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Comment by mey | Hacker News Reader

"You see, today when you buy a Chromebook, it comes with an end-of-life date, its Auto Update Expiration (AUE) date. This is a generous six and a half years after any specific Chromebook is released." -article

This language is insane. This should not be considered generous in any way by a tech journalist. Windows XP, 12 years. Windows 7, 10 years with free migration to Windows 10. Neither are a posion pill to the hardware itself. Desktops/Laptops of the last decade are still remarkably capable devices today for most light workloads. Linux provides a whole other world of possibilities as well.

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The chrome books of 2013 which are still receiving updates (mine does, at least) are quite limited - 2GB of ram including video memory, 32 bit arm, 16GB flash, not expendable (very typical chrome book for the time, two hundred bucks). The things from that time that run Windows acceptably are those that have had their ram and disk upgraded, or were high end at the time.

How are you still receiving updates? We bought one ~3 yrs ago and recently got the message that support was ending. I assumed that was the case across the board.

Anyway, the sketchy part of this is that it's referring to time of (initial) release, not time of purchase. These things continue to be sold well after initial release. When that was is also not something most users are aware of or care about. Arbitrarily losing a few years of support because you unknowingly picked the wrong model stinks.

That is exactly the situation that we are in. Like your Chromebook, this one is still perfect for its purpose and would have continued to be for years if not for this crap.

Not sure how I still get them. I did get a message that it is EOL when I was on the developer/beta channel a while ago. But then I switched back to main, and kept getti ng updates.

It’s the first Samsung Chromebook (iirc 2nd Chromebook ever), one of the last ARM ones. Perhaps they are keeping it alive because it’s an ARM.

Regardless, I put it in developer mode and used it with straight Linux (although the sd card borked recently and I haven’t set a new one up yet)

> These things continue to be sold well after initial release.

They should be forced to put the EOL date on the packaging and on the hardware. I'm sure the average buyer is not even aware of it.

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