<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>throwup238</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; Authenticatic hardware shipping with some bespoke and defective firmware seems even less likely than simple counterfeiting.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not as unlikely as you would think. Electronic counterfeiters are often just ghost shifts at contract manufacturers. If a single company is handling the injection molding, PCB, and assembly, they can run a secret shift that makes units for them to sell themselves. Even if they can&amp;#x27;t get ahold of all the surplus parts they need, they can design their own.&lt;p&gt;Since the firmware is different,  HP could have also outsourced production maintenance too (i.e. updating firmware if a chip reaches end of life and needs to be replaced with something that&amp;#x27;s not exactly compatible) which isn&amp;#x27;t unheard of for legacy products that no one wants to deal with.</text><parent_chain><item><author>LarsAlereon</author><text>I wish more was spent on trying to verify the authenticity of the hardware, or contacting HP for comment. The simplest explanation is that a distributor in Brazil sourced counterfeit hardware. Authenticatic hardware shipping with some bespoke and defective firmware seems even less likely than simple counterfeiting.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Strange Case of the Rogue HP-12c Calculator</title><url>https://dm319.github.io/pages/2024_09_09_hp12_comma.html</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>xeeeeeeeeeeenu</author><text>&amp;gt;Authenticatic hardware shipping with some bespoke and defective firmware seems even less likely than simple counterfeiting.&lt;p&gt;One possible hypothesis is that HP switched to a new SoC, due to price or availability, and porting the firmware introduced some bugs.</text><parent_chain><item><author>LarsAlereon</author><text>I wish more was spent on trying to verify the authenticity of the hardware, or contacting HP for comment. The simplest explanation is that a distributor in Brazil sourced counterfeit hardware. Authenticatic hardware shipping with some bespoke and defective firmware seems even less likely than simple counterfeiting.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Strange Case of the Rogue HP-12c Calculator</title><url>https://dm319.github.io/pages/2024_09_09_hp12_comma.html</url></story>