Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates | Hacker News Reader

Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates

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699 pointstwapi411 comments

This is a big victory for the parents, teachers, and students who wrote to Google asking them to make this change. https://pirg.org/articles/why-google-announced-chromebooks-w...

Google and other tech companies should continue to find ways to stop the disposability treadmill that pressures us to replace our phones and laptops in favor of newer models. With e-waste the fastest growing waste-stream in the U.S., it’s not sustainable to consume technology at this rate. This is a meaningful step toward a tech industry making products designed to last.

Google's per-user software subscription model works to their benefit here, as it lets schools and businesses trade the money saved from a less frequent hardware upgrade schedule for additional years of Google product usage.

> This is a big victory for the parents, teachers, and students

Who should never have been using computers in the first place. There's really no point. Using gmail and gdocs doesn't teach anything of value. A lot of the other software is pricey and sometimes even detrimental to the school result.

Writing papers in a word processor is a far different experience from writing papers on paper.

Thankfully. Handwriting caused me massive hand cramping until much later in life when I re-trained myself to hold a pen differently. A lot of my school essays were optimized for the fewest number of words that met the base requirements.

That in itself is a useful skill, but I don't recommend it as a coping mechanism to avoid physical pain.

Yeah, writing on a word processor is a million times better (at least it is for me).

Don't get me wrong, I do think it's bad that writing things by hand is becoming more and more rare all the time. In particular, handwritten letters and notes have an extra bit of "personal touch" to them that can make them very valuable to the recipient.

However, from the time I was in High School to today I would never want to be required to write a paper, well, strictly on paper (from the beginning). I want all of that ability to quickly edit at my fingertips.

As someone who has physical problems writing by hand, papers I wrote by hand in school where better. Being forced to slow down gave me mental time to edit before I committed to page, by the time my pencil made a mark I was already on the 2nd or 3rd revision of what I was going to write.

I also have physical problems writing by hand, and it led to me handing in a lot of unfinished essays after running out of time in exams. If I hadn't gotten a special dispensation to type my exams later on, I wouldn't really have anything to show for my education. Before my issues were diagnosed, my teachers and parents felt that it was due to a lack of effort on my part and that they could punish me into writing properly, and I feel that having access to Chromebooks is worth it if it even spares one kid from having to deal with that.

On a computer I can easily rewrite the same phrase 10 times, reorganize a sentence for the best sounding flow, move or remove whole paragraphs multiple times, until I am satisfied I have said what I wanted to say in the best way I know how.

I can save off any number of possibilities and compare them side by side.

Also, none of this prevents me from spending 30 minutes beforehand thinking about what I am about to write. Although, I will admit, even if I do that I am likely to have at least a text editor open to jot down a few notes as I think about it.

I do agree, however, that the up-front thinking is a very good idea.

Okay, and? Hand written papers haven't been a thing in nearly 2 decades unless it was some form of punishment. Also, teachers don't want to have to context switch between reading each paper, adjusting to each student's handwriting

Handwritten essays are still widely used in testing environments (including those arguably most important to a student's future, AP tests).

You listed the one exception to the rule. Most AP tests (physics, math, econ, etc) don't have that. Even the SAT essay is gone. That one AP test the final stronghold for an obsolete medium

The ones you listed still have FRQs that require critical thinking. Econ is writing a paragraph and drawing a graph, as I recall, and Physics has a question where you have to reason out an experiment. And all of the history and english ones require long form writing.

Weird, I don't remember writing paragraphs for any of those tests. I took almost all the AP tests available, tho that was a decade ago. At most I labeled some axes and that was enough for perfect scores

> Okay, and?

You appear to be violently agreeing with me that there is a point to giving kids computers to use gdocs.

For me it's the lack of context switching that would get to me. I'm many years out of school (for now) but I do remember having a blank page in front of me as being somewhat inspiring. It was a new, fresh invitation to write something. Ctrl + N in a word processor just opens up a new window, and for whatever reason, doesn't carry that same weight of inspiration.

My boss always loves it when I write the documentation for my code on a wide-ruled paper in cursive instead of in our Wiki system.

ah yes of course why should a school teach kids not relevant knowledge like computer?

Perhaps to make sure that poor kids can never learn it or what is your logic behind this?

I am married to a teacher who teaches 8-9 year olds. This is her perspective from many years with that age group.

Computers and screens are introduced too early. The kids just use them to zone out and mess around.

The kids all forget their passwords, so login is a pain. To solve this the school made the same password for all. Some brat sets all the girls avatars to boobs. The various ways kids look up porn is a continual frustration.

It doesn’t add to the learning, it makes lazy teachers lives easier. Some classes play Minecraft - I’m unclear how that’s teaching. Some use iPads to take creative photos. It’s not creative and is a waste of time and lazy.

Computers have a place in schools, and it’s with older kids than 8-9 and needs to be way more prescriptive when used with <10 year olds.

Edit: Probably relevant, my wife and I went to a Steiner school, as does our kid. That system has a pretty old fashioned view on screen time and devices - as I started typing this our child stated that metal work and leather work lessons were starting soon.

>Some classes play Minecraft - I’m unclear how that’s teaching

There are definitely ways to teach within Minecraft. Redstone springs to mind, but I imagine there are others.

> The kids all forget their passwords, so login is a pain.

I really wish Google would make fingerprint sensors standard for Chromebooks.

I'm not sure collecting kids biometrics makes anything better. Fingerprints are easy to find, capture, and replicate using things students have readily available like glue or gummy bears (https://it.slashdot.org/story/10/10/28/0124242/aussie-kids-f...). Once a fingerprint is compromised the user is screwed forever because it can't be reset.

You have a point, but I don't think a thirteen year old slashdot post is the best way to illustrate it. Fingerprint authentication has to be implemented correctly, or else it does face the problem you mentioned, and other ones as well. Which Apple did. You can't steal the fingerprint out of an Apple Secure Enclave and compromise it like you're thinking. So it would need to be done right, which Google is capable of mandating for Chromebooks.

As far as Gummy bears are involved, my read of the Cisco Talos Threat Intelligence group report*, vs the competency and resources available to 13-year olds (who are not to be underestimated, tbc), is that the gummy bear trick no longer works.

* https://blog.talosintelligence.com/fingerprint-research/

How many of us learned about computers first because we were playing video games, such as minecraft? How many of us learned what a "frame" was, and learned that "RAM" and "HDD" were things?

That familiarity builds over years to give you a half decent mental model for a computer - one that is a massive aid to college freshman learning CS.

Perhaps screens are being introduced too early, certainly there is a point where a game like minecraft is not teaching, but I wouldn't dismiss the concept outright. Familiarity with computers is why some kids soar through CS degrees and others feel like they were missing some secret pre-college class.

The thing is that most schools use platforms that are mainly meant for consumption: tablets and chrome books. You're right that many people in the previous generations picked up useful skills, but that is because we were using platforms that were primarily intended for work and creation. They were also a lot less streamlined so understanding the underlying tech was a requirement to get to the good parts.

I would love to here about how Waldorf education impacted your and your wife's adult life compared to the average bear. I am so close to moving so that my child can go to a Steiner school...

Waldorf schools are dangerous anti-vax strongholds https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/nyregion/measles-outbreak...

It’s certainly there but my experience is that it isn’t that different to what goes on at the school (non Waldorf) where my wife teaches.

That said, I’m in New Zealand, which was quite highly vaccinated and also mandated vaccinations for teachers.

I rate the system for getting kids to want to learn - not just at school, after finishing schooling too.

Waldorf school have a nazi like base idea that you can evaluate people/kids based on their head forms (no joke)

Pls try not to support something like this :(

They really should just print the password and tape it to the inside of the lid...

I tend to agree.

One counter point is that I learnt how to touch type at that age at school, admittedly on an Apple II which limited most of the problems you listed. It has been a handy skill to have.

I like the idea of kids robotics with Scratch. I want to believe that there is an opportunity with children to experience the excitement of blinking an Led with a microbit for example and suspect it would be more difficult for teenagers.

Mostly I want my kids to have an understanding of what computers can be used to create earlier than later.

That's exactly what they're not going to learn. There's nobody to teach software engineering. The only thing they learn is to copy-paste from wiki into gdocs. They'll leave school with the same computer knowledge as they entered.

You don't use gdocs to learn gdocs. You use it to write an essay or something. It is a tool, like a pen.

Which is only needed at the end of secondary school, and only at higher levels. Before that, essays are very short, and should be handwritten, or they not even part of the curriculum.

If we want schools to reflect useful skills, we'd be better off introducing typing and computer skills younger and dropping the requirement for cursive penmanship.

This has already been done (in many cases, 15+ years ago) at most American grade schools -- touch-typing and computer skills instruction now starts only 1 or 2 years after handwriting instruction. This means it is introduced in 2nd or 3rd grade. (Most essay-writing remains on paper until 6th grade, though)

My mom sent me a photo of me when I was about 8 years old, playing on the home computer. It was very expensive to have a computer in Brazil at that age, and my parents used it for their work. I used it for games. I grew up using computers. Just getting the games to run, was something that needed knowledge back then. That lead me to at my teenage years, to try out programming, cause I wanted to make some changes to the open source version of a mmorpg my brother and I played. That lead me to choosing computer science. That lead me to being a FAANG engineer. I had a leg up agaisnt every single one of my peers during all my teenage and university years. When my peers were learning to use a computer, I was already programming. When they were learning to program, I was already good at it. You say that computer for young kids have no value? Useless? That computer usage was the single most valuable thing that has happened to me in all of my life!

Yeah keep scrolling down until you see that comment from a teacher who thinks it’s a distraction.

In general Just because you had a clear purpose for and interest in computers doesn’t mean it’s gonna be the same for other kids

Which open source version of an MMORPG was that? If you don't mind me asking.

Tibia.

Not to be antagonistic, but this story makes it sound like your advantage came from the fact you had a computer early and your peers didn't. If everyone gets one, there is no advantage. You've just created a new necessity instead.

That's an odd takeaway but even if you're right, people who don't use computers suffer a massive disadvantage. Even more so if all their peers used computers. Doesn't change the fact that GP's "parents, teachers, and students [...] should never have been using computers in the first place" is nonsensical flamebait

The advantage came from being better at it sooner in life. That’s an advantage for a productive society.

> If everyone gets one, there is no advantage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking

That's exactly the kind of experience kids with chromebooks issued by a school are not going to get. An old Commodore would be more helpful.

Similar experience. Having one in the 90's was a pivotal point in setting my life.

I mean you can apply this kind of comment to literally any technology. Cars, carpentry, electricity… computing is part of the fabric of society and making it totally inaccessible won’t help anyone. Imagine this:

> Who should never have been using electricity in the first place. There's really no point. Using power tools and washing machines doesn't teach anything of value. A lot of the other appliances are pricey and sometimes even detrimental to the school result.

The weird thing is: arguments change their meaning when you change the words. But indeed, washing machines wouldn't be very useful in a school.

> Who should never have been using computers in the first place.

Is... is this comment in good faith? Are you sure about that, bud? Parents and teachers shouldn't be using computers in the first place?

What a concerning and confusing view of the world.

Ironically (because related to Google), I feel that the constant churn of web development is what makes these older devices unusable.

I have several devices from early to mid 2010's, and the real reason these devices are annoying to unbearable to impossible to use (assuming Linux or Windows for security updates) is that they become very slow while just browsing the web or simply playing a video with a newer codec that has no hardware support on these older machines.

In my mind, this 10 years of updates is fantastic, but also not very practical towards the end of the support cycle. Better to have the option, though.

Generally speaking I'd suggest installing Firefox on older devices.

It's usually at least slightly more usable as long as you don't have too many tabs open.

I'd also recommend Firefox in general but that's neither here or there.

On a slightly newer machine (3 years old, 32GB memory) Firefox (or rather LibreWolf) again runs nicely with a few hundred tabs.

It would probably run fine with that amount of tabs also if it had 16 or maybe 8 GB, but not together with 2 or 3 IDE instancee, Teams, Slack and ome or more applications running in debug.

