[tokai]

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.

[jrockway]

This must be consumer vs. enterprise. For consumers, they're going to buy the item that is $1 less at the time of purchase, even if it costs them hundreds of dollars over the lifetime of the printer. For enterprises, they have accountants tracking the total cost of ownership, so they aren't going to optimize like this. HP is in both businesses; cheap inkjets for people that want to print stuff at home, cheap laptops for corporations that need to give their employees a Windows laptop with 25 minutes of battery life. I am sure the TCO on the cheap laptops actually saves customers money, at least when Windows is required.

(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!)

[theandrewbailey]

I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. HP laptops constitute about 90% of the BIOS passworded/locked 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 an EliteBook that could go for $200 or less is dubious. (We've tried everything short of that.) Maybe I can try to build a lot from them and sell to a large repair shop.

[quesera]

Can you flash the PROM with just a clip on connector? (thereby avoiding desolder and most disassembly)

I've done this successfully on HP Chromeboxes, but have not tried their other devices.

[theandrewbailey]

On models that would be worth reselling, it must be de-soldered.

[margalabargala]

This is exactly what one expects coming from HP.