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?

  • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 years ago

    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.