A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44425253 - June 2025 (110 comments)

> We decided that the best way to do this is to integrate the life-cycle records into the firmware layer. By embedding telemetry capabilities directly within the firmware, we ensure that device health and usage data is captured the moment it is collected. This data is stored securely on HP SSD drives, leveraging hardware-based security measures to protect against unauthorized access or manipulation.

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!

This seems wrong for several reasons:

* 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.

Previously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44425253

I needed a windows laptop. My work laptop is a Mac. Unless you are doing extremely intensive things that will benefit from technology gains, buying a new laptop makes little sense. The performance of an off lease enterprise laptop for $500 is great.

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

The average car on the road is over 12 years old, and maybe a laptop has maybe 1/3 as long a lifecycle? Not sure that tracking "Wh" as a replacement for "mileage" is that useful, it's either time to replace a battery and SSD or it's not - and perhaps we should have scheduled maintenance for removing dust from your fans? An old PC that has a hard drive replaced with an SSD and a fresh battery is usually a great thing, unlike a car with tons of after market parts. I think this would make sense in a world of glued-in components where service is hard and somewhat risky (like Apple) and the highest quality components were installed originally. But ultimately the aftermarket value of a PC is only as good as the brand's reputation overall, that means removing bloatware and good quality batteries and other things that are hard to attest to automatically.

Woah, based on the title I didn't expect to read one of the most elaborate corporate bullshit I have seen coming from HP.

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.

This has dual purpose to proof identity to computer and usage tax.

Rich coming from HP. They have trailed blazed how blatant planned obsolescence can be done in printers, and though its not hard data I have seen plenty HP laptops just burn themselves out after some years of use. They can definitely build better products without user data, just stop working so hard on making them crap.

I've seen the mountains of e-waste first hand. Anything that tries to tackle this problem is welcome in my book.

This is nothing more than another data harvesting scheme thinly veiled as a useful service.

Did anyone else read this and think "WTF is Carfax?" or is it just me?

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.

is there even a used market for laptops other than MacBooks?

The key self-inflicted difficulty with PC laptop vendors is that they can't help but dilute the value of their own laptop model lines. Even when they build a solid pc laptop model - sooner or later the marketing dept comes along and pitches a low-cost cannibalization of the model lines.

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.

Wow this is really dumb. There's literally one fact about a laptop you can track that matters, and that's cycles on the battery. This is already tracked. There is no other 'maintenance' to track.

Dumb idea.

What even is carfax? I am not from America.

I would love to see a program like this succeed. There are huge hurdles in getting partners though.

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.