At some point, if you want 10 years of support, you’re going to have to pay for it one way or the other.
When I paid $129 (including tax and shipping to my door) for my Chromebook, I was fine with getting a little over 4 years of updates from it. That worked out to be about $2.48/mo.
Actually in many jurisdictions, the government collects a e-waste handling fee at the point of sale, which partially or completely alleviates this concern.
Software can keep running without being actively maintained.
What are you talking about?
What a strange devil's advocate.
They didn't, and the result is a lot of e-waste and vulnerable devices.
For how long they can but at least not to kill it like blocking the internet on a device that’s only usable with one.. let the community take it from there, I’m sure some bright people will find a way to have a usable minimal linux distribution for such devices, and I’m sure a lot of less fortunate countries would be happy to buy it.
That means that as the software drifts farther and farther out of date, which in turn means that some things will stop working, but it's not a kill switch.
There already are native boot Linux distros for most Intel Chromebooks.
https://www.wikihow.com/What-to-Do-with-Your-Chromebook-Afte...
The schools may decide that the costs or risks are not worth it to run unsupported hardware/software in their environment, but Google isn't turning them into doorstop as some people on this thread seem to be implying (or believing themselves).
And stopping the updates will block them from the internet, at least that’s per the article:
>Chromebook will no longer receive the software updates it needs, blocking basic websites and applications from use.
>That means that as the software drifts farther and farther out of date, which in turn means that some things will stop working, but it's not a kill switch.
So basically just like an android device, after 2 years you’re on your own? Better than a killswitch obviously but it also means that it’s just a software pre-determined obsolescence and had nothing to do with google claims that’s it’s “hardware vendors issue”, because just like android hardware, a lot received non-official support from different developers for years after untill the hardware became a little slow to keep up with the bloated system.
My guess is that eventually the browser will be outdated and sites will eventually break, but in my experience you have years until you start running into sites that use the latest and greatest features with no polyfill.
Maybe it's worth preparing them with an alternate distribution that will get updates for much longer.
Also, phones are where this hardware update treadmill cancer started. I only stopped using my last phone because carriers unilaterally obsoleted the model and banned it from their networks.