[lwn]

This feels to me like HP is trying to formalize a whole new business around second-hand hardware — not just selling off returns, but really building a controlled ecosystem for trade-ins, refurb, and resale. My guess is they want to keep that value in-house rather than letting third-party refurbishers or resellers capture it.

The Carfax reference stood out to me. It seems more like a feel-good marketing move than anything with real substance — just enough to trigger that association of “trusted, inspected, certified.” Not necessarily bad, but definitely more about perception than transparency.

Overall, I think they’re trying to rebrand “used hardware” into something safe, premium, and profitable — under the HP umbrella, of course.

[Hasz]

Certified Pre-Owned programs.

I am surprised they are starting with Laptops. IMO, it makes more sense to start with servers. They are car-priced assets, and stand much more to gain from a multi-point inspection versus a laptop. They are also less likely to suffer from long term damage damage, such as water damage.

Slap another 5 years of hardware support on it and resell for 20% above the used market. Many small and medium size enterprises will happily take you up on that offer. For example, typical dell hardware support is 5-7 years, the systems are still usable for several years after hardware support ends.

[verall]

HPE is very happy with off-lease server HW only being sold on ebay and appearing as sketchy as possible. The margins are really high on server HW - offering HW support on systems sold at 20% above the used market under their brand name would cannibalize their core business so it will never happen.

But in consumer space, margins are very low, and so there is money to be made reselling used HW at a premium, so they will try.

[mystified5016]

How many enterprises want to use two or three generation old second-hand leased servers?

As a homelabber I can see the sense, but as the IT guy at a small company it doesn't sound like a great deal.

If I were in a situation where I needed some physical machines, didn't care how old they are, and budget was an issue, I'd just go to eBay. Just get something cheap and own it outright without some corporation sticking their nose into the process.

I imagine the market segment willing to accept old and refurbed servers, yet requires some SLA from the vendor is not terribly large. Almost all businesses would be better served by owning last generation servers outright or simply using AWS.

Then again, we are talking about an industry that's happy paying tens of thousands of dollars in AWS bills for an application that can reasonably run on a single server from 2016. So there's no inherent logic at play.

[Ekaros]

There is difference of usage patterns between servers and laptops. Servers are most likely run nearly entire duration they are used or leased. Maybe not loaded, but is not massive difference.

On other hand laptops might spend significant time being turned off. Or their usage patterns might affect batteries. Like how deep they were drawn. In that sense getting more telemetry on laptops is much more useful.