I have absolutely zero issues on 10 year old hardware with 16GByte of memory. Hundreds of tabs (Firefox is really good about moving them out of memory when they don't get used for a while - which, lets be honest, are almost all of those tabs) and the normal everyday onslaught of office software, a fat IDE, and a CAD editor.

This stuff is not rocket science. It's not even performance gaming. We worked efficiently in 2013, and it still works today. All it takes is some memory and a halfway decent SSD.

It bloody well should though, 32G is massive.

Sort of - but completely normal for a developer's desktop circa 2013, even without paying the Xeon tax.

Of course, a high school at that time might have purchased poverty-spec chromebooks with 4GB of RAM for understandable reasons of price.

So when samtheprogram talks about "devices from early to mid 2010's" that could mean a great many things.

Even going as far back as Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad, while running Linux or even mildly debloated Win10, as long as it’s been outfitted with an SSD it’s not immediately obvious I’m using a 15+ year old machine until I have to open a web browser. These machines are perfectly usable outside of the boundlessly hungry entity that is the web.

If you aggressively (and I mean really aggressively) block any and all ads you'll find that you can use that 15+ year old machine just fine on the web. The bloat is mostly in the marketing and advertising part of the web, not in the content part.

Chrome is also very resource hungry. Its great, it lives on the principle that if a machine has 16gb of RAM, it'd be stupid not to use it. Some other browsers limit themselves to the minimum but lose performance.

This is best for most people, but not for those with older devices. In that case I usually find Firefox and a mandatory adblock a lot more enjoyable than chrome+ublock. Bonus points if you have a pihole somewhere on your network.

As of a couple of years ago, I was using a mid-naughts iMac with Linux installed for a number of projects. It was fine for basic scripting, data analysis, and shell-based Web access.

A heavily adblocked Firefox struggled to handle one or two tabs, and became utterly unresponsive beyond a half dozen or so.

(My typical sessions run ... well into the 100s of tabs. Yes, I'm aware I have a problem, but browser state management otherwise entirely sucks.)

That machine's replacement is now also beginning to struggle under what I've considered typical and generally reasonable Web loads.

Until browsers start heavily penalising heavy sites, this will continue to be a problem.

And on a tablet, I find that my web browser uses battery 10x faster than my bookreading software. This for documents that tend to run 10s to 100s of time longer than a typical webpage's actual text, though not their overall memory footprint.

Interesting. I routinely have 100's of tabs open on a 10+ year old thinkbook with 16G in it (they were only sold with 8 at the time but replacing the two 4G modules with 8G modules worked, 16G does not seem to work).

Firefox has an about:performance gizmo that can tell you which tabs are misbehaving, this has already led to me blacklisting some sites completely, others just to close when not in use. Especially image carrousels can be very resource hungry.

modern browsers don't really keep hundreds of tabs open, they just keep a place holder and then return the memory back to the system as resources get low. I'm not sure why people think a browser can keep 100s of webpages open when modern webpages (tabs) often use 100MB->1GB of memory.

Browser memory management has been improving, but when that system was last running, let's just say that things were bad.

SSD or HDD?

16 GB would be about 8-16x what the system I'm describing had.

How are you blacklisting sites? Pihole/DNS, or something within Firefox itself?

1 or 2 GB of RAM? Yeah, that would've been the problem. Old CPUs can handle more than people think but there's absolutely no getting away from modern memory demands.

Yeah. 8GB of ram is pretty much the minimum usable amount these days. If you can get 8GB into an older machine (with an SSD), then it should work fine.

But 4GB? Pass.

With the right distro, 4GB with just a HDD is quite fine for Chromebook style usage.

I have a Lenovo Chromebook with 4GB and GalliumOS and it is still very capable with the latest Firefox.

Yeah something that old is gonna be heavily memory restricted, javascript chews through memory like nobody's business, then you start swapping and it's game over.

This is why AMP HTML was forced by Google - to make websites faster and more lightweight.

One solution is to use uBlock Origin, disable JS on most websites and whitelist it only for those which really need it.

Another is to use a textual web browser in the cloud, such as Carbonyl Terminal: https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal

To aggressively speed up internet just block JavaScript. I use this extension which makes it easy and convenient:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javas...

Keep js off by default and just whitest websites.

It's also very noticeable on smartphones. My phone is as snappy with native apps as when I first bought it, but every year the ridiculous amount of CPU time and memory it takes to render a basic news article increases. The last time I did upgrade phones it was specifically to get more RAM, as I was finding that modern web pages were so hungry that switching to tab n was almost always evicting tab n-1, necessitating lots of reloads if I was cross-referencing information. And that was on a Nexus 6, not a budget phone, and only a few years after its release

Have had similar experiences on iPhones. Multiple native apps can stay in memory and play nice with each other for indefinite periods, but then I need to go visit a heavy website for some reason or another and it starts booting apps out of memory. It’s ridiculous.

At home, I am still on my 2015 MacBook Pro. The only thing I wished had done with going with 16GB Memory instead of 8GB. Surprisingly Chrome and Firefox does far better with many tabs. While Safari constantly for one reason or another reload every single in-active tabs which causes insane memory paging.

Other than that, I can see it run for at least another 3-4 years if not longer.

And it is still faster than my brand new 2023 Windows PC I have at work due to all the security shit they put on it.

I'm still using a 3rd gen i5 machine as my daily driver. It's only just now getting to the point that I'm thinking about upgrading. And even then, it's really only that I need more cores. Quad core just isn't cutting it for my C++ compilation.

Then again, I've been shifting a lot of my compute load onto a 10 year old dual Xeon server. It's good enough for most things

I had a Macbook 12" for a while and it was fantastic. However YouTube brought it to a crawl, as did Google Maps. Everything else rant quite fine.

Slowdown can also be due to the soldered NAND flash slowly wearing out - not necessarily because the device is underpowered.

Certainly the Nexus 7 (2012) had that problem (became completely unusably slow after a few years) and I am sure I have seen the same issue with other devices (Android phones and one iPad I had).

My daily driver is a system76 from 2015 and it works perfectly fine. However, I plan to replace it with a 16" framework so I can ditch my desktop and use the laptop for gaming.

8 year old _desktop_ computers (that have anywhere from 3 to 6x more watts hitting the CPU) are one thing. Also consider whether your machine has a dedicated GPU. A Chromebook or other budget-to-mid-range laptop from 2015 would have a different experience, although I'm sure they're still usable.

I was daily driving a 2009 MacBook Pro for a while in 2018. It was... fine, especially as a Vim user, but if someone else used my computer, they would most certainly comment or complain with normal web browsing.

(Self plug)

We senselessly use RIAs for everything

https://www.radicalsimpli.city/

I'm writing this comment on a 2011 MacBook Pro (admittedly a fast machine at the time) with a busted graphics chip, running current Linux and Firefox, and my experience of the web is basically fine, including video. Some JS-heavy app-like sites are slow, but those are slow on my monster truck of an office workstation too.

til "PIRG"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Research_Gro...

> Google and other tech companies should continue to find ways to stop the disposability treadmill that pressures us to replace our phones and laptops in favor of newer models.

The treadmill is powered by "intellectual property". Abolish "owning" ideas, and you abolish the treadmill. Capitalism would solve this issue if it were allowed to run its course. Unfortunately we've let artificial monopolies run rampant in the name of "innovation". All that we've innovated is screwing people over as much as possible.

Intellectual property is capital. Advocating for communal ownership for the intellectual means of production is more communist than it is capitalist.

The market can then fix it once you've removed intellectual capitalism from the equation.

There are plenty of capitalists who would disagree by arguing that "intellectual property" isn't capital because such thing isn't even possible. Many anarcho-capitalists hold this position. I'm not versed enough to argue it in depth, but the basic premise is that you can't "own" an idea/thought, and there's no scarcity at play with ideas so it fails the basic test for property.

I guess the system worked around that limitation by hiring people with ideas and have them sign NDAs.

Bitcoin is commonly held to be worth something, i.e., an asset. But there are many who argue that its “true” value is 0. Something similar to that divergence is happening here. We, as a society, have a convention, a habit, where copyrighted works, trademarks, mining rights, etc. are restricted by law to be controlled by a single legal entity. This makes these a tradable commodity. But if the law did not apply to these, they would become worthless. It is, in fact, these laws which have created this tradable commodity from nothing. Other laws could be created to do the same to any number of currently freely available things; this does not prove that these things should be covered by such laws merely because it would create a kind of property which would have value.

It would be nice if the solution wasn't "restructure society" because if that's true what will really happen is nothing changes.

This is a very dangerous mindset. Copyright is only a couple hundred years old and much younger in many countries. Many parts of modern copyright (notably the infamous DMCA and equivalent non-US laws) were introduced within our lifetimes. We did restructure society but in the wrong direction, lets not pretend we can't fix that.

> The treadmill is powered by "intellectual property". Abolish "owning" ideas, and you abolish the treadmill.

How so?

A lot of devices become obsolete by no longer receiving security and compatibilty updates long before the hardware is unusable.

Exactly. If a single company could not be granted an artificial monopoly over upgrading and repairing a system due to "intellectual property" laws, no company could decide when a device has become EOL. If anyone could maintain a system, anyone would maintain a system.

I'm not sure Chromebooks are the best example of this issue. Last I checked you can install normal Linux on one.

With some caveats. I've run used chromebooks as my only laptop for about 5 or 6 years now. You have to undo write protection (usually a screw on the motherboard) and flash an aftermarket firmware.

Does normal linux provide firmware updates for chromebook-specific hardware?

I never said they were the best example. Nor was that really the sentiment of the comment I originally replied to, or my reply to it.

> Google and other tech companies should continue to find ways to stop the disposability treadmill that pressures us to replace our phones and laptops in favor of newer models. With e-waste the fastest growing waste-stream in the U.S., it’s not sustainable to consume technology at this rate. This is a meaningful step toward a tech industry making products designed to last.

Uh-huh. Alternatively you could go back to books, pencil and paper.

Like most schools around the world still do today.

I am really heartbroken by your response, I always feel the world/society should fight planned obsolescence. people/planet over profits. and then I see a person responding with a joke (I hope you don't mean it) when we(society) have means to make products last but some corporation chose profits against it and then greenwash with 5min mother earth videos. I know you are aware/heard of planned obsolescence. some people complain, these corporations have to maintain and it costs them, but those people don't realise We are gifted with wonderful opensource community like (pixelexperience os maintainers). These corporation can design it to make it easy for opensource community to maintain it after EOL.

Since you are here in HN, there is high probability you are one of the geeks in industry. I hope you fight for "planet/people over profits".

>I am really heartbroken by your response, I always feel the world/society should fight planned obsolescence.

alternative explanation - they feel there is overuse of computing devices and that one could really go back to pencil and paper for lots of tasks.

‘Uh-huh’ changes that context and makes it sarcastic.

Uh-huh. That's about twenty extra steps compared to going back to books, pencil and paper.

yeah, that might be true, with all that's going on the news,my first thought was that the commenter is linking planned obsolescence with technology progress (sarcastically). Thanks for the perspective. There are days when I felt the urge to forgo the computing and go back 5 years when world is hopeful and not overwhelmed with computing

I have many of my old notebooks that I wrote in as a child. The amount of paper and ink I used was a lot. Multiply that times all the children and you see how much paper is used vs. typing on a computer.

Sometimes the technology route is better, now what we need to do is make it more sustainable.

There's a lot more resources that go into 1g of computing devices than 1g of paper and writing utensils. Several orders of magnitude more.

Better to mine some cobalt than to cut down some trees eh. (This time I'm being sarcastic.)

You have to either be very young or be very LCD-brained if you think advocating for simple, effective, time-tested teaching methods must necessarily be sarcastic.

Yeah! We should keep kids away from technology that has reached 100% saturation in all other parts of society. Schools, as places for learning, definitely shouldn't integrate tech into teaching-- after all, school is definitely only about teaching outmoded skills and not about preparing children to integrate with society.

