At the time of writing this post we have only received one submission on our Ask Us Anything page but it’s a question we get a lot!
Do you ever sell refurbished laptops for home use in the IT garage sale?
– Anonymous RCSD staff member
We have had this question from many teachers and staff who have fallen in love with their device and want to keep it! We are sorry to say that it is unlikely that we will be selling staff devices in the garage sale any time soon. So, the short answer is no, but let us give you a brief explanation as to why.
For budgetary reasons it is not feasible to replace all staff laptops in one year when they have reached their end-of-life. It is for this reason we have been working toward a model in which, each year, we buy replacements for some of the laptop fleet and cycle out some of the oldest model. Currently there are more old-model laptops than there are new laptops being purchased each year, which is a gap we hope to close eventually, but because this is the case we randomly select volunteers from the pool of people with the oldest model laptop.
‘Oh ho!’, you might say, ‘Where are those old laptops going now?’
Even though the laptop is being retired from staff use it is still a useful device (if it’s in good condition). These laptops are purchased at greater expense and therefore greater processing power than the devices typically deployed to students. These laptops are refurbished by IT then redeployed into the hands of students.
Another wrinkle that prevents us from selling all of the older technology is the way that the technology budget works. All technology that we “buy”, laptops included, are actually leased. At the end of the leasing period we have two choices, either return the technology to the leasing company or buy out the remainder of the lease. More often than not we end up returning the technology because at the end of the leasing period the device no longer has enough value to warrant the cost of the buy out.
In the 2020-2021 school year we plan to deploy 2 carts of the original model Yoga staff laptops to each of the high schools. This, of course, is dependent on the status of the pandemic and health directives. Currently, many of these laptops are deployed to staff who wouldn’t otherwise have one so that they are able to work from home.
Technologies available in the IT garage sale, as well as the frequency at which garage sales happen, are highly variable and we can’t make any promises! We love offering retired gadgets to our staff members whenever we are able to 😊.
For those of you that do love your staff device and want to own one of your very own, there are several models in the ThinkPad Yoga series of varying capability and cost!
We hope this has been a helpful article. As always, feel free to ask us anything!
