Ecology – negative award winner – Dell

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If I had the opportunity, I would pressure on todays computer bussiness companies to be more nature-friendly. On one hand, they do awesome job. On the other hand, they are greatest villains of all.

While the whole planet talks about ecology and tries to save as much resources as possible, some companies just wont join the same boat!
Almost unrepairable devices, pushing users hard to new hardware while the old one still could do the job. Cars are going to be electrical (in the sake of not burning the fosils), but at the same time putting 400 – 1000 chips into one car, because children want to watch TV on the backseat and drivers are unable to read the paper map anymore.

During last two years, we purchased approx. 20 notebooks from Dell, in order to renew our laptop fleet, that was bought in 2011-2015.
With almost every laptop, we purchased docking station/usb replicator too.

The quality was low to be honest. From those 15 docking stations, only 5 work until today, the rest was sent to Dell. They were replaced for brand new ones, because laptop suddenly freezed (stopped working), the fan was spinning full speed all the time, or it was disconnected without warning.
10 laptops had faulty batteries, which bulged through the keyboard, two had malfunctioning TPM, and 4 did not boot after their SSD lost functionality. I was unable to restore data from NVMe, but most data are backedup on servers.

And on the top of this, this was the last straw. Inside two paper boxes, there was plastic bag with a computer mouse.

This company does not care at all. Its just profit driven company. The quality is descending, profit is ascending. Thank you. Thank you for brainwashing, how important is to have a fast and secure computer with amazing Windows 11, that forces us to waste even more. Thank you society for punishing the poor ones, while rich get richer. Sorry this is rant, this is how I feel it. I know, that this is how it always was, but today people can be united more than ever. There is certain point of no return fo us.

Dell Latitude 3420, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz, 16GB RAM, W10 22H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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lmacri, Lars220, AlphaCharlie, SueW, NaNoNyMouse

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“And on the top of this, this was the last straw. Inside two paper boxes, there was plastic bag with a computer mouse.”

Sorry, but why is that awful?

I’ve always bought Dell computers since my first computer in 1999. They are from Dell Small Business and I only had a serious problem once back around 2005. I have never bought a laptop though (thank goodness as they are all lousy whatever brand compared to a good desktop).

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For me personally, plastic bag inside paper box inside paperbox is wasting resources. The paper weights like half a kilogram.

Dell Latitude 3420, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz, 16GB RAM, W10 22H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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SueW

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Well the company is based in Texas, after all. But more to the point, I too have not had a good experience with their laptops and would not buy another one from them. But my Dell desktop PC is all together a different story. It is a Dell XPS-4700 with 12 GB DDR3 memory and a Haswell chipset 4th generation Intel Core i7 4770 processor and a 1 TB spinning hard drive running Windows 7 Home Premium x64 SP1 and is now nearly ten years old. It still runs as good as new and I wouldn’t give it up for anything, love it. But all of the reasonably priced laptops these days (that leaves out Apple, of course) just seem to be incredibly cheap and probably meant to last only three years, or so. Just very disappointing.

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wavy

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It’s not just Dell, of course

The whole “throw away that perfectly good PC you bought a year or two back, and buy yourself a new one, just for the dubious pleasure of running a new operating system (same as the old one, but NOW WITH DELICIOUS TPM!)” epitomises the problem

Over-packaging. Over-commercialisation. Over-hyped vacuity

We’re in the process of destroying a world which we don’t deserve to keep

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doriel

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I think smart phone makers, Apple for sure, are among the biggest offenders here, with their practice of planned obsolescence.

The idea is pretty old, but it has endless appeal to companies as a way to sell more of whatever they sell (light bulbs, iPhones, cars …) One way they do this is by coming up with pretty nice shiny and colorful things — that make many people envious of not having the latest shiny thing that is only slightly different from the previous model and comes in a new and different nice color from the one those eager for the latest have right now, that shows everyone that sees it that theirs is not the latest model — or even by coming up with just shiny things that do not last as much as they could and people actually need in the modern world:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE

(Another way is by  sending software patches that slow down and make the intended devices less useful, a sneaky practice “justified” with casuistic arguments.)

 

Electronics of the “buy and use this one for a while and then throw it away when we put out a new one” require the use of elements that are rare in nature, so in limited, finite supply and needed for actually necessary electronics and other really important purposes. Such as making the computers needed to get actual useful work done.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161017-your-old-phone-is-full-of-precious-metals

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mobile-phones-elements-periodic-table-endangered-chemicals-st-andrews-a8739921.html

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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