The old way wasn't broken so why fix it, after all.

Exactly. School is about teaching and books+pen+paper is perfectly adequate for most things that they teach in elementary school.

What do you even lose by not having a laptop per child? Most of us suck at using software. Well, correction: most software sucks to use. And when has someone like an elementary teacher made a child better at using a computer..? It feels like a joke just asking that question.

And unless Bret Victor (or someone like him) has revolutionized digital teaching I'll bet that modern digital teaching is not categorically differen than the old ways (pdfs?).

Yikes.

> Most of us suck at using software.

It's so weird to me that you'd use this as logic for NOT teaching tech in schools.

If only there were some mechanism society had to convey knowledge about how to interact with society and common, everyday things, like some sort of centralized location you can go to where you're given the opportunity to gather and explore new information. Ideally, we'd work this concept into society in a way that the younger generation would gain these skills as soon as possible in their lives, and we'd put effort into making sure the individuals conveying that information possessed the skills they are teaching (again, through some sort of societal mechanism to instill basic knowledge)

Can you think of something like that?

By obliquely and sarcastically referring to the teaching institution you have convinced me. Well played.

> > And when has someone like an elementary teacher made a child better at using a computer..? It feels like a joke just asking that question.

> > > And when has someone like an elementary teacher made a child better at using a computer..? It feels like a joke just asking that question.

You're quoting this again as if it isn't critically damning to the position you're trying to convey. As though you actually believe the existence of ignorance is a logical excuse to continue perpetuating ignorance.

If only some facility had existed in that elementary school teacher's life that had instilled those skills in a way that it wouldn't be a joke?

I don't know, maybe like some sort of centralized institution where you can go to gain knowledge about basic concepts you might encounter when interacting with society. Some sort of... societal mechanism for ensuring people are competent enough to interact with their world.

Can you think of something like that?

> By obliquely and sarcastically referring to the teaching institution you have convinced me. Well played.

Well, having it stated plainly for you clearly hasn't done the trick. Sometimes different approaches are needed!

They should have written to the schools to ban these devices.

This is why we need money spent on recycling and proper cleanup. Not just shipping things to countries with lesser economies and lighting the piles of garbage on fire, but taxing profits of these devices and creating jobs for salvaging and turning the garbage back into resources that can be re-"mined" (so to speak, but from storage areas).

If this is considered unrealistic, OK, then we're right back to the same problem no matter which form of garbage we're creating.

>Starting in 2024, if you have Chromebooks that were released from 2021 onwards, you’ll automatically get 10 years of updates.

Nice of them to cover a few from the last few years as well. From a school standpoint, this is a big win. I doubt many chromebooks in active use by students would even last 10 years.

I don't think it's even covering just the last few years but goes back further than that:

> For Chromebooks released before 2021 and already in use, users and IT admins will have the option to extend automatic updates to 10 years from the platform’s release (after they receive their last automatic update).

I don't entirely understand why the 2021 cutoff for it being opt-in vs. opt-out is there. Maybe it's about the "already in use" bit somehow, and making sure that pre-2021 models don't continue being manufactured and sold as as new.

I’m wondering if that will be a paid option. That’s how the last stage of support for commercial OSes often works.

I have an original Pixelbook (late 2017 release date) and the auto update support page [1] has been updated from June 2024 to June 2027 (with an asterisk saying it is user opt in but that's all I can see). So at first glance it doesn't seem to be paid.

My Pixelbook doesn't get much use anymore vs my M1 MacBook but it's nice to know it will still be supported. It can be a handy thin client and I don't have to worry as much about it getting stolen/abusing at this point in its life.

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?visit_id=...

My guess is that they’ve received commitments since 2021 on parts and drivers for 10 years, and don’t have those commitments prior to that date, so they’re only offering opt-in OS updates that will be under subtly different terms for liability indemnity purposes.

Might also be a case of minimal RAM/SSD requirement and OS build using reasonable new compiler.

HW might also be more standarized today, e.g. using USB internally for webcam and keyboard.

The footnote says

> For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services may not be supported.

So.. they might need to rip out some problematic drivers, maybe? Like, imagine the bluetooth chip vendor not being cooperative, you get to choose to continue updates but losing bluetooth as a feature.

The footnote continues

> See our Help Center for details.

So kudos to first one dig out the exact page they're referring to (there's no link).

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en That one, had link for me.

Except that also just ends with

> ** For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services might not be supported.

which doesn't really say anything...

> imagine the bluetooth chip vendor not being cooperative

no, then you tell them that if they dont play ball, they will NEVER sell a single chip to anything google ever again, and then you hire some people to reverse engineer the shit, and make it work anyway. And then you publish all about how company X is being stupid and trying to work against efforts to save the environment, how they are trying very hard to make money on peoples hardware being obsoleted before time etc.

But then we realize that google themselves have bummed out to large extents with what they have permitted on android and chromebooks, so anything like this would not happen

Good luck with that, in case the company goes out of business?

In that case, it's easy for Google to never buy from them again.

Tell me you have never worked with hardware suppliers without telling me you have never worked with hardware suppliers.

Imagine that the part you want (given the constraints, etc.) has maybe two suppliers. You pick one of them and use them in your product. Then they drop support and you pull this stunt. What do you think will happen? People will storm the company with pitchforks and they'll quietly release their full source code and promise to never do that ever again?

No, what's actually going to happen is you're going to write a blog post, Hacker News is going to be like "yeah I worked with that supplier once, never again" and the average consumer is going to be like "who is this company?" and it will be forgotten by next week. Your reverse engineered drivers, which you of course spent millions of dollars on hiring top-tier engineers to make, will ship and the company will immediately sue you for infringement. Maybe if you did a very careful job you might be able to claim some sort of interoperatability defense and win the case years from now. Before then the court will grant an injunction preventing the sale of your device.

There's no need to tell the supplier that you will never work with them again. You've ruined the relationship already. And the other supplier? They probably won't work with you either, because they're doing the same thing and would like to keep doing it, thank you very much. Oh, you think you're Google so people will care about your business? They're selling 10x the volume to Samsung for their smart fridges. And now you get to I guess create an entire division to create a Bluetooth chip from scratch. By the way leadership wants to ship Pixel 9 on time so can you please have it ready by December? And it needs to support all the latest features because it would truly suck if Apple shipped Bluetooth 6.5 support before we did.

perhaps if it was something mega complex, but we are talking a bluetooth chip, hardly an unwinnable scenario for google.

are you saying for real that google isnt big enough to get its way with these things? they could buy these puny suppliers, piss on every desk in their offices, and close them down, just for fun if they so wanted.

and how come this "sued into oblivion" doesnt happen when the community writes drivers for linux in the cases where vendors do not play ball? are you saying theres absolutely no way google could pay money to make this happen?

get real

Bluetooth chips are complex. That’s why the companies that make them are worth billions of dollars and have thousands of employees. Making a phone is also very complex but it would be exponentially so if every component had to be made in-house and not purchased from another supplier that is an expert in that area.

The way companies express their pique is that they try to aggressively poach engineers from the company to make their own in-house team, in a process that frequently takes years. All the time they continue buying chips because until that is complete they don’t actually have any Bluetooth chips to ship in their products. Even then the process frequently doesn’t work because it turns out that throwing a billion dollars at something doesn’t necessarily mean you can make what the other company has spent 25 years on. If you want examples, just look at Apple: they aggressively pull things they think are strategic into their own hardware team, and they still talk to a bunch of terrible suppliers because they aren’t willing to shell out the money to do it themselves and they don’t consider it worth going to war over. And the things that they do actually try to make (modems, for example) frequently don’t work out.

Nobody is going to sue a guy in his basement working on Linux drivers. You can scare him with lawyers but fundamentally there’s not much that you can extract from them. But going after Google for IP infringement in a phone that sold ten million units is actually very much worth it.

I think you feel that Google has infinite money to just use on tantrums and despite them having a lot of money their is probably no entity on earth that can engage in these kinds of things regularly and get away with it. Companies are not like people. Even the smallest ones have legal teams that can make engaging with them very painful. And in hardware people have a ton of options to sell to, so you’re just a tiny piece of anyone’s pie.

bluetooth chips are more complex than producing spoons, sure.

Google could EASILY do this, they just do not care. Nobody would come after them if they reverse engineered drivers for bluetooth chips.

but it would never come to that, they could just announce that bluetooth drivers now have to be open source to quality for play store shit, and it would be done. they have 1 million ways to get what they care about, they just dont

What is the source of your confidence?

my source is that google/alphabet is in the top 5 biggest companies in the world, I consider it quite within the realm of google to decide to solve having open source drivers for some bluetooth crap. regular small guys can reverse engineer more complex stuff in their basement, google can fund that, or do it themselves, or outright buy the bluetooth companies should they want to.

my spidey-sense is telling me that a giant megacompany that dwarfs bluetooth companies could probably manage to solve this, and easily at that

Your spidey-sense is wrong, for the reasons I specified. It is not economical to do this. The effective way to solve open source Bluetooth drivers is with a carrot, not a stick, regardless of how satisfying it would be to try to beat bad companies with it.

I do not believe that it is beyond google to produce bluetooth drivers, or even bluetooth hardware.

It can no doubt solve it cheaper, but it can for sure solve it

Unfortunately, the supply chain often goes 3 and 4 levels deep. And by the time you get to companies that far in the supply chain, (a) no one has ever heard of that company, so the trying to threaten them with reputational damage doesn't really work (it will be some random set of chinese characters for a company in Shenzhen, for example), and (b) it will turn out that the team that wrote the device driver for that particular subcomponent in the SOC was disbanded as soon as the part was released, and 4 years later, half are working for a different company, and half were died during the COVID pandemic.

Sure, if you could set the Wayback machine back in time, and require that device driver be upstreamed, with enough programming information so it's possible to maintain the device driver, maybe it would be possible to upgrade to a newer kernel that doesn't have eleven hundred zero-day vulnerabilities. But meanwhile, back in the real world, very often there's not a whole lot you can do. So this is why it's kind of sad when people insist on buying Nvidia video chips that have proprietary blobs because performance, or power consumption, or whatever, instead of the more boring alternative that doesn't have the same eye-bleeding performance, but which has an open source device driver. Our buying choices, and the product reviewers that only consider performance, or battery life, etc., drives the supply chain, and the products that we get. And this is why we can't have nice things.

There was an article from the WSJ that wrecks Google for e-waste due to not supporting Chromebooks past 5 years. A lot of chromebooks were purchased from 2020 due to the pandemic. It's not the date of purchase that determines obsolescence, so many were coming up to be thrown away.

It would be better if Google defaults to supporting 2020, 2019 (Many purchased in 2020 were manufactured in 2019).

If you where cheaping out an bought Windows 10 devices in 2020, you'd also only get 5 years of support.

I worked an inner city public school system's well funded IT department about a decade ago. Chromebooks had just been distributed to all students with grant money. After the first year, about 1/5 laptops needed major repair. None of them would make it to 5 years.

> After the first year, about 1/5 laptops needed major repair. None of them would make it to 5 years.

The second sentenxe doesn't follow the first - it's a flavor of Zeno's paradox, after 5 years, you'll be left with 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 of the original batch.

This assumes that 1/5 of them break every year which is probably not the case, older laptops will break more frequently.

On the other hand, considering we are talking about kids breaking laptops, this failures are much more random, a brand new laptop is not that much more likely to survive a fall than an old one.

If the older laptop has already "survived" a fall, yes, it is abosolutely more likely to break from the same fall than the new laptop.

You're assuming that 4/5 of the laptops remained in pristine condition. I doubt that very much. You need to take account for the ordinary wear and tear compounded together with the impact of abusive 1/5 of users that do an excessive amount of damage (requiring a total overhaul.)

And anyway, if 1/5 of laptops needed major repairs and some of them got it, those go back into circulation. Are they still original laptops? (Ask my grandfather's axe...)

