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.
With a car itβs 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?
There used to be the claim that "if you overclock your CPU/GPU, it would blow a fuse and the manufacturer could deny a RMA". Not sure if it ever actually happened, or if it was just an urban legend.
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.
I agree. The status of a laptop is 100% defined by its current status and not by its history. Battery cycles and screen time don't need this.
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.
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.