technology

things I learned from repairing/refurbishing laptops as a hobby/way to save a ton of useful electronics from becoming ewaste/way to earn extra cash:

most laptops are designed atrociously bad. like from an electronics perspective but also from a casing perspective. This is the case regardless of your laptop being $300 or $3000 and it’s a mixture of planned obsolescence, idiotic design choices, poor material selection, and cost cutting

Sometimes it’s just a cheap laptop with very thin or brittle plastic that will inevitably wear down and start to break apart, especially if it’s used heavily. Lots of chromebooks were like this but even pricier stuff like the $6-900 acer nitro

Sometimes it’s got a weird material selection like a rubberized coating that wears away like the asus zephyrus ($1500-3000)

Sometimes the hinges are basically designed to fail and after a year the top half cracks apart in such a way that the casing needs to be entirely replaced or given a hideously ugly and not sturdy repair (basically every hp laptop ever ranging from hundreds to thousands)

Sometimes boards are given cost cutting measures that are paired with “security” measures that render repair impossible. If you have a macbook from ~2015-20 that was a cheaper model one of the cost cutting measures was to remove what’s called a TVS diode from the 3.3v and 1.8v nand power rails. A TVS diode, to oversimplify things, is to protect against power surges. So now when a power surge occurs on either of those lines instead of a TVS diode taking the hit and either clamp the excess or in extreme cases fail. In that case you’re replacing a 3 cent diode that takes 5 seconds to solder instead of a much more costly SSD that requires complex BGA rework. BUT here’s the kicker - apple also stores the firmware keys on the SSD which are paired to a chip called the t2. So once the ssd is dead you are fucked, only apple can restore it. I can reflash macos and efi partitions but without the firmware keys it won’t boot. Only option is an entirely new logic board. Also all your data is gone

It’s fucked now. We let tech bros win. Apple gets the heat but they’re not the only ones. Dell pairs ssds to their tpm module, pairs displays, webcams, fingerprint readers, etc. hp has whitelists for ssds and wan (meaning only “authorized” parts work) and pairs ssds. Lenovo has whitelists for wan cards. They’re all not as aggressive as apple and it’s not across all models but they’re testing the waters and clearly moving in that direction.

Even consoles now - ps5 and Xbox pairs optical drive (though Xbox can be done with some nonsense), switch pairs nand, all three will ban you from their network for fucking with the console.

Our world is designed to consume and waste.