[josho]

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?

[hakfoo]

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.

[sixothree]

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.