India's 'Frankenstein' Laptop Economy Thrives Against Planned Obsolescence (theverge.com) 41
In Delhi's Nehru Place and Mumbai's Lamington Road, technicians are creating functional laptops from salvaged parts of multiple discarded devices. These "Frankenstein" machines sell for approximately $110 USD -- a fraction of the $800 price tag for new models. Technicians extract usable components -- motherboards, capacitors, screens, and batteries -- from e-waste sourced locally and from countries like Dubai and China.
"Most people don't care about having the latest model; they just want something that works and won't break the bank," a technician told Verge. This repair ecosystem operates within a larger battle against tech giants pushing planned obsolescence through proprietary designs and restricted parts access. Many technicians source components from Seelampur, India's largest e-waste hub processing 30,000 tonnes daily, though workers there handle toxic materials with minimal protection. "India has always had a repair culture," says Satish Sinha of Toxics Link, "but companies are pushing planned obsolescence, making repairs harder and forcing people to buy new devices."
"Most people don't care about having the latest model; they just want something that works and won't break the bank," a technician told Verge. This repair ecosystem operates within a larger battle against tech giants pushing planned obsolescence through proprietary designs and restricted parts access. Many technicians source components from Seelampur, India's largest e-waste hub processing 30,000 tonnes daily, though workers there handle toxic materials with minimal protection. "India has always had a repair culture," says Satish Sinha of Toxics Link, "but companies are pushing planned obsolescence, making repairs harder and forcing people to buy new devices."
TFS is an odd read. (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading TFS about how someone is putting together a computer from parts, only reminds me of just how far we’ve come from when I was building company computers. From parts. Sourced at my local computer parts reseller.
It’s unreal how much shit has happened in 20-25 years.
Re:TFS is an odd read. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple started this trend/mess of e-waste. From Smartphone to computer/laptop: everything soldered on board and nearly impossible to fix/upgrade (RAM, CPU, Batteries, ...). Everything is now disposable and planned for obsolescence. This is a freaking nonsense and it's having impact on environment, humans, ... A trend now infecting cars, appliances, ... and many other industries. This have to stop.
Re:TFS is an odd read. (Score:5, Interesting)
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My thought is that the alternative OS groups should be thanking MS and Apple, I drop Linux Mint and Apache Office on older laptops now and give them to my wife's relatives when we go to Peru. Perfectly adequate for 90+ percent of users out there.
Re:TFS is an odd read. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Apple did not start this nonsense. Don't be daft. While they embraced it, there's prior art for everything. The most you can say is you noticed it more with Apple. Which is fair.
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They just followed Detroit's lead.
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Detroit followed everyone else's lead in unibodies and hard steel, and non-ISO stereos and whatnot. Chrysler was only an automotive tech leader until the mid sixties or so. After that it's been mostly Mercedes at the head of the pack. Their brief merger did nothing to change that, Chrysler doubled down on dumb with big goofy engines and fat assed cars afterwards, and got et up by fucking Fiat. No other American automaker was ever a tech leader except in manufacturing, and that advantage is literally ancient
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They ended up under Fiat after Mercedes found out what they had actually bought. The board of Mercedes sued the former board of Chrysler for having given them fraudulent financial documents. I was a little surprised (but only a little) that neither government got involved. I suppose fraud to the tune of billions of dollars is somehow different than if it's in the thousands.
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Since supercomputers don't do it I think it's just more Apple propaganda.
Re: TFS is an odd read. (Score:2)
Supercomputers are all clusters now and what matters is aggregate performance and power efficiency, and of course network performance (but that's part of the first thing.) Apple cares about small system performance only, having given up even on servers as a product where they are not competent and the profits are but high enough.
However, only attaching the RAM to the CPU is really a performance benefit. All the other soldered stuff is there only to decrease costs and also the chance that someone will buy th
Re: TFS is an odd read. (Score:2)
I'm not an Apple fan, but, you're either ignoring facts or are too young to remember - not sure which. But either way, *all* of the computer companies were making their stuff as proprietary and hard for others to work on as they possibly could until companies like Columbia Data Products, Eagle Computer, and Compaq began making clones of the IBM standards that wouldn't get them sued out of existence. And then there was a bit of a golden age for a while, but eventually component standardization and the access
Re:TFS is an odd read. (Score:5, Interesting)
What the article describes is not what you were doing 20 years ago (and what I myself did back in the day). These Indian techs aren't sourcing parts from the "local computer parts reseller", and hardly anything is bought new. They are cannibalizing components from one junked computer into another. Sometimes it's just a motherboard swap between two copies of the same model or scavenging some SO-DIMMs - the kind of thing that folks at iFixit assist with to this day.