> The second sentenxe doesn't follow the first - it's a flavor of Zeno's paradox, after 5 years, you'll be left with 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 of the original batch.

You made a mistake: it's not that 1/5 of the computers spontaneously break every year. It's that 1/5 of the students treat their computers roughly.

Assuming that laptops get collected over the summer and re-distributed each year, you should actually expect that 100% of each tranche of laptops would need to be replaced every 5 years.

I don't understand how that math could work. Assuming random assignment, the probability that a given computer is given to a one of those students is identical from year to year.

> I don't understand how that math could work. Assuming random assignment, the probability that a given computer is given to a one of those students is identical from year to year.

That's fair. I guess, it's more accurate to say that you'd expect a number of laptops equal to the size of the initial tranche to be destroyed after the first 5 years.

Although if I was running IT, it'd definitely keep track of the "destructive" students and issue them the oldest equipment, in which case, we'd be back to something closer to my original statement.

For things which are effectively integers there is no paradox when your division results in a number less than one you have nothing or perhaps more accurately a probability of having 1 but any given instance in actuality has either 1 or zero. Also equipment failure isn't a linear thing its a curve as things reach expected lifespan. For instance a battery which is nontrivial to replace has an expected number of charge cycles until your battery is so shot you can't really use it off a charger any longer. An increasing number of mechanical hard drives fail, charger sockets start failing. Heating and cooling cycles cause progressive degradation of electronics.

You absolutely could design it to last 20 years with batteries that are easy to pop out and pop in as easy as changing a double aa but your customers won't pay a premium over a more disposable machine and indeed if your customer has a good experience over the 3-5 they actually use it for you make MORE if your hardware is designed to need replacement.

All data you have from the author's sentence is the first year, none about the following ones, then the conclusion that none last the full five years. But you assumed it's 1/5th per year, every year.

Anyway, it doesn't matter much either way, even if there's a few that survive, they will be having wear and tear to the point you wouldn't want another student to have them (or maybe as a replacement for a broken one); you wouldn't want some year 1 students to get a new ones while others get the year 4/5 leftovers, they'll resent it for sure.

Second, they'll be paid off after a few years.

Colloquial comment doesn't need to meet mathematical rigor. He's just saying that these laptops do not last.

Failure doesn't work that way.

It's not the case that there's a constant 1/5 probability of failure each year. Many failure modes are based on cumulative stress/degradation; so the probability of failure can go up over time.

Some failure modes go down over time; maybe there's some manufacturing defect, and those that have the defect fail early, while those that survive past the first year will have lower chances of failure early on.

But in this kind of environment, the cumulative stresses are much more likely than the early failures.

This was the case. There were no pristine laptops. Some kids are gentle with them, but things happen outside their control, kids play destructive pranks, or are just clumsy. Theoretically possible to make it to 5 years? Sure. Practically? No.

They’re much more robust today

I've seen some of the chromebooks at my daughter's school and they are beyond abused by the kids. Missing keys, screens cracked, you name it. My daughter's is in pristine condition, though!

Pretty soon we'll see kids making their own covers and protective cases for Chromebooks like we did back in the day with our textbooks

Was it an issue with Chromebooks specifically, or just a general consequence of heavily-used shared laptops?

Chromebooks are made out of plastic, children are not very careful, and people don't value free things they're given.

Pedagogically, it would seem the answer to that would be to have the classroom be a computer lab on the first day of school, and then make the kids work (running laps, taking quizzes on having done the reading) before they earn the laptop to take home.

But then you can't export the work of designing and implementing homework into some faceless corporation who's only real goal is to appeal to administrators, not teachers or kids, certainly not to match course material or learn.

I've seen an explosion of online homework recently and it's all confusing and either way to easy or waaayyyy too hard with very little of the partial credit and recourse that an actual person grading a paper assignment has.

Which comes from the same place that Microsoft Teams craptacularity comes from. The people buying the product aren't the ones using it. Computerized homework could auto adjust to be not too hard and not too easy, by changing the difficulty of the next problem, based on how the student did with the previous problem. But implementing that is beyond our capabilities, apparently.

Nah, that won't work either, kids forget about that very fast. You don't sound like you've got kids yourself either.

Kids aren't all or nothing. They remember, and they also forget.

The only thing that really works are repeated reminders and attentive consequences, over a sustained period of time.

Also, adults don't typically have coworkers grab their laptop and smash it because they're disliked.

Teachers were building lesson plans around everything being on the laptop, and that all students would have one available. A student couldn’t just be restricted to not taking laptops home, because that means that student either can’t do their homework, or has to do their homework afterschool, which would require parent involvement.

The sorts of kids with laptop issues were not the children with high parent involvement.

Plastic isn't necessarily a bad thing, metal tends to dent and deform while plastic has some elasticity. It depends on what plastic they use.

E.g. thinkpads usually use a composite plastic (carbon/glass fiber), which makes them lightweight, durable, and thermally insulated from your body. Chromebooks definitely use the cheap stuff though.

I have a ThinkPad Chromebook and it is very solid and durable, even though it was a bargain.

We had macbook airs at school and they were similarly destroyed because people would just carelessly chuck them around.

> Chromebooks are made out of plastic

Wait to see what happens to devices made of glass !

Jest aside, any device lasting even two or three years in a school environment is kinda of a big deal given the daily abuse it will get.

>After the first year, about 1/5 laptops needed major repair. None of them would make it to 5 years

Do you believe a Mac or Windows laptop would have been more reliable given the abuse they were subjected to?

I think a simple fix would be a psychological, not technical one. Simply, it's "their" laptop. They don't return it at the end of the year and if they keep it in good form, then they have one. If they don't; they don't.

And when they don't, what? The workhouse?

They'll get a crappier bulky version.

So like the office then? Your 12" light laptop that you use for travel breaks? No worries, here is a 17" 8 year old machine that will break your back carrying around everywhere, and cant be used on a airplane.

My work has solved this problem by making everyone have the crappy huge laptop. 7000+ employees, everyone gets to choose from a menu of one.

That approach doesn't really work with children.

Removing student access to technology is overly punitive and does not support the intended learning and development outcomes of attending school.

To ostracize a child because they damaged their laptop is psychological abuse.

We can just help them take better care of it and reinforce the reasons why and train them to do so! :-)

The reality is some people take care of their stuff others dont.

I see adults with absolute garbage looking iPhones. Some people just do not care. Others do. There is some amount of 'psychological' you can do to fix some of it. But at the end of the day you will have a mix of 'sorta broke', 'broken', 'did you ever take it out of the box'.

Then on top of that. There is a level of junk products. I have a high end laptop I absolutely baby. That thing is a piece of rubish and in a year or so I am going to gladly get rid of it. It has major defects ~2 years in. The previous 3 laptops I had were in very good condition for 5+ years each until the plastic literally started detreating. The same ODM's making that laptop are also making chromebooks. My only option to fix this is by buying used parts of sites like ebay. Or be without my primary computer for 4-8 weeks. Chromebooks margins have to be decently thin or they would not sell them that cheap. Which probably means the things are kind of junk too.

Mildly. Some classes had MacBook airs, which were a bit more durable to the sorts of abuse that would happen, but they costed 3x as much, and didn’t take 3x the punishment. I can’t imagine a solution beyond ‘give them the cheapest thing possible’ which happens to still be chromebooks.

Having participated in a one-laptop-per-student pilot program ages ago, with Fujitsu tablet convertibles that were very much plastic painted to look like brushed metal, I had problems keeping my laptop intact too - since I was constantly running between classes, sandwiching my laptop between textbooks, the case plastics didn’t last the year. But laptops were much, much heavier then.

I think an individual device not making it 5 year would be fine.

A big issue with chromebooks in particular: there's many discreet models of different sizes and builds, that all require different parts, and don't get renewed every year.

One school ordering 400 12" HP chromebooks for instance will have no guarantee to be able to order another batch 2 years later, even of an equivalent machine that could be a straight replacement.

Perhaps Dell has a more stable offering given they probably understand these problematics better ?

I've been dating a 6th grade teacher in a SV adjacent town, and hearing how she attempts to teach with these things is hard to imagine for me even though I was a computer nerds as a kid.

They have like 5 different saas programs/platforms they use. They also have video platforms. Reading, library checkout, digital media, quizzes, tests, who knows.

If I was a kid without add, I would for sure have it having to use that stuff at 11 years old.

I'm not sure who thought doing away with pen and paper and a simple book in front of you was a good idea.

I assume it was an IT/software salesperson with ability to give kickbacks.

I agree, but at the same time, this is an extension from 8 to 10 years. While this will surely buy time for many schools to upgrade, we can all be prepared for a re-hash of this kerfuffle in 2 years.

What laptops are we seriously expecting to last more than 10 years? I wouldn't expect that from a MacBook Pro or a Thinkpad, let alone a $300 Chromebook.

Any Apple laptop has a good chance? My 2011 MacBook Air still works fine (as does the 2013) - the main problem is software support. You’re not playing games on that but it’s fine for email / web / video chat / office docs and light coding. Each of the earlier ones I had was replaced for performance reasons, not failure other than hard drives back when spinning metal was the norm.

>the main problem is software support

Hopefully this announcement will put some pressure on Apple to do the same.

Agreed. They have the lease excuse of any vendor to say drivers are hard to support.

Apple has been top of the industry in terms of length of OS/software support for their devices.

My iPhone 8 is still supported by the current iOS (no longer by 17, womp womp.) It's nearly seven years old, is still on its first battery with about 79% capacity left and it hasn't gone into brownout-prevention mode yet. I'm figuring that with the new iOS release it probably won't be supported, but who knows.

A few whiz-bang features aren't supported; fancy but kinda useless webcam stuff, and newer iPhones can do more extensive object recognition in photos like bugs and plants that I think my phone won't do.

I'm not missing much aside from better cellular band support, which is kind of a wash because my phone has a qualcomm modem and Apple's switch to intel modems didn't go well.

Even the newer cameras aren't tempting because a generation or two after the 8 and X, they all became inflicted with Apple's horrifically bad "AI" image processing that makes everything look like a watercolor painting.

>Apple has been top of the industry in terms of length of OS/software support for their devices.

They have for phones but I think they could do better when it comes to the computers.

Also it would be nice to have a formal statement of what their intentions are.

As an example I have no idea how long my four year old Mac Mini will continue to get updates for.

The average lifespan of a desktop is five years, and for a laptop, 3-5. All of you bitching about how computers older than ten years old not being supported is some massive injustice are completely divorced from reality in the marketplace.

Apple provides security updates for the prior two releases, which means that damn near any Mac made in the last ten years, even without Opencore Legacy, is still receiving security updates.

My 2013 Macbook Pro will run the current MacOS release with Opencore Legacy. That's a now-ten-year-old computer running the current OS release.

Anyone who uses their computer for a significant period of time, and especially to make money, who does not upgrade more quickly than every ten years, isn't very smart. It doesn't take long, waiting for your computer every day, before it's costing you more in lost productivity than it would be to replace it with something newer, especially if you buy used.

Claiming that a ten year old laptop, Apple or otherwise, is "perfectly usable" is a joke by people who clearly haven't spent any appreciable time using current hardware, which is by every single measure enormously better.

> Apple has been top of the industry in terms of length of OS/software support for their devices.

For phones and tablets, sure. For desktops/laptops, Linux outdoes them handily. My mid-2012 MacBook Pro can run Catalina at the latest, which has been outdated for several years and unsupported since last year. But I can still install a current Linux distro on a machine of that era just fine.

This doesn’t absolve Apple of their lack of support for older Macs, but if you want to keep using that MacBook on a more modern MacOS, take a look at Open Core Legacy Patcher. Have Monterey on my 2012 Mac mini and it’s working great.

Linux, with 3% market share, is not "part of the industry" for personal computers like laptops and desktops.

The only valid comparison is versus Windows, because only Windows has similar capabilities and user experience.

Same here. My family uses my MacBook Pro from 2009 on a daily basis, the original unibody model.

