9

I was in the non-profit shop of a local charity. They accept donations of used computers then resell them to the public. The profit goes to charity. I asked for their oldest machine. It had an AMD chip from the 16h family. Thus, a spychip.

So their oldest machine was still too new for me. I asked why don’t you have anything older? They said the general public would not accept anything older, and so the shop also does not accept anything older. When machines are rejected, they go to a factory that destroys them and recovers the raw metals.

It’s sad to see that pre-spychip machines are being destroyed and that even 2nd-hand customers are being limited to anti-consumer spychip hardware.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 week ago

The second smartest thing to do is to have someone you know / trust offer to buy the machines from the charity before they are destroyed (by getting those forwarded away from them, for example), assuming they still get some. Consider, you have a potential good, actionable source to nab good hardware.

The smartest is to get charity policy changed, but that's more of a hassle.

this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
9 points (58.8% liked)

retrocomputing

5459 readers
1 users here now

Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS