly annoying.

A decade ago, I had a Lenovo Yoga 2. The Wi-Fi card it came with only supported 802.11g, or something old and outdated at the time. I learned about the whitelist the hard way when I bought a decently (then) up-to-date wifi card to upgrade, and the computer refused to boot.

But! I refuse to let a computer tell me no... So, after many many (too many) hours of reading forums, dumping firmware, flipping bits, and pushing firmware, I got the stupid card to work. And of course I took no notes, so if I had to do it again, I'd be starting from scratch.

Not just that, they restrict the WWAN slot to cell modem cards only.

This really sucks because it’s just mPCI and could host a number of other things. I used the WWAN slot on an old Dell Precision to adapt to a modern Intel WiFi+BT card for example (a 2008 laptop with WiFi 6E+BT 5!).

On my X1 Nano, the slot isn’t even wired to an antenna since I didn’t get the cell BTO option, so it’s present but totally useless thanks to the restriction. They could at least let me pop a second SSD in there…

Supposedly it's for FCC compliance. Makes perfect sense if you believe it, but I'm not super convinced.