No, that’s not how warrantee expiration works

by Robert Graham on October 16, 2020

The NYPost Hunter Biden story has triggered a lot of sleuths obsessing on technical details trying to prove it’s a hoax. So far, these claims are wrong. The story is certainly bad journalism aiming to misinform readers, but it has not yet been shown to be a hoax.

In this post, we look at claim the timelines don’t match up with the manufacturing dates of the drives. Sleuths claim to prove the drives were manufactured after the events in question, based on serial numbers.

What this post will show is that the theory is wrong. Manufacturers pad warrantee periods. Thus, you can’t assume a date of manufacture based upon the end of a warrantee period.

The story starts with Hunter Biden (or associates) dropping off a laptop at a repair shop because of water damage. The repair shop made a copy of the laptop’s hard drive, stored on an external drive. Later, the FBI swooped in and confiscated both the laptop and that external drive.

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The serial numbers of both devices are listed in the subpoena published by the NYPost:

You can enter these serial numbers in the support pages at Apple (FVFXC2MMHV29) and Western Digital (WX21A19ATFF3) to discover precisely what hardware this is, and when the warrantee periods expire — and presumably, when they started.

In the case of that external drive, the 3-year warrantee expires May 17, 2022 — meaning the drive was manufactured on May 17, 2019 (or so they claim). This is a full month after the claimed date of April 12, 2019, when the laptop was dropped off at the repair shop.

There are lots of explanations for this. One of which is that the drive subpoenaed by the government (on Dec 9, 2019) was a copy of the original drive.

But a simpler explanation is this: warrant periods are padded by the manufacturer by several months. In other words, if the warrantee ends May 17, it means the drive was probably manufactured in February.

I can prove this. Coincidentally, I purchased a Western Digital drive a few days ago. If we used the same logic as above to work backward from warrantee expiration, then it means the drive was manufactured 7 days in the future.

Here is a screenshot from Amazon.com showing I purchased the drive Oct 12.

Here is a picture of the drive itself, from which you can read the serial number:

The Date of Manufacture (DOM) is printed right on the device as July 31, 2020.

But let’s see what Western Digital reports as the end of warrantee period:

We can see that the warrantee ends on Oct 25, 2025. According to Amazon where I purchased the drive, the warrantee period is 5 years:

Thus, if we were to insist on working back from the expiration date precisely 5 years, then that means this drive was manufactured 7 days in the future. Today’s date is Oct 16, the warrantee starts Oct 23.

The reality is that Western Digital has no idea when the drive arrives, and hence when I (as the consumer) expect the warrantee period to start. Thus, they pad the period by a few months to account for how long they expect the device to be in the sales channel, the period between manufacture and when they are likely to arrive at the customer. Computer devices rapidly depreciate so are unlikely to be in the channel more than a few months.

Thus, instead of proving the timeline wrong, the serial number and warrantee expiration shows the timeline right. This is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect if the repair shop recovered the files onto a new external drive.

Another issue in the thread is about the “recovery” of files, which the author claims is improbable. In Apple’s latest MacBooks, if the motherboard is damaged, then it’s impractical to recover the data from the drive. These days, in the year 2020, the SSD drive inside notebooks are soldered right on the motherboard, and besides, encrypted with a TPM chip on the motherboard.

But here we are talking about a 2017 MacBook Pro which apparently had a removeable SSD. Other notebooks by Apple have had special connectors for reading SSDs from dead motherboards. Thus, recovery of files for notebooks of that era is not as impossible as a it sounds.

Moreover, maybe the repair shop fixed the notebook. “Water damage” varies in extent. It may have been possible to repair the damage and boot the device, at least in some sort of recovery mode.

Conclusion

Grabbing serial numbers and looking them is exactly what hackers should be doing in stories like this. Challenging the narrative is great — especially with regards to the NYPost story, which is clearly bad journalism.

On the other hand, it goes both ways. We should be even more concerned about challenging those things that agree with us. This is a great example — it appears we’ve found conclusive evidence that the NYPost story was a hoax. We need to carefully challenge that, too.