> We decided that the best way to do this is to integrate the life-cycle records into the firmware layer. By embedding telemetry capabilities directly within the firmware, we ensure that device health and usage data is captured the moment it is collected. This data is stored securely on HP SSD drives, leveraging hardware-based security measures to protect against unauthorized access or manipulation.
The laptop doesn't have a Secure HP SSD Drive? Then throw it in the landfill because it doesn't have an HPFax Report, so who knows what kind of problems it might have!
It sounds like they're doing something similar to Seagate's Field Access Reliability Metrics (FARM) log where IIRC it's much harder to reset or forge their wear-leveling/usage stats, vs SMART metrics which certain manufacturers seem to clear when drives are re-certified[0]. I've seen this tool[1] mentioned often in /r/DataHoarder discussions about checking whether second hand drives have had this stat-reset done. I'm assuming it compares `smartctl --log=farm` output with the attribute/device-statistic log counter values.
A friend and I have been building our own solution[2] for monitoring these wear-leveling attributes on NVMe and SATA drives, with the focus being on tracking and visualizing trends over time. We both have a large collection of drives in various servers and laptops and found that SMART metrics can be reported somewhat inconsistently from vendor to vendor so what started as a simple shell script to scrape `smartctl` output has now turned into a lightweight desktop agent that attempts to normalize all these inconsistencies and let us focus on the actual signals while also allowing us to define alerts/notify us of anomalies via email - maybe something HN users will find useful.
Fun fact: did you know that most drives maintain a pool of spare sectors/cells that are used by the firmware to replace blocks that have failed? It's one of the many metrics we like to track and visualize in Sentinowl [2]!
* Collecting all sorts of telemetry has never been done for altruistic reasons by large tech companies.
* The value of an HP over an Apple is that the HP are supposed to be upgradable, so will HP start monitoring all the replaced parts of machines, too?
* HP has a multi-decade history of not being able to maintain a single URL for long term. I bet the only URL that hasn't changed from the '90s is "http://www.hp.com/". We're suppoed to believe that HP will maintain a customer facing system for more than a couple of machine lifecycles?
This is just an attempt to exfiltrate all sorts of data.
It doesn't look like any exfiltration is happening? Although they use the word "telemetry", unless I'm misunderstanding the information is just stored locally on the device.
(Disclaimer: I am an HP employee, but I don't work on laptops and I think this is the first I have heard of "HPFax". Neither now nor at any other time on HN am I speaking for my employer rather than myself.)
> There are two primary methods to access BIOS ...
> Method 1 involves restarting your computer and pressing a specific key during the boot process. This key varies by manufacturer but is typically one of the following: F1, F2, F10, DEL, or ESC.
It doesn't say what the key is for HP! On an hp.com article, with "HP" in the title, with "HP" in the header just before this section!
I needed a windows laptop. My work laptop is a Mac. Unless you are doing extremely intensive things that will benefit from technology gains, buying a new laptop makes little sense. The performance of an off lease enterprise laptop for $500 is great.
I purchased one from Dell, but it shut down at high cpu which indicates a cooling or other issue. In return they sent me an even better laptop for no additional charge. Perhaps more detailed reporting would avoid things like overheating laptops to enter the market. These laptops originally retailed for over $1500
I had a similar experience. We're mostly Apple at home, but I bought an X1 Carbon reburb from MicroCenter a few years ago to run desktop Linux. It's become one of my favorite pieces of tech. Ultra-light but solid with a nice-feeling keyboard and trackpad.
Woah, based on the title I didn't expect to read one of the most elaborate corporate bullshit I have seen coming from HP.
Basically, they just want to add constant and invasive useless telemetry, in the crappiest way possible to ensure easy access for them, unexpected hardware bugs and security breach as much as possible. Green washing again pretending that it has any impact on the environment.
For no added value for the user. That sucks highly.
What would be good for the user and ecologically is too ensure that every part is easily replaceable and user serviceable. Also reduce the useless crapware in the background consuming energy and reducing performance. But I guess it does not give you $$ worth of user telemetry data.
For reselling, everything has already enough info at sale time, as is, without keeping a daily log:
- age of the computer
- SSD health data
- battery health data
- model of all components that would give you info about their quality on the long run
- you can easily check the state of the casing, screen, keyboard, connectors.
- if it was easy to open, you can see the inside state, fan state.
For the rest, anyway there is no telemetry that will tell you if anything will fail based on its past. It just suddenly fail at random time by surprise, like the screen connector being torn.
And anyway, again, normally if a component has a problem, like ram, you should be able to easily swap it.
