Apple has sent a threatening letter to SomethingAwful about a post in its forums that describes how to fix the overheating in some MacBook Pros by applying thermal paste properly. To be more exact, Apple requests to remove this image because "The Service Source manual for the MacBook Pro is Apple's intellectual property and is protected by U.S. copyright law."

Of course the real problem isn't the single excerpted page being linked from Something Awful, but instead the fact that the image shows the extremely sloppy manufacturing process that is causing the MacBook Pro to run at temperatures as high as a 95 degrees Celcius under full load. (A temperature so high that the processor is at risk of malfunctioning.) Rather than addressing the problem of the shoddy workmanship, documented not only by those who purchased Apple's $2,500 laptop but by Apple's own service manual, Apple is trying to silence those from the Macintosh community who are trying to help other Mac users fix Apple's mistake.

As such, it seems pretty obvious to me that Apple is trying to prevent the criticism of whatever shoddy computer building practices it might have, rather than trying to protect its copyright.

miglaugh> if anything they just turned the spotlight on themselves. haha... good going jerks.

Exactly :) They are caught out in a fairly major QA problem and trying to lawyer their way around it. Same as every other large company...

I'm actually quite surprised that, given its attention to detail, no one at Apple nor anyone at Asustek realized that this is an utterly stupid amount of paste to be applying.... :roll:

if anything they just turned the spotlight on themselves. haha... good going jerks.