Zero issues, I just had to migrate to Linux to get OS updates. It has pretty damn good reliability.

Hardware can last pretty long, it is wasteful not to bother releasing software updates.

As (The Verge's article[https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/14/23873319/google-chromeboo...]) about this points out

``` The company currently guarantees eight years of automatic updates to Chromebooks. That period, however, begins at the time when the company certifies a Chromebook, not when it’s actually in the owner’s hands. Because of the time it takes schools and businesses to purchase, receive, set up, and deploy new fleets of computers, they commonly end up getting four to five years of use out of them in practice. ```

so this is really about ensuring that the laptops actually get 5 years of use before needing to be replaced.

My experience is different. My experience is that the failures are pretty random.

If you expect to lose 20% of laptops each year, after a decade, about 10% of laptops will still work after a decade. It's more if you are willing to work around issues (e.g. epoxy a crack or replace a part).

It's crappy if you need to toss otherwise good computers purely due to a software issue.

My opinion about 10 years ago (most likely affected by inflation now) was that a laptop costs roughly $100/year. When I had an inexpensive $300 laptop, it lasted about 3 years. In that time I opened the case multiple times to fix problems, usually involving overheating. Towards the end the laptop was unusably slow and unable to play full-screen video. When I bought a $1000 laptop, it so far has lasted 8 years and counting. I opened it once to upgrade the memory, and once again to simply tighten screws to reduce the chassis flex that had gotten worse over time.

Failures are random and infrequent if you start with good hardware. Sadly, in my experience a lot of cheap laptops do not come with reliable hardware.

My buddy will be delighted to know that his $4700 MacBook is good to go until 2069

It's less about price than about grades of laptop.

For example, if you buy Lenovo, the Idea* laptops will be junk laptops, while Think* will be pretty good quality. There are sub-grades within both. With Dell, there are usually several series with names changing periodically. In the Latitude series, the first number corresponded to quality when I last bought. 3xxx is junk. 5xxx is decent. 7xxx is good. There are similar divisions in their consumer lines.

It's possible to find very good reliable laptops if you're willing to live with last years' model, and especially with off-lease premium laptops. Corporate environments will often lease a thousand premium laptops for three years, not stress them very hard, and then they're sold for a song as there's a corporate-wide refresh.

> I wouldn't expect that from (...) a Thinkpad

You wouldn't? I have an X230 and it still works fine/is perfectly usable, and that's over 10 years old at this point. Why would you not expect a laptop to last more than 10 years?

Rugged Chromebooks? I still use Acer R11s (albeit these are non-rugged) that were released in 2015 -- almost 10 years ago.

Software should not be a limiting factor in the lifespan of a laptop. If the hardware breaks and you toss it, I think that's much more acceptable than tossing it when the hardware still works but the software is out of date.

2008 ThinkPad t400 user here, running Ubuntu. Most business class notebooks are incredibly durable and the market offers replacement parts for 10 of 15 year old devices. A t400 battery is less than 25€ on Amazon and there are dozens of vendors.

I still lug a T430 around. Runs Win 11, hyper-v and 1 bazillion tabs across multiple browsers.

As I said, the previous window was 8 years. Presumably schools are able to get end up with enough 8 year EOL laptops to have caused a storm about it. If they were manage cause that miracle, then they can probably manage to get enough of them to 10 years as well.

(And yes, I know what the real answer is - they bought bargain bin laptops like 4-6 years after RTM, so they only have like 2-4 years of actual wear and tear on them. Given their carelessness the first time, I wouldn't rule out a repeat in 2 years).

If the hardware is still working, and the battery works enough to run off AC, even a 10 year old machine is still usable for a lot of stuff.

I got an Acer Chromebook C720 in 2013ish, and the dual-core Celeron 2955U (Haswell) with 4GB of RAM is still ok. The touchpad stopped working in mine, and I dunno how bad the battery is, and I installed FreeBSD for fun after ChromeOS stopped updating, but I bet it'd run ChromeOS Flex no problem. It doesn't have the virtualization extension needed to run Android apps (not part of ChromeOS Flex anyway), but I don't think there's anything else missing really.

I'll probably install ChromeOS Flex on my Lenovo ThinkPad 13 Chromebook after I let the final official OS update simmer a bit more (it's a pain to get to the firmware write protect screw), it's a much nicer case and a little bit newer processor, but otherwise pretty close to the Acer one; and the touch pad still works. OTOH, I don't think I can change out the storage and as I mentioned the write protect screw is hard to access.

My father had been using a laptop he got in 2011 (I5-2410m) until a few months ago when I bought him a mini PC with an Intel N95, he didn't even want to switch because for the most part everything worked pretty well and why wouldn't it? The i5-2410m is faster than the Celeron N4020, which is commonly found in many ChromeBooks and budget laptops today, and the i5-2410m wasn't even the best mobile processor back then. Many cheap laptops today are also limited to a soldered-on 4GB of RAM, but most older laptops can be upgraded to 8GB.

I have several other laptops from 2011 which are even weaker (One with I5-560M (upgraded from 380M for 6$) and other with I3-2310M) and they are also mostly fine for web browsing and office, and capable of playing 1080p YouTube video even without hardware acceleration (they don't have VP9 decoding),with H264ify CPU usage drops to 30-40 percents.

With progress in semiconductors slowing down i would expect laptops to last even longer, but with manufactures soldering down RAM and sometimes even SSD maybe that won't be the case. Cause if i wouldn't be able to replaces HHD with SSD and upgrade RAM on these old laptops they would be garbage long time ago.

My personal laptop is a Thinkpad x250 from 2015. That is "only" 8 years old at this point, but I have every intention of continuing to use it for the foreseeable future.

My MacBook Pro 2015 still trundles along just fine, and while that isn’t exactly 10 years it’s getting there. I did replace it with an M1 air for my personal use but my wife is still quite happy with it. The only thing that has needed replacement despite its hefty usage has been the power cable which fell apart at one point. Maybe it had seen too much sun? Not sure exactly, but the plastic sure disintegrated.

I’m not sure I’ll ever really need to replace my M1. I could technically still work on the pro, and I mostly got the M1 because of hype, but I really don’t see what is going to increase my systems requirements in the next 20 years to be beyond what the m1 is currently doing. Maybe if I start doing more compiling on it instead of in the cloud? But I really think we’re at the point where it’ll physically break before the spec become obsolete, or alternatively, that it’ll stop getting updates from Apple. At which point I guess it can just live on with Linux.

I have an HP Elitebook 8460p that was released in 2011 and is still working really well.

It got ssd and battery replacements + memory upgrade though.

I run a small convention that just needs some easy to setup web kiosks to use for checkin. We bought a lot of 30 surplus Chromebooks at $15 each a few years ago, but we're throwing them out because of lack of support.

Why not just isolate their network and keep using them? I can't imagine this being a big risk for a convention checkin system.

I bought an eeepc netbook in 2008. It was my main computer until 2012, spent several years sitting on a shelf, and now is my daughter's. It's still doing fine, as are the two other eeepcs people in my family bought around the same time.

It's not useful for very much, since it's way underpowered for most things you might want to do today, but it still works for typing and basic networking.

Oh Lord. There are lots of early teens/late oughts laptops out there being used today. Non-power-user laptop specs haven't really changed that much since then (4G of ram and 500G of storage) and normal people don't actually care about their processor or graphics card.

I was shift lead for a SIEM team when lockdown started and the number of 2009-2011 era machines that got pulled out of a closet and brought online when remote work started was staggering.

I still have functioning Thinkpads from 2011. They run well with SATA SSDs and minimal Linux distros, and they're handy in the garage or on a workbench where you might not your expensive devices lying around but need to reference technical data.

I am using a 12 year old Thinkpad as a secondary device. I don't see why it won't last me another 10. It runs a responsive and quite good looking modern Linux desktop environment from a HDD and I am not even using 40% of the RAM I have on it. I am obviously not encoding 4K video, running AI or AAA games on it, but for most things that people do on computers, it's perfectly fine.

This wasn't the case in 20-25 years ago when stuff would outdate real fast. 90% of people don't really need new computers.

  > I doubt many chromebooks in active use by students would even last 10 years.

Maybe not, but we've been surplussing tens of thousands of otherwise-usable Chromebooks regardless, because they could not be updated to current.

Unlikely to last that long, but helpful that they'll still be supported so they can be repaired, updated, etc. -- and so they can slowly upgrade throughout a school system, rather than having to do a wholesale update every few years.

> Unlikely to last that long,

That's what I keep coming back to. I've known two classes of Chromebook, shelved and about to be.

Most of my customers tried them. It seemed reasonable their office could use them for light web app use. Every one was in the closet within 6 months.

They're commonly slow. Printer support is a crapshoot, MFP doubly so. Corporate plugin support is a crapshoot. Whatever unforeseen new computing experience arrives, they probably can't do it.

I was at my mechanic's shop last month. He stopped mid sentence to say 'I hate this thing; I'm about to throw it thru a wall' while he's trying to lookup parts online. It's an Acer Chromebook and will likely be gone by my next visit.

I am also seeing all the easy educational access around Chromebook ecosystem as a long play to secure Google Suite as a de facto desktop publishing app for the next generation.

Kind of like Adobe did with easy piracy of Photoshop during the early versions.

As did Microsoft. They cared about businesses pirating office, teenagers and for home use, not so much.

Ubiquity is it’s own reward.

typically a school chromebook will break in 3-4 years though

The problem with Chromebooks is that their supported period is ticking even when they are sitting unsold in the shop in the unopened box. So someone buying a new condition 3 year old model Chromebook with lets say 5 years of support would only get 2 years of support left. So this change will mostly makes them competitive with a regular laptops on the support terms.

I've seen a few folks here doubting that Google would actually follow through with this (which I think is a valid concern with their track record), but I'm more curious about if the hardware would hold up to 10 years of updates.

Granted, not all current Chromebooks are as low-specced as they used to be, but with the way the modern web has been gobbling up system resources the last few years I can't imagine a Chromebook actually being usable through an entire decade of bloat (whether it's technically supported via updates or not).

That's a very good point. If I look at my android experience, two major updates is the limit I would _want_ to update to. On devices where I could push the limits with lineage/cyanogenos, I could perhaps extend this to 3, being pretty apparent you're sacrificing speed for security at that point.

I hope they're going for a different track record.

ChromeOS and Google are super creepy because of how data hungry they are. That said, one of the advantages is that if they have committed to a 10 year lifecycle, and they have a new feature that is awful on an older device for performance reasons, they have an incentive to implement a feature that executes that slow function using cloud compute resources when the device is connected to maintain their lock on customers.

It really depends on how Google assesses the value prop of supporting older devices.

For the intended education market I'd hope there's pressure to keep the used software reasonably well optimized for the sorts of hardware it gets used on. But the react zealots have swindled the whole world economy into funding their madness for years, so who knows.

my chromebook is a c720 released in 2013. Still holding up fine.

Not only this but my Chromebook wasn't upgradable even though the parts weren't soldered in. I tried upgrading the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module but it wouldn't grab the latest drivers so I had to stick to the old Bluetooth that barely reaches across the room.

You haven't worked a lot with laptops then. Many have a whitelist for Wi-Fi cards and will refuse to boot with anything else in the slot.

I'm kind of amazed at the Chromebook I got for $250. I can do pretty much everything I need with it, it has good battery life. I can even do some coding with it. I bought it as a stopgap when the Dell I ran Ubuntu on died, but since I don't do a lot of coding these days outside of work, haven't replaced the Dell yet.

Same experience, except all 4 of my Mac and Linux laptops still work fine.

I bought a Lenovo Chromebook two years ago for $300: includes keyboard case and pen. Linux containers work well (but a little slowly). If I were poor, I could have a good digital life with just this one device.

re Google: good for them doing this!

My 300 euro Asus 1215B netbook bought with Linux in 2009 is still going, without sharing everything I do with Google, and survived several Ubuntu upgrades.

I've had a number of these Dells over the years, and most have been great. This one developed a problem with the wifi system that I think must be in the HW.

WiFi failure is common on laptops.

You can often easily replace the internal WiFi card - Intel cards were usually the best bet in my experience (especially on Linux - sometimes best to replace when you buy laptop if Linux is your main OS). I have done quite a few replacements for friends.

