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Comment by sebringj | Hacker News Reader

"The main problem I have with Chromebooks is that they are not guaranteed to be supported by Google for more than 6.5 years. " I was seriously interested/engaged in this then stopped there. I thought to myself, if I am still using the same Chromebook in 6.5 years, either an apocalypse occurred or I am so poor that I will have other problems that are more pressing than worrying about Google support.

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Why? Hardware holds up well, and web browsing isn't that resource intensive; why should a perfectly good machine just stop working?

I don't agree that something should stop working of course as that is just a straw man...rather from a pragmatic view of actual usage from my own perspective that seems to be fairly normal to use something else within 6 long years that renders the tech of the now obsolete in terms of attention over gathering dust so thus I stop caring whether it is supported or not.

It doesn’t stop working at all. It stops getting free OS updates, presumably because there are many dozens of hardware configuration to manage, and having fallen into that trap once with Android devices, they didn’t want to immediately jump into the same pit a second time.

> It doesn’t stop working at all. It stops getting free OS updates

No security updates on a browser (a program designed entirely for pulling and running/rendering arbitrary code and data from untrusted sources) is a death sentence.

> having fallen into that trap once with Android devices

Google doesn't maintain any Android devices except its own.

FWIW, a common thing to do with a chromebook that has gone out of update service is to install either a non-Google ChromeOS like Cloudready, or just install Linux directly. Both approaches are usually easy and effective.

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