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Comment by victornomad | Hacker News Reader

One day I entered in one of the labs in a previous company and found a few piles of "old" macbooks pro ready to trash. I would say easily around 500' They seemed quite new to me so I asked if I could get a bunch and reuse parts to make a working one.

They told me I could get all I wanted. So I took 10. I arrived home and all of them were functional after formating and reinstalling. My family and friends got very happy with seminew laptops for free.

I guess is not only about recycling or shredding, is as well about giving a second, third or fourth life to our goods... And lets be honest. Recycling is a very wasteful process. If we want to be eco friendly we should consume less, thats the only way.

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Well apparently not all people want to be eco friendly.

Most people I know would rather buy a new low/mid range product than a used/refurbished device that was high end when it was released. It's mind boggling - you'd rather get a creaky piece of shit locked down cheap NEW laptop than a high quality business grade used one, because... it hasn't been used before?

I believe that if a device was gently used and hasn't failed, the chance of it failing after 1-2 years is actually lower than with a new one. I don't know if it's true, but it's been my experience.

But then again, my relationship with tools is weird - if I get them, I clean and rebuild them, so they're mine. No one else gets to use them. They're almost like pets. And I don't care how many people used them before me...

> It's mind boggling - you'd rather get a creaky piece of shit locked down cheap NEW laptop than a high quality business grade used one, because...

Yes but not only that, for laptops it comes down to priorities. I know plenty of people who are better served with Chromebook with 8 hour battery life than a refurb high end one with 2 h battery.

> I believe that if a device was gently used and hasn't failed, the chance of it failing after 1-2 years is actually lower than with a new one. I don't know if it's true, but it's been my experience.

True for some devices and not true for others.

> They're almost like pets. And I don't care how many people used them before me...

It's unhealthy to think about tools that way, off course rebuilding your tools increases their emotional value. If your rebuilds of tools are good, not very custom and things are not expensive, try to give them away to friends and family, it usually increases your satisfaction, lowers materialistic attachment and can make you more creative.

If I give away my tools, I can't use them any more without borrowing them back. If I keep my tools, I can make all manner of things to give away, or not, just as I choose. The buddha might not approve, but the buddha is dead.

To be fair it's only in the last couple of years that second hand devices haven't been complete dogs in terms of performance.

I only buy old ThinkPads, I avoid all the horrific shit Lenovo is doing to them, and get solid Linux support.

There is a reason "recycle" comes last in "reduce, reuse, recycle". But not consuming is bad for the economy, so the invisible hand does its best to prevent reduction and reuse.

> But not consuming is bad for the economy, so the invisible hand does its best to prevent reduction and reuse.

That 'the invisible hand' (by which I assume you mean the free market) prevents reuse is simply not true. In a competitive free market you would have companies that would specialise in reuse. For Apple's products that is exactly what happens: there are actually quite a few companies selling refurbished second hand Apple products (e.g. [1] and [2]), including Apple itself [3]. Of course, regulation sometimes gets in the way: India's prime minister Modi is preventing Apple from selling second hand iPhones in India in an attempt to get them to start producing products in India.

The free market has many short-comings. Preventing reuse is not one of them.

[1] https://leapp.be/nl

[2] https://www.forza-refurbished.be/?gclid=CNb63IaEutMCFSEG0wod...

[3] https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac

[4] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/tim-cook-k...

Maybe in a competitive market with no externalities and perfectly rational consumers, aka fantasy land. Here in the real world people are easily influenced by ads, durability is less important than price, and environmental destruction is not factored into the cost of a product.

Companies make money by selling stuff. If every item you needed would be built to last and people wouldn't throw away perfectly good things because the design doesn't match the designs they see on TV anymore, many companies would go belly up.

Not so. In your theoretical world the market dynamics would simply be different. Companies in the real world can choose to make products vastly more reliable and long lasting and not go belly up (as you put it). Indeed, they used to. Now they just prefer a more subscription-based model (where consumers buy a new one every so often) because it cash flows easier, and it's easier to manipulate the customers perception of true cost. So "belly up" weakens your argument. You'd be much closer in simply saying companies might make less. Though, I'm not sure that's true either. My dad used to own and operate a company selling VERY high-end, long-lasting seat covers for cars and trucks. He charged A LOT, and had a three month waiting list.

So...

Low durability = low price = many sold High durability = high price = fewer sold

But mathematically you could still make the same under either approach.

From [4]: > The government is in-principle against allowing import and sale of second-hand phones in India to prevent dumping of hazardous electronic waste, said a person familiar with the matter. But it might take a more favourable view of the proposal if Apple agrees to manufacture in India. "Local manufacturing will be the thrust of the PM's message to Cook," the person said.

Free market doesn't prevent dumping of hazardous waste in developing countries.

So if I understand it correctly, if Apple manufactures in India, the Indian government would take a more favourable view of 'dumping of hazardous electronic waste'? It sounds like a pretext to me.

I agree that the free market doesn't prevent dumping of hazardous waste in developing countries.

It's not bad for the "economy" except for a too narrow definition of "economy". This is the broken window fallacy.

"Not consuming" is actually great for the economy.

Imagine you could produce a car that never needed repairs and would last a million miles and cost the same to build as current cars. You'd free up tons of mechanics and auto-workers to build and repair other things. Actual economic output would go up, more and better things would be made.

The problem here is that for example in Poland the market is flooded with post-enterprise laptops from Germany/UK/France, and while yes, those laptops get second life in this market, almost all of them will end up in landfills, not recycled fully. So basically Germany "recycles" their IT equipment by selling it to other markets where it's not certain the equipment will be recycled once it dies fully.

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