The average car on the road is over 12 years old, and maybe a laptop has maybe 1/3 as long a lifecycle? Not sure that tracking "Wh" as a replacement for "mileage" is that useful, it's either time to replace a battery and SSD or it's not - and perhaps we should have scheduled maintenance for removing dust from your fans? An old PC that has a hard drive replaced with an SSD and a fresh battery is usually a great thing, unlike a car with tons of after market parts.
I think this would make sense in a world of glued-in components where service is hard and somewhat risky (like Apple) and the highest quality components were installed originally. But ultimately the aftermarket value of a PC is only as good as the brand's reputation overall, that means removing bloatware and good quality batteries and other things that are hard to attest to automatically.
A well-built laptop can last you just as long. I’ve been rocking a tricked out Dell XPS for 9 years now and it’s still going strong. It’s really hard to find something better on the market. If I could only change the motherboard with a slightly updated APU like the strix halo or current gen AMD solution, I couldn't be happier.
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.
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!)
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.
Did anyone else read this and think "WTF is Carfax?" or is it just me?
This is a bad headline, IMHO, because that is a service of some kind for 1 kind of person in just 1 country, and to the entire rest of the human race it's meaningless.
Americans tend to drive and many have gone through the experience of buying used cars. HP and Carfax are both U.S. companies. Should an American take umbrage if a British article discussing Deliveroo had a headline referencing Tesco because it’s meaningless to the entire rest of the human race?
Actually, Carfax also serves ten Canadian provinces. And appears to also be active in twenty countries of mainland Europe, though I understand that nowadays in Britain there is less of an awareness of the continent.
The key self-inflicted difficulty with PC laptop vendors is that they can't help but dilute the value of their own laptop model lines. Even when they build a solid pc laptop model - sooner or later the marketing dept comes along and pitches a low-cost cannibalization of the model lines.
Macbooks sell used because they haven't been diluted, but as a buyer who is willing to buy quality used equipment - I'm not willing to try an sift out is this the good lattitude model year or the shitty one. Was this the good years for the Carbons or after they injected a low cost line with the same name but one letter difference.
Also, bizzare manufacturer specific laptop customizations, especially from HP are usually a big minus - eg a while back they had 3gb vid cards when everything else at that grade was 4gb or weird incompatible bioses with "carfax" tracking bs
Really they do they same with desktops too - it's why I build my own desktops.
Refurbished enterprise laptops like Thinkpads and Dell Latitudes are highly sought after. They generally have better build quality than regular consumer models along with good Linux support out of the box. I've been using refurbed Latitudes for the past decade, works pretty great imo for a fraction of the cost. I.e buy the machine for <EUR400 + some additional sticks of RAM + storage.
Though more and more manufacturers are switching to completely soldered components now, so I guess this won't last long.
Ironically making the device more repairable would be a boon for recycling instead of whatever bean counting bullshit HP is attempting here. Meh.
There used to be, when new laptops were thousands of dollars, and it was easier to swap out parts and the batteries were removable. I learned a ton about Linux playing with Slackware on a $50 used laptop back in the mid 2000s.
Not so sure I'd bother with one any more, though. Hard to justify when there are $200 new options on Amazon.
It started off as a way for people to get info on cars via fax machine. You ask or enter the vehicle VIN and you get a report. If it was in a crash, in a flood, see if mileage matches actual odometer. It's all web-based now.
Vehicle history reports. It's mostly to see if a used vehicle was in an accident prior to purchase though it will sometimes also tell you if the car had a history of maintenance (typically this indicates a car was serviced at the dealer).
Wow this is really dumb. There's literally one fact about a laptop you can track that matters, and that's cycles on the battery. This is already tracked. There is no other 'maintenance' to track.
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 it’s 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.
A CarFax for Used PCs; Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44425253 - June 2025 (110 comments)
> We decided that the best way to do this is to integrate the life-cycle records into the firmware layer. By embedding telemetry capabilities directly within the firmware, we ensure that device health and usage data is captured the moment it is collected. This data is stored securely on HP SSD drives, leveraging hardware-based security measures to protect against unauthorized access or manipulation.
The laptop doesn't have a Secure HP SSD Drive? Then throw it in the landfill because it doesn't have an HPFax Report, so who knows what kind of problems it might have!
It sounds like they're doing something similar to Seagate's Field Access Reliability Metrics (FARM) log where IIRC it's much harder to reset or forge their wear-leveling/usage stats, vs SMART metrics which certain manufacturers seem to clear when drives are re-certified[0]. I've seen this tool[1] mentioned often in /r/DataHoarder discussions about checking whether second hand drives have had this stat-reset done. I'm assuming it compares `smartctl --log=farm` output with the attribute/device-statistic log counter values.
