Most sustainable / Green Tablet or Laptop / Manufacturer?

Before we start, I use a 5 question chart to answer this. The questions are:

• 1) How easy is it to get parts? If something breaks, how hard is it to get replacement parts? Do they give out the service manual, or keep it as proprietary information?
• 2) Will the vendor sell parts directly? if not, how hard is it to find new parts from other sources?
• 3) Does the vendor openly supply part numbers?
• 4) Is there a WiFi whitelist? If so, how hard is it to bypass or remove from the laptop?

1st place: When it comes to parts availability, I tend to like Lenovo the most, especially for the ThinkPad. The IdeaPad models aren't as good here, but what laptop vendor has good parts availability for consumer grade machines? Many do not.

While the IdeaPads are nowhere near as good for parts availability as the ThinkPad, you can still buy parts for them easily. That's a lot more then I can say about Asus, Toshiba and maybe even Acer.

For both the Think and Idea lines, they opt to sell the parts to the consumer through a 3rd party rather then do it directly and have authorized Encompass to sell parts for them. With that being said, the machine is likely obsolete when it breaks.

In terms of durability, the general rule is Think products are built far better then Idea products, although your mileage may vary here.

Lenovo fails the whitelisting test on pre Broadwell ThinkPads. I don't know if/when Lenovo dropped it on the Idea line, but I very much doubt it.

Part numbers are provided in the Lenovo HMM.

2nd place: Dell gets 2nd place on this list. Dell supplies part numbers on the build sheet of the system you have, but these aren't always the best. However, you can get the real part numbers from companies like PartsPeople if you find out the part number on your build sheet is old or incorrect. Generally speaking, Dell will not sell most parts to me or you so you need to go through a 3rd party if you need anything other then RAM (better 3rd party RAM exists), hard drives (like RAM, better 3rd party) and Wireless cards (Dell does not whitelist, but if you want an official card they will sell it to you). Even what they WILL sell you varies from each machine series.

Bad machines from Dell continue to fail a lot of the time, so most people will sell them cheap to dump them if this happens. This may yield you a good parts machine if it is truly too far gone or a easily repaired machine due to that stigma with Dell repairs. Thew consumer line is more prone to disposal over something silly, compared to Latitudes. A bad Latitude is far more likely to have more then one issue. A good rule of thumb here is if the machine has problems 1 year in on Latitudes and ~6 months on the Inpsirons, it's probably going to fail more then once.

While I dislike how often Dell hardware fails if you get a bad machine, they don't have Wireless whitelists and don't obscure the parts information made available through 3rd parties like PartsPeople.

3rd place (HP): HP has PartSufer and will sell them through this site, so parts are probably not very hard to get. However, HP discontinues them the quickest so you may need to shop used for older machines if you find the part you need is no longer sold (The max is ~10 years, but can go as low as 5 years). All you need for this information is the model or system serial number if you want a specific parts list or need a specific part to keep your machine's build sheet 1:1, should you care for that.

Whitelisting has been dropped on the Haswell and up models from HP's Business line, but may not be dropped on all consumer machines; if the service manual mentions unauthorized Wireless modules, it probably is whitelisted. Of course, this assumes the machine is *new* enough to find it since some are too old to get this information.

If there are any other brands you are wondering about, I can tell you.

Good Question!

I agree with OT here. What you already have can be the greenest if you upgrade the subsystems as you need to. Sadly, this is getting harder as the newer systems are getting harder to upgrade ;-{

I see the issue in five areas:

• Physical Plant
• Design
• Material Choices
• Recycling

Physical Plant

So far Apple has made it their mission to be as green as it can be. While they maybe making great strides on having their corporate buildings as energy efficient as possible and using green materials. I don't know of any other company that has put so much into it.

Their suppliers of raw materials as well as who assembles their systems (contract manufacturers) are a very different picture! Apple claims it is now pushing their contract manufactures and material suppliers into better practices. So we'll need to wait a bit to see what comes of this.

The other companies as well don't assemble or even make the components in their products. None have offered any data on their efforts on being green or even being more energy efficient so I guess Apple gets the ribbon here from a corporate perspective.

Design

Sadly all of the manufactures are rushing to less repairable designs. As an example the new MacBook is very close to a throwaway computer! It is not expandable and limited in repairability. I give Apple a D here and most of the others likewise.

Material Choices

While Apple has been the most vocal on using materials that don't have Lead or Arsenic. Most of the other companies are likewise moving away from using materials which have proven to be poisonous. The other issue is the chemicals used to make the parts are often environmentally dangerous as well as harmful to the factory workers. So far this is still a big problem across all of the companies. All get an F here.

Recycling

This is a hard one to rate as most of the companies don't do it as they don't have store fronts or a means to collect returned outdated equipment when a new system is bought. They depend on the resellers to do it. Apple Stores do offer recycling rebates but they pass the hardware to a 3rd party to dispose.