Back Market is turning old Windows 10 PCs into $99 Chromebooks

In just a month, Microsoft will end support for Windows 10 and doom millions of PCs to obsolescence. For the refurbished tech vendor Back Market, that’s an opportunity.

This week, the Paris-based company is selling a limited run of old HP and Lenovo laptops for 99 euros, preinstalled with Google’s Chrome OS Flex operating system. The same laptops cost at least twice as much on Amazon with Windows 10 still installed.

The announcement itself is a marketing stunt—Back Market only has about 50 of the old laptops available—but Amandine Durr, Back Market’s chief product officer, says the company is serious about turning PCs that can’t run Windows 11 into a new product category. Back Market plans to add an “Obsolete” section to its online store by year’s end, including laptops loaded with either ChromeOS Flex or Ubuntu Linux.

“Those devices, we want people to keep loving them and using them, and there’s no reason why they should go to the landfills,” Durr says.

The Windows 10 e-waste crisis

When Microsoft announced Windows 11 in 2021, it introduced stricter upgrade requirements for existing PCs. The biggest roadblock is that PCs must support Trusted Platform Module 2.0, a special hardware component that keeps data encrypted and makes sure the computer hasn’t been tampered with. Microsoft has called TPM 2.0 a “non-negotiable standard for the future of Windows.”

The upshot is that even if PCs otherwise meet Microsoft’s performance requirements, they won’t be able to upgrade, including some that are less than 10 years old. Users of these PCs can either try elaborate work-arounds for the TPM 2.0 requirement, pay $30 (or jump through other hoops) for one more year of security updates, or risk being vulnerable to new security exploits.

One likely outcome is that a lot of perfectly fine PCs will get tossed. PIRG (a federation of independent public interest research groups) has estimated that 400 million PCs could be rendered obsolete by Windows 11’s hardware requirements, based on a 2022 analysis that showed 43% of PCs weren’t eligible to upgrade at the time. Canalys estimates that 240 million PCs would wind up in landfills due to the upgrade cutoff.

“The announcement from Microsoft is maybe the start of the most massive e-waste crisis in the world, so we want people to be aware of that,” Durr says.

Selling obsolete tech

Back Market isn’t yet ready to turn old Windows PCs into Chromebooks and Linux machines on a large scale. For now, it’s only working with a single refurbisher on a batch of 50 laptops, with just a few models available: HP’s EliteBook 840 G3 and Lenovo’s ThinkPad T460 and ThinkPad T470.

Durr says the plan is to expand over time as demand allows, gradually working with more refurbishers to replace Windows with a different operating system. Because they already have to factory-reset and reinstall Windows, she doesn’t believe it will be too burdensome to install ChromeOS Flex or Linux instead.

[Photo: Back Market]

“What matters for refurbishers and for sellers is the complexity of the process, and here we believe it’s minimal,” Durr says.

Still, a lot’s in flux at the moment. Back Market isn’t working with Google on the initiative, as anyone can install ChromeOS Flex on an existing PC. Durr also wouldn’t commit to selling $99 or €99 laptops in the future, as that ultimately depends on what’s available through refurbishers. But she says obsolete models will always sell at a significant discount.

Amandine Durr [Photo: Back Market]

In the meantime, Back Market also wants to educate users of old Windows PCs about the possibility of replacing the operating system themselves, with video tutorials that it plans to offer through its website. “The right laptop, the right device, is the one that you already have,” Durr says. “With this obsolete computer program—and category—you are going to be able to keep it.”

“What we’re doing here is making sure there is the condition for the demand to exist, so that people will actually trust that these obsolete computers will work,” Durr says.

If those users decide that they’d rather buy an up-to-date laptop instead, Back Market will connect them to refurbishers who might want to buy the old laptop, so they can feed it back into the “Obsolete” market. With a limited run of €99 laptops, Back Market is hoping to spark some interest in that idea.