My friend is looking to buy a chrome book or pixel book (he’s not technical at all) and said he’s read about resellers selling older models as if they’re new. Any truth to this? If so, where would you buy one?
Two pieces of advice:
- never buy hardware online, except from a vendor you know and trust (don’t browse amazon/ebay because it’s full of shit)
- never buy hardware less than 1-3 years old, because firmware/drivers are not mature yet, but hardware has great chances of having major issues soon (wild estimate: i’d say 75% of models are entire shit that will end up in the trash in the next 3 years, but the 25% who stood the test of time likely will survive another decade)
There’s a lot of good, reliable vendors for second-hand hardware. If your friend wants to make an “ethical” purchase, i’d recommend something like minifree.org. Those are solid second-hand hardware pre-loaded with libreboot, a cool project to replace proprietary UEFI/BIOS blobs. They are sold directly from people running the libreboot project as a means to support that effort. There’s a few other vendors providing equivalent services, i just cited this one because i saw it in the news yesterday.
as a counterargument, i think you can definitely buy old gear online. so long as you do your due diligence, it can be a great way to save some money. i stalked/loitered craigslist and fb marketplace for a couple of weeks looking for a decommissioned thinkpad and bagged a $150 470s. fortunately for me, the seller was actually a new IT shop that hadn’t set up an e-commerce site yet. aside from my anecdotal experience, i think the points @southerntofu@lemmy.ml make are mostly valid.
your friend might be talking about “refurbished” products. this is completely different from “used.” a “refurbished” product is one that goes through a testing/benchmark/verification process, and are thus [typically] free of defects, some even come with insurance, while “used” products may or may not be defective. you just don’t know, it’s kind of a toss up. “refurbished” products are usually resold by the manufacturers, local IT shops, or some more mainstream places like Best Buy. These obviously aren’t as cheap as “used” products, but they’re cheaper than “new” products.
Maybe if you said where you live people might provider better Info.
I get a lot of stuff from my local second hand website. For computers a good plan is to get “decommissioned” ones from companies. They won’t be chrome book but dells or thinkpads that’s only 4-5 year old. I paid 230€ for a device that costed 1800€ new.
I’m in the US
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i buy everything from amazon, they have a good record of fighting hate
Amazon fighting hate? You mean when they distribute for profit all forms you can think of of reactionary propaganda? Or when they exploit people in their warehouses? Or when they sell facial recognition software to ICE to track undocumented people across the USA? Or when they want to colonize Mars because they don’t want to fix problems on earth with their fortune, but reproduce capitalism racism and cis-hetero patriarchy elsewhere? Were you just trolling, maybe?
