Then you’d lose your bet and you folks really do have to be careful with how easily you jump to conclusions.
As I already mentioned when discussing the overtime originally, we are doing that simply to get people their laptops as soon as possible so we can hit shipping parity. I’m referring to our fulfillment/operations team which does the final testing, flashing, and configuration of individual laptops and ships them to customers, not manufacturing.
It’s been less than a day since we’ve started investigating this.
As I said before, we are looking into this and I’ll report back once I find out why these initial boards had these hotfixes. As I mentioned, after looking into this with the team I found out that hotfixes at this phase were unexpected and other production boards (like the one pictured in Nicole’s post) didn’t have them. Clearly my own minimal experience with the devkits doesn’t really apply when we are talking about production laptop manufacturing.
So I need a little time to get to the bottom of things. Reasons could range anywhere from fixing an manufacturing issue (not a design issue, otherwise we’d probably see the hotfix in the production board Nicole took pictures of) during the first batch of board production, to responding to electronics components shortages to something else entirely.
Beyond getting to the bottom of that, there is also the matter of investigating whether that hotfix (outside of the aesthetics) actually affects the longevity or stability of the laptop or not.
In the mean time I’d strongly encourage folks to resist the urge to jump to conclusions.