The rise of ‘Frankenstein’ laptops in New Delhi’s repair markets

If we're actually trying to achieve sustainability, we have to stop being consumers. "consume" means to use up and destroy leaving nothing useful behind. This is what consumers do. Think about this the next time someone says the "additional price is passed on to the consumer" and phrases like that. Want to stop paying those prices? Stop consuming!
Instead of sending your money to some evil dictatorship on the other side of the world to "consume" something else, we should be building a system and a society where we can give that money, probably a little more more money even, to somebody in your local community to do actual productive work that doesn't destroy the environment.
Right to repair is a huge project that we need to force down the throats of the large corporations who want to keep us being consumers forever no matter how much it destroys the planet. But India can still do things like this even without having the "right" to repair, they just figure out a solution and do it anyway, and we can too if we learn from them. We throw away so much perfectly useful stuff. Not just electronics but everything in our modern world from clothes to cars, because economics has told us that it's expensive to repair or repurpose or salvage, and cheaper to buy a new one, buy more, buy in bulk, buy and dispose. And it often is, but that's false economics. It's the economics of throwing more shit in landfill and digging up more tons of rock and burning coal to turn it into something new. It's the economics with all the costs externalized onto the environment and onto the future. It's the economics of us destroying ourselves.
- Yeah, even if we didn't reuse, we could at least recycle. We got so into the craze of shoving computers in everything we stopped considering if we might be better off sticking to easily fixable tech for some things. My appliances are old as dirt, but parts are very affordable, there are 100s of youtube videos on how to fix them, and there are very few things that can break to begin with. That's a far cry from the landfill of bricked smart fridges next to a factory somewhere.
  
  When I replaced the batteries in my earbuds I broke the left one. It shouldn't be this hard to replace a part that eventually dies

Two boys transport discarded computer CPUs on a bicycle in Seelampur
Captions a clear image of a tricycle.
Literally unreadable. /s
- This is why people don't trust the media anymore! /s
  
  Yeah, this is why our AI image generators create kooky images sometimes. /s?
- "computer CPUs" is great as well.

Shout-out to the nice Indian gentleman whose YouTube video walked me through disassembling an ancient laptop so I could add a bit of RAM. I ended with a few leftover screws and a rattle, but it worked! Still chuntering away (slowly, it's geriatric) on Linux. I was amazed to find a video of the exact model.
- I had a similar experience. The video that helped me had pretty poor video quality compared to some of the other results, so I only turned to it when I was burnt out from basically every other video being useless for my task. Props to all the Indian educational YouTubers

The article doesn't even show an example of a finished Frankenstein laptop. 😑

This is the way

People should see any of those videos of 3rd world countries repairing and refurbishing industrial technology on the street with their bare hands. I even remember someone commented that back in the days of the USSR, they used to salvage the solder off old and broken components too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNGg0P7B5fI
The sad thing is, many of these people end up with health issues due to lack of any protection or health standard, yet they also provide a superior service and product that you will never find in a first world country due to the industry opting to trash and buy new.
I've personally had to junk a radiator because the cheap plastic at the end broke, and no OEM actually sells the plastic part because it only comes as a whole assembly, even though you can easily delid the radiator to replace it if the subpart could be bought or made.

Cyberpunk.

Fascinating country - running useful and forward thinking stuff like this, and scam call centers at the same time.
- Opportunistic. This isn't about saving the planet. This is about repair and sale.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things.
- ewww a slashdotter
  
  If you recognize that then you were a slashdoter. Once a slashdoter always a slashdoter.

A college student or a freelancer can get a good machine for INR 10,000 [about $110 USD] instead of spending INR 70,000 [about $800 USD] on a brand-new one. For many, that difference means being able to work or study at all.”
I think he is overstating the price point on that one. For INR 70k, one can get SSD drive, 256 Gigs RAM, a mid end GPU, 1080p screen and probably an entry level GPU as well. Whilst repairing and reusing does drive the price down, it does not do to such an extent in India(falling to one seventh in value is humongous).
Secondly, whilst I can't personally speak for the market in question, there are multiple dodgy repair markets as well in my country. And since there is no warranty on the product in hand, the consumer is on his own if something fails(and that chance is significantly high).
Yes, planned obsolescence sucks and tech companies aren't making it easier but I had still be wary. The grass isn't all green and I am speaking from personal experience.