But more often it's more like: this laptop's power supply is shot, let's pull the flyback diode and bulk caps from this junked stereo and solder them in. Or: this battery wasn't made for this laptop, but it still holds 50% charge, and it'll fit in the case if we shave this plastic rib away. Or: this LCD's ribbon cable doesn't fit into this connector (because it comes from a different computer brand), so let's patch it together with a bunch of 32 AWG wires. Or: this mobo is fried, but we can put it in a toaster oven to reflow it, then pluck off the processor to use elsewhere. Mixing and matching parts from dissimilar equipment is why they're called Frankenstein computers. How much computer building did you do back in the day required a soldering iron, or a Dremel?
The article also discusses right to repair, and the ways that OEMs make that harder and harder: arbitrary pinout changes, software locks, lack of genuine repair parts, no service manuals, and even that most petty of gestures - proprietary screws.
Re:TFS is an odd read. (Score:5, Interesting)
China is ahead of even that. For years now you have been able to buy new motherboards and new laptops that have a CPU or northbridge chip scavenged from an older machine. They also found ways to get around Intel's forced obsolescence of chipsets, allowing them to use a newer CPU and thus support Windows 11.
You get weird machines that have a laptop CPU, integrated cooler, desktop chipset, and other parts that are brand new. New motherboards for old laptop chassis, and vice versa. They also take laptop CPUs and solder them to a new adapter PCB that lets them be installed in a desktop socket.
It's recycling done right. They can re-use those parts and sell them profitably, we get cheap but very useful machines. Often they are specialized for things like NAS use.
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The article describes essentially every computer lab I've set up at home since about 1997.
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It has, more than once. There used to be a lot more user-alterable parts on computers than there tend to be today.
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Ah, missed that. It's too bad that most journalists have never done anything else for a living.
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Depends on how you interpret "crackle" I guess. When I'm soldering, I can definitely get some sizzle, hiss, pop and, yes, "crackle" when using flux-core solder (or even needle-dispensed flux, if I overdo it), and when cleaning the tip against a wet sponge.
TFA doesn't mention OS just hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
So, interestingly, the biggest thing driving planned obsolescence right now as far as I can tell is MS pushing windows 10 out, and so many devices unable to meet the hardware requirements for Win 11
The article didn't mention if these machines would be set up with older Windows or with Linux, though I'm going to guess it will be the former.
I do developer support for an SDK, and thus I have a lot of customers in India, so I have some sense of one part of this: an incredibly strong "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude. I regularly have customers using a 10 or even 15 year outdated version of our SDK they're trying to work with - it worked well enough that they didn't need to update and so they didn't. Many of these folks are also using really outdated Windows. I'll admit it's been a while since I've seen someone actively using XP still, but I still often see win 7. We don't officially tell them "no we won't support you" but we will tell them "if your issue is fixed in a newer version, you need to upgrade, we can't backport fixes to ancient versions.", and over time, those ancient windows systems have been mostly replaced... I'd guess though that just like other OS versions, a huge number of folks will continue to use outdated / unsupported versions long past end of life...
Granted, this isn't just India - but I do think they have extra large motivation and that repair culture there (as mentioned in TFA) to keep older hardware limping along, and probably using out of support Windows.. I kind of shudder at the security implications... but I also kind of really admire the ingenuity and resourcefulness.
The whole windows 10 end of life due to hardware requirements is indeed going to drive a lot of waste of perfectly serviceable hardware - honestly, I kind of hope it finds its way to the bodgers / makers / hackers rather than landfills.. but I do kind of wish there was more Linux uptake to lessen the number of unpatched/unpatchable vulnerable machines out there.
