A follow-up to "Premium Prices Demand Premium Refurbished PCs"

Last technical review: July 16, 2026 by PC-Doctor Engineering

IBM just put a public number on something refurbishers have been feeling for months.

In the last weeks of June, IBM's clients yanked their capex toward servers, storage, and memory... buying early to lock in supply before prices climbed again. It hit IBM's own results hard enough that the CEO wrote a letter about it.¹

Last technical review: June 29, 2026 by PC-Doctor Engineering

Read-only sounds like a simple property of a storage device. The device either allows changes or it does not. In practice, the phrase describes a rule enforced somewhere along the path between an application and the storage media.

That distinction becomes important when a Multipurpose USB Device (MUD) travels between Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, and computers that may not be fully trusted. A computer may report that the MUD is read-only while the device itself remains physically capable of accepting writes. Connect it to a different host—or start the same computer under a different operating system—and the rule may no longer apply.