if just the Bluetooth craps out and you have a spare USB-A port then you can get cheap Bluetooth dongles.

Is WiFi failure something that happens? I've never seen one. I did upgrade a few cards (in one to go from B to G, in other from N to AC), and I replaced a few broadcom cards with intel ones to get better Linux support, but I don't think I ever saw a broken card.

I think the theory is that cards go out of spec and start connecting less reliably. I replaced a friend’s WiFi card the other day when they were about to throw the laptop out because connectivity was poor (Windows, and it wasn’t a driver issue). Obviously you also need a reliable access-point (that’s a much more difficult topic to address!). And don’t forget some secondary means to connect to laptop to the internet or you can’t download the driver!

I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad Chromebook for ~$20 and it still runs very well under Linux.

I have serious doubts about how comprehensive this support will actually be, especially regarding firmware updates and non-Google vendor commitment.

There is a wide variety of Chromebook hardware manufacturers, and most of them don't have a good track record of providing firmware upgrades for long. Google can keep ChromeOS updated on these devices, just like Microsoft can keep pushing Windows updates, but are the manufacturers going to provide firmware updates for 10 years? Are Intel or Mediatek going to be providing 10 years of microcode updates for the CPUs used on these devices? It doesn't make sense to me that these companies are suddenly going to invest a lot of money just to support these cheap devices that probably don't make a lot of profit, when they have never given a similar level of support to their flagship products.

I think this 10 year support window will not be full device support, just a commitment to providing OS updates that don't break stuff.

> but are the manufacturers going to provide firmware updates for 10 years?

Typically, yes, at least for severe, headline-generating issues. Most others tend to be able to be worked around in Linux kernel drivers anyway (and usually better than by most vendors…), so realistically the burden will be on Google to use a 10-year LTS kernel and meaningfully support it receiving backports for various issues.

> Are Intel or Mediatek going to be providing 10 years of microcode updates for the CPUs used on these devices?

Intel at least seems to be providing updates for 7+ years, going by their recent microcode releases. It's not quite as out of the ordinary as it seems, at least for the big vendors. Mediatek is another question.

I'm still a bit salty that Google discontinued the Pixelbook and shut down the team responsible for it. I could easily see that machine becoming the perfect developer laptop with its Linux container support, and the high-end version had pretty good specs.

I would love a high end Chromebook, but sadly haven't found anything that is even close to where the Pixelbook was.

I switched to a Acer Spin after my Pixelbook EOL'd, and have been happy with it. Aluminum chassis, enough ports, nice keyboard, touchscreen 2-in-1, etc. I don't really use the touch features but it doesn't hurt.

ChromeOS has come a long way and the builtin Linux VM makes it surprisingly easy to e.g. do full-stack development with VScode devcontainers.

It feels like a proper OS. I hit the search key and type "code" and it launches my full dev stack. No more mucking about with crouton or dual-booting or other hacks.

I'm not sure if it would suit you or not, but I've been very happy with my lenovo c13 chromebook. You can get a decently spec'd chromebook-version of a thinkpad for a pretty reasonable price I think.

It really was a sleek and elegant system. I got a friend to switch to one after him twice say "my computer is so slow, I need to buy a new one" only for me to find each computer filled with every browser plugin and tracking app you can think of. Even though I'm sure there are still sketchy chrome plugins, the pixelbook cut down on that sort of thing enough it's lasted him several times longer than a new computer does. Like you, I wish Google had continue to make them.

Love my Pixelbook Go and now I have until June 2027 to find a replacement or drain the battery to death.

I agree, I used a high end Chromebook/Chromebox for several years as my local dev machine (for corp work) and it worked flawlessly. It was one of the sleekest developer experiences I've ever had.

I use an obnoxiously custom Linux setup for my personal devices, but I still try to push anyone who will listen to try a Chromebook.

Maybe give "HP Elite Dragonfly" a try?

The Dragonfly Pro Chromebook (terrible naming scheme) is really fantastic. The Elite Dragonfly is a little weird. The Elite seems to be only available as a build-to-suit SKU that ships next February, and a comparable config to the Pro costs 3x more, while the Pro comes with the better display and ships today.

I agree with you. I think the Dragonfly Pro is the successor to the pixelbook go.

Same price and better in so many ways. Skipping 3 generations of CPUs, doubling the memory, and using NVMe instead of eMMC all noticeably better. The dangerously bright backlight is just a bonus. The problem is the machine is bigger and heavier and although quiet, not actually fanless like the Pixelbook Go.

Yeah, I can't say that this is the best value Chromebook but a decent choice if you want a premium level one. The only complaint I have is its noise but it's not that extreme.

There's a framework Chromebook. It's on last gen and not entirely high end, but close enough.

The I had the last pixelbook and loved it as a dev laptop. Although, the hardware was lacking.I have a Framework running Fedora now.

I like the default window manager and shortcuts on chromeOS better then any linux distro. I hate customizing linux distrubtions and I like a laptop where I can sync my backups and start new with little time configuring. I really love the linux container/vm integration and would like to see further polish for running VMs and containers. For me the single remaining and sort of major downside is that I can't just read a large variety of filesystems to access backups. I can't DD a linux ISO to pen drives either. I'd like to play with bcachefs when its out for backups but currently I can't on chrome OS. Its so close to being such a nice base secure OS with great out of box container/primitives, but it just feels easier and more practical to run fedora these days and chromeOS develops pretty slowly.

You can write arbitary images to pen drives using the "Chromebook Recovery" Chrome extension.

I have been using an Intel samsumg chromebook for my dev machine and it is great. <$500. When I lose updates, I will buy a new one and still be ahead. Never buying windows or Mac again. Thinking about framework linux or chromebook

I've had a Google issued pixelbook for work since 2018 and I absolutely love it.

Now we just need every model to come with its expiry date clearly labelled.

Expiry date? It's not like after 10 years those laptops will simply shut down.

They might as well, since they will be insecure.

Old Chromebooks can run Linux, or ChromeOS Flex

Do they require the hardware drivers to be upstreamed to the Linux kernel?

If not, then there's no way to patch security issues.

Also, what about the binary blobs, such as the cell and wifi chipset operating systems?

I don't know but the hardware drivers are not directly exposed to the web. The biggest security issue is the web facing attack surface and Google is in complete control of that.

Or they can continue to get automatic browser updates after the platform updates stop with Lacros.

afaik you can't install another OS on any chromebook, some are locked

Wrong, Chromebooks aren't locked by default. But the owner/institution can opt-in to lock them.

https://MrChromebox.tech/ would like to have a word with you.

How about an “Officially Supported Until:” date?

This has all the devices and dates: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366

Not a good idea when the date can be extended later.

The Chromebooks show that prominently in "About" dialog

Is there anything, maybe a legal agreement, that can stop google from breaking this promise in three years?

They are not famous for longterm project management.

Has there been an instance of Google promising to support something for a certain number of years then failing to do so?

Disclosure: I work at Google.

Pixel Pass, which was supposed to give you a new phone after two years, was closed 22 months after being introduced.

> Can I still upgrade my Pixel device after 24 months?

> Yes, you can still upgrade your Pixel device after 24 months, you just won’t be able to renew your subscription to Pixel Pass. You can purchase or finance your next Pixel device directly from Google Store or Google Fi Wireless, and you have the option to trade-in your current Pixel device towards your next device. Current Pixel Pass subscribers received $100 towards their next Pixel purchase good for 2 years, which can also be used alongside available promotions.

https://support.google.com/pixelpass/answer/13968577?hl=en#z...

That's amazing, how did I miss this. What a classic example of Google's inability to see anything through (at least in consumer facing paid products!).

This was never suppose to give you a new phone after 2 years. It was just a way to finance the phone. The way to upgrade was to get a new Pixel Pass that would lock you in another 2 years.

Very interesting, thanks! But it is a bit different than backing out of a support promise.

If Google backs out of the 10 years of updates promise, then people who bought a Chromebook right now wouldn't be getting what they paid for.

However, the Pixel Pass buyers all got what the paid for. The only thing they didn't get is the convenience of automatically buying a new device. But I'm not sure how that would have actually worked. Maybe it wouldn't have been that convenient after all.

Also, Google didn't explicitly promise to support Pixel Pass for any specific period of time. Some people might say "a new device every 2 years" means at least 2 years. But it's not explicit. And some people might interpret "a new device every 2 years" to mean it's supported for infinity. There's no end date stated.

I have a Gen 1 chromecast, which was supposedly still supported till April.

I can tell you, that for the last~3 years of its life, it was pretty much useless. About half of youtube videos would stutter so badly it was unusable (ie. half the time they'd be paused).

Third party apps were also about only about half functional - the loading time of the app frequently meant there was a comms timeout before the app had loaded.

And the chromecast itself couldn't stay connected to any wifi network for more than about 20 mins - which obviously isn't great for something designed for TV watching.

Basically - support is useless unless they actually put enough effort in to make sure the product remains usable.

They should also guarantee that OEMs will not leave the Chromebook bootloader locked once those 10 years of automatic updates are over and they should release the source code for their drivers. My android is useless after 3 years because google doesn't do what microsoft does with x86 OEMs.

Are chromebooks bootloader locked?

No. Chromebooks have all open source drivers, and you can compile it yourself if you like. The only closed source bits are third party code (usually due to patent reasons - eg. mp3 codecs).

If you want to run all your own stuff, you do need to have the machine in dev mode, which will warn you on every startup.

That warning screen is the most awful thing...

Not because of the warning, but because if you press Spacebar on that warning screen (which is the only key that the screen suggests you might want to press), it re-enables OS Verification, removing your ability to boot anything but ChromeOs until you run some more terminal commands do set it all up again..

If at any point a child, or pretty much anyone else besides you turns on your laptop, this is guaranteed to happen.

I hope they had good reason for making this design decision because for me it was one of the most frustrating aspects of trying boot outside of ChromeOS

It's to ensure that you, the user, know when the boot process has changed substantially, and that you have a simple way to get back into familiar territory.

If you want to get rid of Chrome OS and all its user protection measures entirely, that's possible with official and relatively standardized means. The open source firmware community provides documentation and tested firmware images for that (of course: no warranty), most prominently https://mrchromebox.tech/

But I don't want to get rid of it.

ChromeOS tends to provide the best experience for anything that ChromeOS is able to do.

I want to be able to choose at bootup, and not have that configuration be "easily obliterated" as someone else described. The warning is fine. The way back is a bit too simple...

I went to a lot of trouble to set up my kid's Chromebook in unlocked mode with Linux+Steam installed. It all got obliterated by one naive keypress after it ran out of battery and rebooted. That self-destruct button is ridiculously easy to push.

Yes, I had nearly the same exact experience.

Do OEMs still release modified versions of their Chromebooks with a standard BIOS?

I used to have an x86 Acer "CloudBook" that shipped with Windows and a nice EFI bios. It boots Linux well, and even has an option to disable the windows trusted boot keys, and to use user installed (i.e., grub) keys instead. The hardware seems to be designed to run chrome os, except that it has a standard keyboard.

My only complaint is that I'd like a higher-end version of it.

Google Pixel phones have unlocked bootloaders[0] (see the excellent projects GrapheneOS[1] and Calyx[2]), so if that's something that is important to you (it's good that it is), then you should purchase your next phone with that in mind.

0. usually, but not always. Sometimes you need to install, for example, a T-mobile app for some previously GoogleFi phones in order for the phone to check with T-mobile's servers and get unlocking approved, but the phone can be purchased unlocked directly from Google as well.

1. https://grapheneos.org/

2. https://calyxos.org/ from https://www.calyxinstitute.org/

Sometimes there is no known way to unlock a Pixel bootloader: https://jacobhall.net/2022/01/29/000177/

Graphene only supports the same time frame as Google, 3 years from launch for the #a series models. Calyx goes about an extra year. I really got hosed by not reading the fine print, I just bought Google 5a, and it runs out of support in a year now, its a 5G phone, I'll have to use Calyx or Lineage OS to go beyond. I wish I had just gotten an LG V50 or V60 and gotten better audio quality and a nicer screen.

