I Hate Junk!

It's a "love-hate" relationship..... me and old computers. On one hand, I love the benefits of being able to turn caste-off computer/computer parts into something useful and productive. On the other hand, just the thought of the mountains of this stuff piling up all over the world has me really concerned and just a bit angry! Oh; don't get me wrong! I still love my electronics, it's just the junky stuff out there that simply compounds the problem by dying long before they should that's the issue. What started this rant?

I was given a gift this morning. Why would a "gift" set me off? It's a pretty little laptop isn't it? It's a Gateway (really Acer) "M-Series", W650i. This and another machine were brought to be by one of my students who said that her parents wanted to throw them out and thought I might want them instead. This Gateway is the older of the 2, from the Core 2 Duo/ Windows Vista generation. I don't know yet whether it'll boot up, but it appears to have a few "salvageable" parts in it. Probably the screen (since it doesn't appear cracked), the DDR2 SO-DIMMs (1, 2Gb and 1, 1Gb) and a nice little Western Digital Scorpio series 250Gb SATA drive. Not too bad...... it's the other one that really pisses me off though.....

It's a nice, "no nonsense" Dell Inspiron 15 from a couple of years ago. It has a stick of 4GB DDR3 SO-DIMM, and a 500Gb Seagate (yuck) hard drive; oh yeah, and the optical drive is even a SATA unit. So what's the problem? This computer is less than 2 years old! It not only doesn't boot. It doesn't even get power!

Here's the thing. You look out there on the Internet, go to Walmart or heaven forbid, go to Best Buy..... there are all these nice looking nicely spec'd machines and they cost a pretty reasonable price..... somewhere between $300 and $500. That's affordable and seems to make perfect sense to their target audience; right? So...... what's the problem? For those of you who know me, you know where I'm going with this right? 

• Give the current state of manufacturing technology and cost, it's as cheaply as a full-blown computer can go and the manufacturer still make a profit.
• Because they are affordable, aka cheap people don't worry about the abysmal build quality, so when they break in the next 1 to 3 years, they just buy a new one.
• The very fact of their price-point creates certain production realities of their design. They are cheap to make, but not cheap to fix. In actuality, those $1000+, HP Elitebooks, Lenovo ThinkPads, and Dell Latitudes are WAY easier (read cheaper) to work on than these machines. They are made to be fix, their made to be throw away. 
• There's nothing I can do for these machine. There very cheapness makes them cost more to fix then they are worth!

See that sneaky little work "cheap" hiding inside every bullet point? Hiding in plain sight! We've become a society so wasteful largely in pursuit of cheap. The Walmart-ization of America! I really hate cheap junk!!!