Big Screwdriver is screwing us all over and you don’t even notice
puts on tinfoil hat
It's all part of this new age of "Hostile Engineering."
If you need a proprietary screwdriver to access the inner mechanisms of something, you are more likely to return to the manufacturer to get it fixed rather than go through all the hassle of finding a third party with the appropriate set of tools or simply doing it yourself. This allows the manufacturer to double-dip: they are making profit off of the sale of the commodity, but also have a monopoly on the maintenance and repair of the same commodity. While the manufacturer may not have a permanent customer base for the product, they can ensure they have a pseudo-permanent customer base for the service side of the company. In some instances this is important like delicate machinery where you do not want an uninformed third-party making repairs that could have dangerous ramifications, and from the manufacturer's perspective there is legal reasons to try to prevent these third parties from handling this kind of delicate and potentially dangerous equipment.
Source: I actually work for a company that manufactures proprietary industrial machinery.
Yeah I was just editing my comment with another line or two.
Specifically in regards to screws: You can gatekeep different "sections" of the machine behind the different fasteners using same logic above. Normal screws to take plastic off of outside of console, no problem! But to get inside of hardrive? Need something special for that.
Will probably come back to this later to add another line or two.
That's true for security screws, but a lot of screw heads were designed with varying levels of ability to apply torque torque/resist stripping/damaging, or ejecting the tool.
We could probably get away with like 2 standard screw heads, one being either star or square, and one for delicate applications where you want the tool to slip out or break if you apply too much force.
cool vid abt it: Why Are There so Many Types of Screws?!
(i'd summarize but i no longer remember if it had a general thesis or not apart from the screw being a Fordist dream)
