It's more complicated than that though. If you purchase a refurbished machine
you will likely actually be contributing to the increase in value and benefit
of the original purchaser and also directly increasing the profits of some of
these awful companies through means of licensing. I'll give you an example.
Legitimate companies who refurbish hardware are purchasing refurbishment
licenses from Microsoft which apparently applies to all machines which
originally came with Microsoft Windows. Essentially any laptop you might buy
that had Microsoft Windows on it will directly benefit Microsoft a 2nd time
around. Next: Short of replacing the BIOS you'll likely be forced to replace
broken pieces with identical parts that are only available from the original
manufacturer due to things like digital restrictions. After-warranty sales of
parts are a huge business and digital restrictions only forces the profits
from any such sales back to the original manufacturer.
There is simply no good solution. Particularly not without a coordinated and
well-marketed push to do something about it.
I certainly am not advocating we do nothing- but I don't think we should act
as if there is some sort of real solution either.
Certainly you can make the argument that you can get parts and build it
yourself and avoid some of these issues. Ultimately though there is no
realistic solution that can impact change in a meaningful way. The average
user is not going to be able to do this. There are not enough people even
willing to purchase a system per-assembled as such.
I think the best we can do is work toward something larger that is not
directly reliant on free software advocate's purchases to impact change. That
is to say free software advocates are better suited to seed efforts to free
hardware that can be targeted at everybody. Indirectly everybody wins. We all
get free software friendly hardware- or more of it- (or even just maintain
the status quo-which is better than going backwards).
