https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling
Disclaimer: I work there, and posted many of those listings.
Though more and more manufacturers are switching to completely soldered components now, so I guess this won't last long.
Ironically making the device more repairable would be a boon for recycling instead of whatever bean counting bullshit HP is attempting here. Meh.
Not so sure I'd bother with one any more, though. Hard to justify when there are $200 new options on Amazon.
The laptop doesn't have a Secure HP SSD Drive? Then throw it in the landfill because it doesn't have an HPFax Report, so who knows what kind of problems it might have!
A friend and I have been building our own solution[2] for monitoring these wear-leveling attributes on NVMe and SATA drives, with the focus being on tracking and visualizing trends over time. We both have a large collection of drives in various servers and laptops and found that SMART metrics can be reported somewhat inconsistently from vendor to vendor so what started as a simple shell script to scrape `smartctl` output has now turned into a lightweight desktop agent that attempts to normalize all these inconsistencies and let us focus on the actual signals while also allowing us to define alerts/notify us of anomalies via email - maybe something HN users will find useful.
Fun fact: did you know that most drives maintain a pool of spare sectors/cells that are used by the firmware to replace blocks that have failed? It's one of the many metrics we like to track and visualize in Sentinowl [2]!
[0] https://github.com/gamestailer94/farm-check/tree/main
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Fraud-with-Seagate-hard-disks-D...
I've done this successfully on HP Chromeboxes, but have not tried their other devices.
(I have been issued an HP laptop before. They certainly don't spend money on the screen, keyboard, battery life, cooling, or industrial design. You can add your own memory though!)
I purchased one from Dell, but it shut down at high cpu which indicates a cooling or other issue. In return they sent me an even better laptop for no additional charge. Perhaps more detailed reporting would avoid things like overheating laptops to enter the market. These laptops originally retailed for over $1500
This is a bad headline, IMHO, because that is a service of some kind for 1 kind of person in just 1 country, and to the entire rest of the human race it's meaningless.
So only for half of one percent of people.
Much less by population, of course.
About 1.5 billion people speak English.
If every single person in the US saw it, that's about one fifth of the potential reach.
Macbooks sell used because they haven't been diluted, but as a buyer who is willing to buy quality used equipment - I'm not willing to try an sift out is this the good lattitude model year or the shitty one. Was this the good years for the Carbons or after they injected a low cost line with the same name but one letter difference.
Also, bizzare manufacturer specific laptop customizations, especially from HP are usually a big minus - eg a while back they had 3gb vid cards when everything else at that grade was 4gb or weird incompatible bioses with "carfax" tracking bs
Really they do they same with desktops too - it's why I build my own desktops.
Basically, they just want to add constant and invasive useless telemetry, in the crappiest way possible to ensure easy access for them, unexpected hardware bugs and security breach as much as possible. Green washing again pretending that it has any impact on the environment.
For no added value for the user. That sucks highly.
What would be good for the user and ecologically is too ensure that every part is easily replaceable and user serviceable. Also reduce the useless crapware in the background consuming energy and reducing performance. But I guess it does not give you $$ worth of user telemetry data.
For reselling, everything has already enough info at sale time, as is, without keeping a daily log: - age of the computer - SSD health data - battery health data - model of all components that would give you info about their quality on the long run - you can easily check the state of the casing, screen, keyboard, connectors. - if it was easy to open, you can see the inside state, fan state.
For the rest, anyway there is no telemetry that will tell you if anything will fail based on its past. It just suddenly fail at random time by surprise, like the screen connector being torn. And anyway, again, normally if a component has a problem, like ram, you should be able to easily swap it.
* Collecting all sorts of telemetry has never been done for altruistic reasons by large tech companies.
* The value of an HP over an Apple is that the HP are supposed to be upgradable, so will HP start monitoring all the replaced parts of machines, too?
* HP has a multi-decade history of not being able to maintain a single URL for long term. I bet the only URL that hasn't changed from the '90s is "http://www.hp.com/". We're suppoed to believe that HP will maintain a customer facing system for more than a couple of machine lifecycles?
This is just an attempt to exfiltrate all sorts of data.
That reminds me of the HP BIOS Setup page: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/how-to-enter-bios-s...
> There are two primary methods to access BIOS ...
> Method 1 involves restarting your computer and pressing a specific key during the boot process. This key varies by manufacturer but is typically one of the following: F1, F2, F10, DEL, or ESC.
It doesn't say what the key is for HP! On an hp.com article, with "HP" in the title, with "HP" in the header just before this section!
(Disclaimer: I am an HP employee, but I don't work on laptops and I think this is the first I have heard of "HPFax". Neither now nor at any other time on HN am I speaking for my employer rather than myself.)
Dumb idea.
awnird•6mo ago
The strength of Carfax is the enormous number of data sources they use, and the enormous amount of money they pay for access to those sources. A typical Carfax report can include data from the OEM, dealership, government agencies, police agencies, insurance companies, and repair shops (both big groups and small independent shops).
Even if HP is willing to put in the money and effort making connections to secure data sources, it relies on those data sources wanting to play ball, rather than trying to build their own siloed approach.
It's certainly a noble goal, and I hope there is some kind of consumer groundswell to enable a program like this. I also hope, that like Carfax, there are eventually standards for the data, allowing competing services to exist.
josho•6mo ago
With a car it’s common for people to not maintain correctly or to get in a major accident and not disclose.
What are the common factors that cause a computer to prematurely wear out? I can imagine there are lots of hypothetical risks, but how common are these? And how easy are they to mask?
hakfoo•6mo ago
I could see a system management controller that blew fuses to track known potentially hazardous situations-- "Internal temperature while operating exceeded NNN degrees for XXX seconds" or "power surge in excess of NNN volts registered on this rail." Maybe a case for "paired part replaced" but that's more informational than accusatory-- a legitimate repair or upgrade could be an increase on any "health metric" they want to show.
But you'd want it someplace like, as I said, fuses on a SMC, maybe viewable in the setup screen, rather than a SSD which is not only easy to swap, but has legitimate reasons to do so (plenty of refurbishers install new SSDs because they're a cheap boost, or because they're sourcing from companies who have a "destroy the old drive on retirement" policy.
sixothree•6mo ago
If HP was actually serious about keeping laptops out of landfills they would stop selling machines with 4GB of RAM. BestBuy currently has 18 HP laptop models that sell with 4GB.
They are literally selling e-waste.