A friend and I have been building our own solution[2] for monitoring these wear-leveling attributes on NVMe and SATA drives, with the focus being on tracking and visualizing trends over time. We both have a large collection of drives in various servers and laptops and found that SMART metrics can be reported somewhat inconsistently from vendor to vendor so what started as a simple shell script to scrape `smartctl` output has now turned into a lightweight desktop agent that attempts to normalize all these inconsistencies and let us focus on the actual signals while also allowing us to define alerts/notify us of anomalies via email - maybe something HN users will find useful.
Fun fact: did you know that most drives maintain a pool of spare sectors/cells that are used by the firmware to replace blocks that have failed? It's one of the many metrics we like to track and visualize in Sentinowl [2]!
[0] https://github.com/gamestailer94/farm-check/tree/main
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Fraud-with-Seagate-hard-disks-D...
[2] https://sentinowl.com/
No thanks HP, I'll stick with SMART instead.
„Your mainboard may rust away in the next two years, I'd stay away from that!“
This seems wrong for several reasons:
* Collecting all sorts of telemetry has never been done for altruistic reasons by large tech companies.
* The value of an HP over an Apple is that the HP are supposed to be upgradable, so will HP start monitoring all the replaced parts of machines, too?
* HP has a multi-decade history of not being able to maintain a single URL for long term. I bet the only URL that hasn't changed from the '90s is "http://www.hp.com/". We're suppoed to believe that HP will maintain a customer facing system for more than a couple of machine lifecycles?
This is just an attempt to exfiltrate all sorts of data.
It doesn't look like any exfiltration is happening? Although they use the word "telemetry", unless I'm misunderstanding the information is just stored locally on the device.
(Disclaimer: I am an HP employee, but I don't work on laptops and I think this is the first I have heard of "HPFax". Neither now nor at any other time on HN am I speaking for my employer rather than myself.)
> HP has a multi-decade history of not being able to maintain a single URL for long term.
That reminds me of the HP BIOS Setup page: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/how-to-enter-bios-s...
> There are two primary methods to access BIOS ...
> Method 1 involves restarting your computer and pressing a specific key during the boot process. This key varies by manufacturer but is typically one of the following: F1, F2, F10, DEL, or ESC.
It doesn't say what the key is for HP! On an hp.com article, with "HP" in the title, with "HP" in the header just before this section!
Previously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44425253
I needed a windows laptop. My work laptop is a Mac. Unless you are doing extremely intensive things that will benefit from technology gains, buying a new laptop makes little sense. The performance of an off lease enterprise laptop for $500 is great.
I purchased one from Dell, but it shut down at high cpu which indicates a cooling or other issue. In return they sent me an even better laptop for no additional charge. Perhaps more detailed reporting would avoid things like overheating laptops to enter the market. These laptops originally retailed for over $1500
I had a similar experience. We're mostly Apple at home, but I bought an X1 Carbon reburb from MicroCenter a few years ago to run desktop Linux. It's become one of my favorite pieces of tech. Ultra-light but solid with a nice-feeling keyboard and trackpad.
Woah, based on the title I didn't expect to read one of the most elaborate corporate bullshit I have seen coming from HP.
Basically, they just want to add constant and invasive useless telemetry, in the crappiest way possible to ensure easy access for them, unexpected hardware bugs and security breach as much as possible. Green washing again pretending that it has any impact on the environment.
For no added value for the user. That sucks highly.
What would be good for the user and ecologically is too ensure that every part is easily replaceable and user serviceable. Also reduce the useless crapware in the background consuming energy and reducing performance. But I guess it does not give you $$ worth of user telemetry data.
For reselling, everything has already enough info at sale time, as is, without keeping a daily log: - age of the computer - SSD health data - battery health data - model of all components that would give you info about their quality on the long run - you can easily check the state of the casing, screen, keyboard, connectors. - if it was easy to open, you can see the inside state, fan state.
For the rest, anyway there is no telemetry that will tell you if anything will fail based on its past. It just suddenly fail at random time by surprise, like the screen connector being torn. And anyway, again, normally if a component has a problem, like ram, you should be able to easily swap it.