Re:TFA doesn't mention OS just hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
It's basically Win10 21H2; but with the benefit of not having 'store'/appx to deal with; and with security support through 2032. MS makes a big deal about how you should super only use it for special purpose embedded devices; because what kind of sick retrograde weirdo would want an OS that just sits there doing what it does for a decade without a deluge of 'feature updates' to perturb things? but aside from making it a pain in the ass to get legitimate licenses for they offer few solid explanations for why people would actually see "just 21H2 that you don't have to bother with for years yet" as a bad thing.
For people with slightly newer hardware(enough to support the required CPU instructions; I assume TPM verification will just be stubbed out) the same argument could be made for win11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024; which is basically win11 24H2 except it will shut up and just do its job, security updates only, until late 2034. Again, they make it a nuisance to license and assure you that you are a depraved enemy of 'modern' management for even wanting it; but a decade of the OS just getting nothing but security fixes sounds like a "don't threaten me with a good time" proposition to me.
I'd also be interested in whether there's an uptick in TPM fakery; or whether (while standardized in some respects) TPMs are too closely integrated with motherboard firmware to readily tack on. If you ignore pesky requirements like "physical tamper resistance" and "actual cryptographic-grade entropy" something that talks and acts like a TPM is a pretty unexciting microcontroller tacked onto the LPC bus, which isn't very demanding to interface with; and, since basically every hypervisor option going has the need to emulate TPMs for certain guest OSes there are FOSS software implementations(for x86 hosts, you'd need to port to your microcontroller of choice) you can examine if you don't want to work from the TCG specs.
If MS has a limited set of TPM vendor attestation keys that they count as 'real' TPMs emulating a TPM wouldn't help you much(though there are probably a lot of dead motherboards from 'business' machines that you could unsolder 'real' TPMs with infineon or similar attestation keys from to bodge into working systems); but if simply having something that talks like a TPM on the bus is good enough that would be a pretty accessible add-on.
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I'll be curious to see if, and how broadly, "Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021" either gets cracked for redistribution or gets mined for patches.
It's basically Win10 21H2; but with the benefit of not having 'store'/appx to deal with; and with security support through 2032. MS makes a big deal about how you should super only use it for special purpose embedded devices; because what kind of sick retrograde weirdo would want an OS that just sits there doing what it does for a decade without a deluge of 'feature updates' to perturb things? but aside from making it a pain in the ass to get legitimate licenses for they offer few solid explanations for why people would actually see "just 21H2 that you don't have to bother with for years yet" as a bad thing.
I think there was a version of XP like this, and yes it was reasonably popular among people who had older PCs for whatever reason. I saw some users who were into retro gaming, others who had the "aint broke, don't fix it" mindset. Also users whose PC was supporting expensive 3rd party systems - lots of Windows PCs sit in labs, not connected to the internet, but running lab equipment worth more than a nice house. Downtime is expensive here, you're in big trouble if a forced windows update stops research.
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With all due respect to Linux, and I am just as much a fan of Linux as anyone (hell, my daily is Crunchbang++), the problem with adoption is there are too many choices.
The average person will have heard of Linux and think..."maybe!" and then discover the massive choices they are faced with, and their eyes will glaze over.
Or perhaps they will google it, find Linux Mint to be a top hit, try it, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, and then run face-first into Linux elitism when they have a problem, and run right
Re: TFA doesn't mention OS just hardware (Score:3)
"Or perhaps they will google it, find Linux Mint to be a top hit, try it, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, and then run face-first into Linux elitism when they have a problem"
Then they can go to a Microsoft forum when they have Windows problems, and run into some dipshits with Microsoft certifications dominating threads with non-working "solutions" which don't actually work and blaming failures on users.
Re: Repair videos on youtube (Score:4, Insightful)
but do they run Linux? (Score:2)
Work Harder (Score:2)
"It's alive! it's aliiiiive! (Score:3)
Frankenstein (Score:2)
Frankenstein was the creator not the monster
Re: Frankenstein (Score:3)
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Cool it, Eyegore.
handle toxic materials with minimal protection (Score:2)
Wait wait wait (Score:2)
Who besides high end gamers are paying $800 for a laptop?
Remember Weirdstuff Warehouse? (Score:2)
Pepperidge Farms remembers!
Nothing wrong with that (Score:2)
I don't see anything wrong with technically skilled people repairing computers with used parts sourced from other machines. This is exactly like what my generation was normally doing two decades ago with tower PCs.