The only one who can lock the boot process is the device owner: school/company laptops might be locked down and they might not bother resetting that.

By default it's locked-but-user-unlockable (presence test, user data removal), with various levels of trade-offs between "degrees of freedom to replace stuff" vs. "ability to recover without external hardware tools". When user and owner differ (e.g. schools or companies), the owner gets to decide.

As for source code, go wild: https://review.coreboot.org/plugins/gitiles/coreboot/+/refs/...

Can folks help me a little here, please. Sure this is an awesome announcement. I now am considering to buy a ChromeBook even more seriously.

My reluctance is, can Google, tomorrow (before 10 years) feel that, ahh no we are bored of this so let's not do it. Google has a history of introducing stuff that people start to rely on and then kill it; I still wish Inbox had not been killed by Google.

You’re not wrong. Google does have a history of ending products. Honestly, someone should read the fine print and figure out if there is a clause in there that actually allows they to end support whenever they feel like it. I have an inkling that there is…

How often have they explicitly committed to support something for that long? Not disagreeing just curious. I think the main thing is whether or not they continue the product line. As long as they keep releasing Chromebooks they'll want to keep this commitment or else they'll risk reputational damage.

Well, previously they supported Chromebooks for 8 years and adhered to that. They even prolonged support for some devices during the pandemic.

I'm just in the middle of installing Linux Mint on my 2017 Asus c202 because the updates stopped this summer. The c202 is still a fine machine for my uses. I've take taken the screw out of the mother board now and just reading up on how to install Linux but now ... maybe I'll wait and see if fresh updates restart coming my way.

im extremely biased, since its my daily driver for everything, but i think Linux is the better way to go. maybe a little awkward at first if you're fully embedded in the Google eco, but can still use most google products via browser, anyway.

I have a samsung chromebook plus 32 bit ARM based and now it has plastered on the screen a message that says: "Security Updates Ended. Update your device" The message cannot be removed. If I click on it, opens chrome and sends me to the Google store (effing commercial).

The laptop runs like a charm (I replaced the battery) with termux installed. It has a great touch interface with a stylus that will break If I try to install other OS on it.

Google way to obsolete this things starts looking a lot like Apple. They want to kill their old devices with a thousand little cuts.

I just want to remove the goddam message and for Google to leave me alone. Good luck with that.

How does this look like Apple? Google is far worse about obsolescence than Apple, and, afaik, always has been.

Just install Linux on it, if you can.

Have you tried wiping ChromeOS and installing Linux on it?

https://itsfoss.com/install-linux-chromebook/

I am pretty sure that install Linux fine but it will kill the touch interface and the use use of the stylus to take notes. I might have to do that at some point.

Longer support is good. I hope schools don't see that 10 years of support as meaning that the Chromebooks they buy will have 10 years of useful life. My daughter has a 3-year old Chromebook issued by her high school that struggles to load web pages.

At least this means that the OS is less likely to be the constraint.

This is fantastic! I had kind of stopped buying Chromebooks because of how short the supported life was, even though they were great for my needs and very affordable. I'll be buying Chromebooks again.

With Pixel phones getting 5 years, and Chromebooks getting 10, I'm feeling good again about recommending them to people, particularly since they are unlockable so you can install alternative ROMs to get more life. I'd really love to see them match Apple by doing at least 7 years for Pixel phones, but I'm feeling really good about the direction we're going!

We are yet to see for how long Apple is going to support their Apple Silicon machines, but this definitely sets a precedent for Apple. It would be really shameful if they go the iPhone route and cut support after 6 years of updates.

On the other hand, Apple is still selling the iMac with a 2020 chipset, so we could say that they look like they are committed to providing updates. I hope they wouldn't just cut off support in 3 years time.

Apple has typically supported Mac hardware for about 7 years from introduction for a while now. That is provided you're updating to the last supported version of macOS for it and then all security updates. I'd be surprised if they changed this much either way for Apple Silicon.

One issue is that Apple never tells you when they end of life a given version of macOS officially, so you're left guessing a bit.

We need to go back to making everything available offline, and use local compute power. Chromebooks and the ChromeOS are useless really in offline mode unless you are technical expert. The Linux container and Android support is abysmal unless you have the fastest and most powerful chromebook. At which point you should just get a Windows machine with WSL and WSA, or a Macbook.

Not true at all in my experience re:speed, it's really bizarre to me how often people assert that without even a token anecdote. It's not the same speed as your average devs machine but doesn't mean it's any slower than WSL on the same hardware

You still need the fastest hardware. It would be better if Google just released a true Linux desktop and killed ChromeOS all together. This would allow native application install and better hw support.

It does? I'm confused

I can't think of one single way in which a Chromebook is less useful when offline than a laptop running some other operating system.

If you are only in a web only/SaaS type user.

I think those sorts of people would have trouble offline on any OS.

Google can't decide if they want it to be a cloud-terminal thin client OS or a powerful Windows-competitor, so we get the worst of both worlds.

Nice ! We were at a ridiculous situation where Google had released ChromeOS Flex, which would allow installing the latest OS on devices older that many Chromebooks that went out of support (and it was marketed as such). I joked that they should release ChromeOS Flex for out of support Chromebooks, but official support is much better of course.

10 years is a long time. I wonder how they are doing the accounting on this commitment or if the only cost is marketing.

Serious question:

Is the chromebook division run by an entire different company? They are great exactly where Google has otherwise failed.

I'm not sure what you mean. When Google shut down Stadia they refunded everybody everything, for instance.

Google generally seems to treat its users pretty well. As long as you can accept that free accounts don't come with any kind of customer service or recourse. And that it's going to shut down products that don't ultimately contribute to its bottom line, since it's a business.

Wait... if you got a stadia/bought games, etc., all of it got refunded when they folded?!

Yes also i think they sent out update for controllers so it can be used outside of stadia

Yes - all Stadia purchases were fully refunded - software and hardware (Chromecast and controllers).

Google also released a firmware update for the controllers allowing them to be used as generic Bluetooth controllers. It was the best Google product sunset I have experienced.

Wow I'm really surprised I missed that!

Google sure gets a ton of flack (and deservedly so) for unceremoniously axing beloved products that don't quite bring Google-scale revenue, but this sunset sounds beyond incredibly respectful to their users and really shines a positive light on them. The controller thing is such an unnecessary but trust-promoting thing to do!

"Certain behaviors of a corporation look very different from how they usually seem to behave" is most easily explained by:

{Google, Microsoft, Apple, Intel} is big enough so that {insert product here} operates a lot like an independent company, just with lots of automatic mind share (although that can backfire when the parent brand is devolving), access to top-tier lawyers, marketing, sales, etc people and practically infinite runway (as long as the bosses like what you do).

Probably they are close to Google Chrome. Google is very good with development with Chrome IMHO.

ChromeOS always seemed to me an expression of the main stem of Google culture. Android, if that is the distinction you were drawing, is from an alien planet.

That’s an interesting perspective. When I think of core Google culture, the first thing that comes to mind is the mission statement, “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

If search is the root, then the branches would be maps, street view, books, earth, scholar, patents, etc. Just cataloguing and indexing everything there is. Truly mind-blowing projects, each one of these. Hardware (and some of the other PAs) seem somewhat tangential to this core idea.

What comes to mind for you when you think of Google culture, and what parts of that do you see in ChromeOS?

I always viewed platforms hardware as the core organization. I really think dirt-cheap computers is their core product and all those things you mentioned are just side-effects of owning a huge number of servers. The Chromebook definitely resembles the internal platforms approach to removing as much as possible from the machine. Everyone else has followed but in 2010 the CR48 was quite a bare-bones machine.

On the software side, ChromeOS also reminds me of the Google's internal platforms software. Remove everything and start from scratch, build something that doesn't really resemble anyone else's Linux distro. Use all of the sandboxing and isolation features that other distros ignore, and invent a few new ones. Don't take the BIOS for granted. Maybe you don't need one.

Cool, can we get the same for Pixel4+?

Ta.

My chromebook simply stopped playing videos of any sort a couple months ago. I followed all the procedures google provided, nothing worked. Everything else works fine.

I figured it was some automatic update that did it.

>All Chromebook platforms will get regular automatic updates for 10 years — more than any other operating system commits to today.

I suppose Microsoft technically doesn't offer 10 years of support with Windows 11, but it has done with Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8/8.1, and 10.

There's also a footnote on the Google article:

>A small selection of device platforms may not receive the full 10 years of automatic updates, and some features and services may not be supported. See our Help Center for details.

And more importantly: with "normal" computers and OSes, you can just upgrade the operating system to the next version. So even though a computer with Debian from 2008 did not get "15 years of updates", it still runs a current and supported operating system today.

It has only started with this smartphone madness, that you cannot install a stock OS of whatever version you want and are dependent on manufacturer or community for device-specific images.

But you can install Linux just fine on Chromebooks.

I wonder what changed that allowed them to have a better update policy. AFAIK the time horizon was capped because SOC vendors fail to update drivers for legacy products.

It is interesting to see a very specific number 2021 here...Wonder why they picked that year as a cutoff? Did they have any (relatively) recent technology implemented around that time to make the update easier and future proof?

I know that this kind of long commitment is painful for platforms because third parties won't do a shit for old machines and platforms usually don't have a good way to enforce them to update their problematic firmware or whatever.

Probably a certain class of chipset/ SoC that was used in a lot of machines sold that year? Also could be that in 2020, when schools were buying oodles of chromebooks during the pandemic: a) Schools were already buying years old models that made them infeasible to continue supporting b) ...they want all the schools that bought tons of chromebooks in 2020 to re-up

10 years of updates, sure. But will 10 year old hardware actually be usable on the web? Especially Chromebook hardware that tends to be low end.

They don't have to be low-end. You can buy higher-end Chromebooks, but they cost more money. Do people remember the "netbooks" that were-super cheap Windows laptops with 10 inch screens? Even if you install Linux on it, with the 512MB or 1G (or maybe 2GB for the really highly spec'ed out netbooks), there was real limits to what they could do.

If you want something super-cheap, then perhaps it won't be useful 5 or 10 years later. You get what you pay for; this isn't unique for Chromebooks.

This does more for the environment than renewables. Kudos

Hmm, I wonder if they will extend the update time frame for their Pixel Phones? The #a series only get 3 years of updates, which is way too short.

This is a big relief. I have a Samsung Chromebook Plus that still works fine and I like the form factor. I recently got notified that ChromeOS updates were EOL, so I reformatted it with PostmarketOS, an Alpine Linux derivative. Installing was easy, and I want to like it, but it almost works. It has no sound, won't play videos, and the touchscreen behavior is janky.

how is Google doing this ? i mean as opposed to Apple, ChromeOS has to support a much wider variety of chipsets/motherboards/wifi drivers, etc.

how is Google guaranteeing 10 years of updates on Linux while supporting newer and newer models every year.

In 10 years - Google's supported chromebook devices would exponentially blow up (versus Apple).

How are they pulling this off ?

There is a small selection base boards prescribed by Google, that a manufacturer can built a Chromebook around. That base board covers pretty much everything AFAIK, except for touchpad, touchscren, pen input, etc.

I count around 40 base boards[1] that are still supported today, one year from now it's 37, two years from now it's 31. And you see much fewer variety in newer devices.

The x86 boards are very similar, you'll often have the same board just with a newer CPU/SoC. It just means you have one more device in the regression test lab, it won't necessarily create more work.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...

A serious question, what do people do with Chromebooks? Especially people who use their own money to get one, instead of getting one free from school.

