> When buying a used car, dealerships and individual buyers can access each car’s particular CarFax report, detailing the vehicle’s usage and maintenance history. Armed with this information, dealerships can perform the necessary fixes or upgrades before re-selling the car.

Dealerships in no way use those reports for that reason, nor do they contain the information that would be necessary to do so. They inspect the car to determine its mechanical condition, and query manufacturer databases to determine if recall repairs are necessary. CarFax reports are a marketing tool to assuage concerns that used-car buyers have about inadvertently purchasing a lemon.

I think the main problem with old laptops being discarded is one of software & OS release cadence more than hardware relatability.

My accountant has used the same 4 apps since the turn of the century. Yet the industry has created a situation where they’ve needed to buy 10 new computers to keep up, even though they still just use email, spreadsheets, web, and a word processor. They’d happily be in XP if it were still on offer.

The only meaningful productivity boost from the hardware side of things for the overwhelming majority of knowledge workers over the period was the introduction of SSDs and wireless network cards.

I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. This comes off as somewhat disingenuous coming from HP, whose laptops constitute about 90% of the BIOS passworded systems we get. We can't do anything with a laptop that we can't adjust the boot order or disable secure boot on, and the value of completely disassembling, de-soldering, and flashing the BIOS chip of a laptop that would only go for ~$100 is dubious. (We've tried everything short of that.) This is particularly painful when I just today went though a lot of over 100 HP Elitebooks with 8th and 10th gen i5 CPUs. (That's plenty usable for most people.) I could sell these for $100-150 each (~$15,000 total, of which I would get 10% commission on), but since they're all BIOS locked, they're worth little more than scrap. Take the RAM and SSD out and move on.

I'll trust that this is genuine when HP lets me connect 3rd party ink cartridges to their printers.

100% of the companies I work(ed) with have either a "destroy laptop" or "destroy data storage media" policy. I know 0 companies reselling their used computers with storage media included.

HP has 0 incentive to give old laptops new life if they don't profit from it. People who buy used laptops are already doing so. Yes, there are somes risks but if the computer boots up, perhaps run a few performance tests, then it's good. A used laptop is $100 - $500, not $2000 - $10000 and it most likely is not sold multiple times because after teh second owner, it's likely already too old, too slow, and not supported (Microsoft). I was a seller of used laptops.

Another reason HP is irrelevant. They pour money into stupid ideas no one is interested in. I'm curious what HP would think about the Acer C740 I recently reformatted and reflashed so I could directly into Linux. Would they "restore" it to its EOL state, undoing that work I did? My money is on yes because corporations don't know shit about PC building or optimal settings.

Wow HP is the last company I would expect to get this right.

HP laptops don't last 3 years these days. You're lucky to get past 1.

They haven't made anything good for years now.

Solution in search of a problem...