Drilled motherboards

[Askic]

Hello,
I was looking to buy some faulty boards to be used as donor boards for repairs (mainly macbooks but also other manufacturers).

I was surprised to learn how many boards are offered with holes drilled inside them. I wonder why is that. I could understand if HDD/SDD is drilled to protect any sensitive data, but don't know about logic boards.


Can anybody shed some light on the topic?

Thank you!

[eccerr0r]

Re: Drilled motherboards

Prevent resale market, especially for big companies that collect their old computers (apple sounds like a good candidate.)

[Askic]

Re: Drilled motherboards

So it seems that in most cases manufacturers themselves are drilling holes. So much about recycling and reusing....

[eccerr0r]

Re: Drilled motherboards

They want you to recycle the materials not compete with their new products...

[momaka]

Re: Drilled motherboards

I was surprised to learn how many boards are offered with holes drilled inside them. I wonder why is that. I could understand if HDD/SDD is drilled to protect any sensitive data, but don't know about logic boards.

If the motherboards have an SSD or other storage soldered onto the motherboard (such as tablets and many of the modern ultra-thin laptops), then that's probably the reason why... which is silly, because you don't even need to fully low-level format an SSD to make the data completely irrecoverable, unlike on a conventional HDD. Just wiping the file table on the SSD of where all the files are stored is typically enough... and since SSDs are fast, I'm sure there's software out there that can do this on the fly in very little time. But some people/companies are too dumb to learn new ways and would rather smash/destroy stuff than put a little effort and time and recover much of that investment back while also helping the environment and local community.

They want you to recycle the materials not compete with their new products...

Which is bullshit, because majority of the "materials" in the PCB are various non-recyclable organics and very little metal. On top of that, even then a lot of the metal recovery is not very effective... so you end up with a lot of waste.

[diif]

Re: Drilled motherboards

They will have been written off against tax, the holes ensure they can't be repaired and any possible data recovered but they can be reused for parts which is better than shredding.
If it has a T2 chip and wasn't wiped by the previous owner it's scrap anyway.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Drilled motherboards

Which is bullshit, because majority of the "materials" in the PCB are various non-recyclable organics and very little metal. On top of that, even then a lot of the metal recovery is not very effective... so you end up with a lot of waste.

This is how business works: "NOT MY PROBLEM... IT'S NOW YOUR PROBLEM!"

[sam_sam_sam]

Re: Drilled motherboards

This is how business works: "NOT MY PROBLEM... IT'S NOW YOUR PROBLEM!"

This is so true

[eccerr0r]

Re: Drilled motherboards

Pisses me off, if they can't get electronics to fail and force people to throw it away, they get software to not run on old hardware anymore and force people throw it away too...why *can't* I still use my P3 and Athlon XP...

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Drilled motherboards

Pisses me off, if they can't get electronics to fail and force people to throw it away, they get software to not run on old hardware anymore and force people throw it away too...

Looks like that will backfire for anything manufactured in the 2010s, with the coronavirus pandemic! Because many people can't even get a later video card!

[dmill89]

Re: Drilled motherboards

So it seems that in most cases manufacturers themselves are drilling holes. So much about recycling and reusing....

^This, businesses recycling their own equipment generally don't care what happens to it once the HDD/SSD is removed/wiped so they generally aren't the ones requiring stuff to be destroyed. However manufacture's "official" recycling programs (especially Apple) often specifically require their contractors destroy equipment to prevent it's reuse, this is largely a result of their vendetta against independent repair (Apple is certainly the worst offender in this, but many other manufactures are following their lead), since it is much harder for independent repair shops to operate if they can't get parts, and since Apple won't sell new parts to " non-authorized" repair shops, used parts were often the only source, but now they are attacking that as well.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Drilled motherboards

hard drives at least tend to be automatically obsoleted by size/speed, so they don't need to destroy them... alas I'm still using old drives despite this...

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Drilled motherboards

vendetta against independent repair (Apple is certainly the worst offender in this, but many other manufactures are following their lead), since it is much harder for independent repair shops to operate if they can't get parts, and since Apple won't sell new parts to " non-authorized" repair shops, used parts were often the only source, but now they are attacking that as well.

That backfired with the automobile industry! And even for "big-ag", with John Deere, there were revolts.

[sam_sam_sam]

Re: Drilled motherboards

Why don’t we just stop buying this crap if companies want do this kind-a crap oh I forgot that you can not talk bad about a company like that they might retaliate in some way

But sure would be nice though

[eccerr0r]

Re: Drilled motherboards

problem is that the products are "so good" that getting an alternative is "suboptimal" ...

... until it breaks and suddenly the "so good" item is "suboptimal"...