The average car on the road is over 12 years old, and maybe a laptop has maybe 1/3 as long a lifecycle? Not sure that tracking "Wh" as a replacement for "mileage" is that useful, it's either time to replace a battery and SSD or it's not - and perhaps we should have scheduled maintenance for removing dust from your fans? An old PC that has a hard drive replaced with an SSD and a fresh battery is usually a great thing, unlike a car with tons of after market parts. I think this would make sense in a world of glued-in components where service is hard and somewhat risky (like Apple) and the highest quality components were installed originally. But ultimately the aftermarket value of a PC is only as good as the brand's reputation overall, that means removing bloatware and good quality batteries and other things that are hard to attest to automatically.
A well-built laptop can last you just as long. I’ve been rocking a tricked out Dell XPS for 9 years now and it’s still going strong. It’s really hard to find something better on the market. If I could only change the motherboard with a slightly updated APU like the strix halo or current gen AMD solution, I couldn't be happier.
This has dual purpose to proof identity to computer and usage tax.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
On models that would be worth reselling, it must be de-soldered.
This is exactly what one expects coming from HP.
I've seen the mountains of e-waste first hand. Anything that tries to tackle this problem is welcome in my book.
Did anyone else read this and think "WTF is Carfax?" or is it just me?
This is a bad headline, IMHO, because that is a service of some kind for 1 kind of person in just 1 country, and to the entire rest of the human race it's meaningless.
Americans tend to drive and many have gone through the experience of buying used cars. HP and Carfax are both U.S. companies. Should an American take umbrage if a British article discussing Deliveroo had a headline referencing Tesco because it’s meaningless to the entire rest of the human race?
You mean apart from the way Tesco operates or has operated in about a dozen or so countries?
The average American knows not about that, nor cares even if it was true.
Carfax also inserts themselves into the process of buying new cars too.
Only, AFAICT, in 1 country. There are 193 countries.
So only for half of one percent of people.
Much less by population, of course.
Actually, Carfax also serves ten Canadian provinces. And appears to also be active in twenty countries of mainland Europe, though I understand that nowadays in Britain there is less of an awareness of the continent.
This is nothing more than another data harvesting scheme thinly veiled as a useful service.
The key self-inflicted difficulty with PC laptop vendors is that they can't help but dilute the value of their own laptop model lines. Even when they build a solid pc laptop model - sooner or later the marketing dept comes along and pitches a low-cost cannibalization of the model lines.
Macbooks sell used because they haven't been diluted, but as a buyer who is willing to buy quality used equipment - I'm not willing to try an sift out is this the good lattitude model year or the shitty one. Was this the good years for the Carbons or after they injected a low cost line with the same name but one letter difference.
Also, bizzare manufacturer specific laptop customizations, especially from HP are usually a big minus - eg a while back they had 3gb vid cards when everything else at that grade was 4gb or weird incompatible bioses with "carfax" tracking bs
Really they do they same with desktops too - it's why I build my own desktops.
is there even a used market for laptops other than MacBooks?
Yes:
https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling
Disclaimer: I work there, and posted many of those listings.
Refurbished enterprise laptops like Thinkpads and Dell Latitudes are highly sought after. They generally have better build quality than regular consumer models along with good Linux support out of the box. I've been using refurbed Latitudes for the past decade, works pretty great imo for a fraction of the cost. I.e buy the machine for <EUR400 + some additional sticks of RAM + storage.
Though more and more manufacturers are switching to completely soldered components now, so I guess this won't last long.
Ironically making the device more repairable would be a boon for recycling instead of whatever bean counting bullshit HP is attempting here. Meh.
Thinkpads used to be sought after, not sure about it nowadays though.
There used to be, when new laptops were thousands of dollars, and it was easier to swap out parts and the batteries were removable. I learned a ton about Linux playing with Slackware on a $50 used laptop back in the mid 2000s.
Not so sure I'd bother with one any more, though. Hard to justify when there are $200 new options on Amazon.
What even is carfax? I am not from America.
It started off as a way for people to get info on cars via fax machine. You ask or enter the vehicle VIN and you get a report. If it was in a crash, in a flood, see if mileage matches actual odometer. It's all web-based now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carfax,_Inc.
TIL how it got its name, thanks.
And here I was thinking it was named for the phrase "car facts".
Vehicle history reports. It's mostly to see if a used vehicle was in an accident prior to purchase though it will sometimes also tell you if the car had a history of maintenance (typically this indicates a car was serviced at the dealer).
Wow this is really dumb. There's literally one fact about a laptop you can track that matters, and that's cycles on the battery. This is already tracked. There is no other 'maintenance' to track.
Dumb idea.
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.
Why? What problem does this solve?
With a car it’s 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.
They are literally selling e-waste.