Not OP, but I can describe a similar experience. Still feels better than brand new $current-year non m1 laptops.

It’s not a great thing, but most companies supply employees new laptops every 3 years if they want to keep those employees.

is it rare the decommissioned machines are given back to the employee after cleanup?

Depends on how the computers were procured. Leasing deals won’t allow that, for instance.

My org insists that the disks of all obsolete machines are destroyed and the rest of the hardware sent for disposal. I have a few systems that could be wiped and given away for charity but that’s not allowed. This seems incredibly wasteful to me.

seems a lot of orgs work on cargo-cult knowledge

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/56891586200393318... (2015)

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/11917713453627965... (2019)

i think swift had another post about it a bit more recently but i cannot find it now

if you encrypt the disk at the os level, you only need to throw away the keys, ie: reformat the drive. no need to physically erase as what is store is just noise once the keys are gone.

Thanks for the links. I wonder if it’s entirely that, or if management fears that staff might somehow gain a benefit by taking obsolete hardware.

There’s a temptation that is removed by destroying or selling to a liquidator - and it removes any chance of apparent favoritism: Steve got to take home that twelve CPU rack mount and I just got an old mouse.

But even more common in large companies is that it’s all on leases and goes back to the leasing company to be liquidated on eBay; you can always find miles of three or five year old gear there.

ebay being the access normaliser to this equipment doesn't sound too bad

it substitutes the internal network/hierarchy bias for a mostly monetary one

maybe there's no point for us to argue over the decisions of management

Keep in mind that people in their 30s and older today either grew up or lived their working years during a time when upgrading computers every year or two was the norm.

That hasn't been necessary for 15 years.

I still remember the joy of buying additional/bigger RAM sticks for my PC and then being able to do more demanding stuff much better :-)

I remember those days, but that hasn't been the case since intel released the Core 2 line.

Also am M1 user. I remember back in my Windows days the things would slow dramatically over a couple of years mainly due to software bloat.

That seems to have gotten better but I don’t know if it’s because I’m smarter on what I install, or if windows is better.

The problem I have is Microsoft keeps shoving windows 11 down my throat; that damn start menu needs to remain where it was in 1995!

windows 2000 was peak windows for me. only got worse afterwards one way or another... but hot take: windows 8 "metro" was kinda awesome refreshing though most people hated it :-)

W2K was certainly peak UI for me - all my windows machines run as close to that UI as I can get them.

More like: if I would lose it today, I would be the same thing again, maybe next gen M2/3, but everything basically identical to this one. There is no single other device out there I'd prefer to buy instead. Nothing shiny to chase thats better somehow...