A decent Chromebook seems to be around 1000€, with prices going up to 2000€. You can get an _actual_ laptop with that. Why get a glorified hardware browser?

Very low bloat. And if you use mainly Google cloud based Apps you can get pretty much everything done.

The only problem is the lack of a 'premium' model that isn't cheap plastic.

...Define bloat.

Because if you say thAt a Beyond Linux From Scratch built system with a package manager integrated is bloated, I'd like to draw your attention to the fact there is a certain minimum footprint symbol table wise to provide a complete interface to the hardware for the user. Which can also be had literally ad-free, no web telemetry, no one else's encryption keys involved.

Anything using a cloud suite like Google or Azure, I assure you, is fundamentally not unbloated.

I have a chromebook from 5+ years ago other than the 4gb of ram I don't see why Google couldn't just keep updates going forever?

Surly chromeOS isn't so "heavy" now that it cannot run on a 3.5gz dual core and 4gb of ram?

Latest of any major distribution still runs pretty well.

Slight tangent but why do school students need laptops? What's wrong with pen and paper and a scientific calculator? Every thing taught in school can be taught using pen and paper. Introducing expensive unreliable (compared to pen and paper) tools is unnecessary.

But don't expect them to check whether the Chromebooks are still useful after an update. E.g., the original Lenovo duet turned into an oversized paperweight after one of their later updates.

That's pretty good. Are they also able to run popular Linux distros?

Yes, but if you want to run linux, then I wouldn't suggest getting a Chromebook. It's a square peg in a round hole imho, just get a laptop.

Of course. I'm thinking more about life after those 10 years.

> life after those 10 years

Yes, Chromebooks run coreboot and almost every model has a community coreboot build with a SeaBIOS/EDK (UEFI) payload available. [1]

When you flash that, you lose the ability to boot ChromeOS, but you can install a standard Linux distro on them.

IMHO, Chromebooks are awesome machines. With ChromeOS they have one of the most secure boot chain/data models of anything currently shipping. Unlocked bootloader, vboot by default, all user data is encrypted, and power washing is trivial. Amazing battery life. Also, they're cheap, and guaranteed to run coreboot with a bootloader that can always be unlocked by the user.

[1] https://mrchromebox.tech/

If you just want to run some Linux software, or do linux development, a modern Chromebook is totally sufficient. The built-in Linux VM is easy to set up and no longer requires voiding your warranty.

Docker, VSCode, et al works great.

It's a very different world than 5+ years ago with crouton, etc.

Fair one if it's improved but it still feels on par with WSL2 for user experience, some people like that I guess. A vanilla linux laptop just seems better imho but I've not played with one for a while, I admit.

WSL2 has significantly worse experience IME. The ChromeOS Linux VM takes like 10 seconds to launch initially, but after that I haven't observed any latency.

Meanwhile, the same dev stack running in WSL2 has noticeable latency e.g. seconds of extra delay launching any containerized Python interpreter (on a powerful Windows desktop workstation, too).

To me the big difference between the two is security.

WSL2 mounts the windows file systems. A VM in crostini is completely isolated and yet it can still display windows on the main desktop.

The only other thing I know that does that is QubesOS.

I would never use a Chromebook, but this is extremely appealing either way. I wonder if their other hardware and operating systems will receive this kind of support eventually.

> this is extremely appealing either way

Not really, any standard computer gets updates forever.

(at least for Linux, I don't know other OSes really well).

However, Chromebooks supposedly come with well-tested Linux support.

If this is a guarantee that the drivers will get security updates for 10 years and be mainlined into the linux kernel (and if there is a way to get these things with a normal keyboard and BIOS), then this is great news.

I'd never run ChromeOS, but would happily buy a flagship-grade laptop that lived up to the expectations in the previous paragraph (and then run Linux or even BSD on it).

Why BIOS (did you mean UEFI?) when it runs the best boot loader, which is Coreboot¹. Many users would love to re-flash their bios/uefi for it, if it’s supported.

1: https://www.coreboot.org/

Chromebooks are popular in schools because of ease of use and ease of device management. Suggesting school districts with thousands of students deploy and manage linux students is asinine.

Not really. Not once you get the primitives nailed down, and your network architecture/endpoint management sorted.

In fact, most of the biggest things holding back Linux in schools is the lack of a multi-billion dollar corporation extprting enough money that after the "student and educational discount version" is released and a few paltry assurances by a salesman that support will be a thing that school administrators are fine with provisioning networks of it.

Novell, contrary to popular belief, exists, and works just fine with Linux, windows, and Mac. Lets you use your own servers and cloud infra and everything. Novell itself is just a bunch of effort put into migration scripts, some custom OpenLDAP schemas, a few augmented endpoint agents/pieces of groupware, and the ever important to the Enterprise license management framework.

Well you can install Linux on a Chromebook too.

And for a Chromebook to be supported by Google means that exactly the same device runs in some Lab and every ChromeOS update gets regression tested against it before going live. That's a big difference to "just install Linux".

No operating system gets updates forever, no software package gets updates forever, no hardware gets firmware updates forever, and there's no such thing as a standard computer. But other than that you're right.

I don't know of any distribution that gets 10 years of support besides Ubuntu LTS with paid support.

... And after 10 years, Google will intentionally structure their updates to force-sunset hardware, even if the hardware is still going strong.

The question is, is this statement binding for 10 years, or can they "kill" it within a couple years?

Retroactive to devices released in 2021.

Until they decide to change their mind

I'd be happy if they got full keyboards, with Control, Super, and Meta so I can run Emacs.

Why not re-map the keys? I absolutely love my Chromebook’s keyboard for just that, less keys.

I'd love a laptop with a Space Cadet keyboard ;-)

I guess the bad PR got to them

Regardless...its a win

That's ambitious for a laptop. Would expect like 7 years max. Need a chrome phone.

Is this contractually binding? Or is it an opinion piece on a blog with no legal impact?

The hardware will be obsolete after 5 years as the web browsers require more and more hardware to render text and graphics. Soon it'll be 20GB and 16 cores to render cnet.com. And OS updates always slow down the machine. I just got a Samsung update to my smartphone and now it's 50% slower.

until 2 years later we are discontinuing chromebook support in 90 days.

Will they though? I don’t trust google now as far as I can throw them.

That’s great, Google.

Now for your phones.

If only this were true regarding the ChromeBook I bought 9 years ago.

We all know after 3-5 years it will be only security patches

ChromeOS updates are all full system updates, not just security updates. So they include any features that the hardware can reasonably support.

As a reminder, this is the same Google that once announced unlimited photos and such. No one should be surprised when they come back and say oopsie.

Also, if you can replace the browser with Firefox, that'd be great - I might consider buying one.

My reaction is simply that poor schools will soon be budgeting a 10-year Chromebook cycle. In 2033, students will be typing and tapping on Chromebooks that could be twice their age. Yuck.

So what? Laptops made 10 years ago are perfectly cromulent for typical classroom activities.

If it works it’s fine. Schools are under immense budget pressures. It’s normal to use a textbook with your older sibling’s name written in it because it was issued to them. Now if it shows your mom’s name written there the book is too old.

I'm sure we can trust google on this one

Purposely being coy about they type of updates thinking it will get brand new OSs up to year ten is disingenuous. It will likely be security patches mostly after year 3

Unsure if this is true, but would it be so bad?

I won't use a device that is significantly behind on security updates.

I will absolutely use an OS that only has the features available at time of release. Might be preferable to the Apple situation in which devices seem to get slower and slower over time as you jump to major OS revisions with heavier base requirements.

On the other hand, websites generally expect modern browsers. I don't recall if they separately version the base ChromeOS from the actual Chrome browser that is primarily[1] what people do with these machines. I'd probably want the latter to be fairly up-to-date on features as well as security...

[1] Recent Chromebooks also can run arbitrary Linux containers. The feature is called "Crostini" or "Linux on ChromeOS".

Security updates don't really do squat in the realm of reassuring you that you're okay, and definitely wouldn't even be a thing if we had comprehensive documentation of the underlying hardware/firmware these bastards are running on. Software/hardware gets better with age, but only with full disclosure and a full, unblack-boxed picture of what you have to work with.

God, how I wish for a modern, fully documented, fully public Mobo+Processor+chipsets of reasonable oomph. Kill the firmware blackbox, and watch the quality that can be bootstrapped. If I live to see the day when the leading cause of electronic equipment retirement is "50th time reflowing solder, and oopsed", I can die a happy man.

Someone is positioning against Apple’s entry.

Why not just make it indefinite?

Updates as long as you want.

No use to me, have booted linux on it

Why 10 years? 12 is a better. #Dozenal

would be nice if at end of support they would allow to install another OS, like some linux distro

I'm skeptical, they don't have a track record of supporting anything long term unless it's ad related...

I worry more about Google’s service longevity than the updates on these.

...unless we decide to just cancel the whole project on a whim.

But do Chromebooks harvest user data to sell to advertisers?

Of course

Users will pay for those 10 years one way or another

Data isn't "sold to advertisers" under any account plan, but there are stricter controls for Google Workspace for Education users.

https://workspace.google.com/terms/education_privacy.html

While getting updates is great news, this presumably means that they either don't intend to leverage any new hardware capabilities until a decade after they come out (either in Chrome the browser, or ChromeOS).

For example, this blog post commits to not requiring on-device machine learning acceleration until at least 2034. Otherwise, users will be stuck on a "secure" but obsolete web browser and/or old version of ChromeOS.

I'm not convinced they thought through the implications of this policy.

They could use it, but make it optional?

Right. I said they couldn’t do anything that requires it.

For instance, a GPU is “optional” when browsing the web, but the last time I checked, even a high end xeon server CPU was too slow for it to be usable.

Show me a chrome book that has hardware which can last a decade.

I literally did some web dev work on my Samsung Chromebook Series 5 550 (released 2012) last week. It's running linux[1] at this point (since it's EOL), and is a little slow, but it's still perfectly functional for running vscode and a local webserver. (As others have pointed out, browsing the rest of the bloated web is a pain, though)

[1] https://galliumos.org/

Google has a track record of discontinuing things when they feel like it. Such a statement is welcome but it needs to be tested in time. I would even say it is much more related to the fact that it is September than anything else or because they want to make their brand look better in the light of all this antitrust probing.

Cool, the computer I use every day is older than that, and has the latest OpenBSD on it... and it cost me less than any Chromebook on the market (and I can upgrade/repair it myself). /shrug

And how long will my windows laptop, or linux laptop receive updates?

Answer: Basically forever.

Google is playing the game of "See, we got everyone in mobile to think 3 years of updates is good. Maybe we can do the same with laptops?"

10 years is good, but frankly for a laptop built on linux it's an embarrassment. If google would instead support a standard distro like debian we'd see way better support. (but then, they couldn't track everything as easily).

"basically forever" is only true in Mac-land now because of the recent architectural switch.

Apple was dropping support for specific Intel microarchitectures with each release for a while there.

Now that the future is ARM, these machines will be supported for a long time. Not sure how long the Intel Macbook Pros from 2020 will be. I bet it's not another 8 years.

2016 is an important cutoff because it is when they introduced the T1 boot security chip. Some future macOS will drop support for everything before these machines, which will permanently evaporate the concept of a hackintosh.

Agreed. Right before your comment I pulled mac from the list. I was thinking of apple's iphone support being pretty good in the mobile arena and conflating that with their non-mobile support.

After double checking to see what's going on with old hardware, it became really clear that apple doesn't support their older laptops.

Things are changing with Windows. Windows 10 will only be supported until 14 Oct 2025[1], and Windows 11 explicitly does not support some relatively recent hardware configurations, e.g. 7th generation Intel processors[2].

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...

[2] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/08/27/update-...

Sadly, my first thought was, "I don't trust that remark, Google."

Perhaps their hardware division will perform better than their software, but I can't help but feel that some exception to the rule will come up in a few years and this promise won't be worth much.

Dunno why you are getting downvoted. That was my exact reaction, too. Given how often they "promise" something and then renege in 3 years.

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