> But I also must admit, with a heavy heart, that we must undertake the effort, in order to ameliorate our legal vulnerability against what a customer might do with a modified product.

Wait, wait? Is there actually precedence for this? Sure seems obvious to me that once the product has been modified by someone other than the manufacturer, it's no longer the same product. If the NOS in my car explodes when I'm racing Vin Diesel, I can't think a judge would hold Ford liable.

I've asked a well-placed internal person that very question, myself. I think it's clear that once you break the thing, you get to keep both pieces, no questions asked. But internal senior management groupthink is that there's enough weakness against such litigation that we're willing to further burden an already-straining engineering design & build process with this new requirement. Make of that what you will. I have not studied actual case law on the topic, because no one cares to hear a contrary opinion on this. Maybe that would be a good question to put to the CEO at one of the "town halls" he's so fond of holding...

The case law on that topic is against it, for what it's worth, but hard to find because it's such a silly argument no one really tries it. They probably think what they do as an excuse to implement DRM and maintain some control over their platform.

If you look at gun mods you might get somewhere. These do actually fail in ways that harm people as they're made to contain explosions. Has the user of a modified device ever been able to sue? No.