> 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.

Other people noted this is a very bad privacy issue. Just thinking: since when laptop manufacturers encourage reuse instead of buying new? It would lower sales!

I belive user tracking is the real purpose of this tech. It would have the ability to track the user no matter what OS is installed. Windows does tracking, Google does tracking, all websites have tracking, and now they want a piece of the pie too. PCFax is just a disguise - an alterative purpose more acceptable to the public than what it really is.

And now, thinking ahead: what would be the next logical step for them? Ad popups directly from the firmware?

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.

HP is circling the drain! if they have to resort to rentseeking crap like this then they are already out of high ROI revenue streams.

On topic / off topic: This has me thinking about the current state of user replaceable internals.

I wonder to what extent the structure of corporate laptop fleet management ( ie. Lease and return less the ssd because... security) dictated which components could and couldn't be soldered down, versus a happy coincidence of potential gains, as the ssd has the least to gain by being soldered? But even if it did, would the requirements of Big Inc. have prevented that?

And for those that do solder their storage, have there been ramifications in accessing this market? Do companies with strict policies on data loss risks have black lists for devices with soldered storage? I'm guessing it's hard to use apple as a comparison point here because it was never really welcome in corporate fleets.

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.