Google could make Chromebooks last years longer with a change to Chrome OS | Hacker News Reader

Google could make Chromebooks last years longer with a change to Chrome OS

androidpolice.com

20 pointstwapi7 comments

Google details a list of Chromebooks and their support end-date in a single list [0]. I randomly picked a couple with support ending this year and it seems like a decent chunk of the devices being EOLed in 2020 were released in ~2015. ~5 years of support for a <$300 laptop is pretty good IMO.

[0]: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366#Acer&AOpe...

It's decent from an economic standpoint, but it's still environmentally wasteful, and among people buying a $300 laptop, there's probably a decent number who would have a difficult time paying to replace it. Also, the actual hardware of laptops hasn't changed that quickly in a long time, and when compared to Windows (which runs on basically anything), and macOS (which officially runs on 7-8 year old devices, and can be patched to run on older ones), the ChromeOS update policy looks kind of silly to me. I'm writing this comment on a non-Chromebook laptop that was purchased in 2015 and still works perfectly fine; it's crazy to me that I would no longer be able to use it because of an arbitrary limit on software updates.

I have a couple of Thinkpad T60 laptops, I think they were made in 2006 or 2007. Perhaps surprisingly, they are perfectly usable for many tasks. The obvious big exception is the "modern" web, but that can actually be a benefit when you want to put in some focused time and avoid distractions. Coincidentally, a lot of my best work in the recent past has been done on one of these antiques or one of my only-slightly-newer Thinkpads.

It's pretty amazing if you consider what it would be like using a 13 or 14 year old computer in 2006-7.

Or Google could just provide long term software updates for their hardware like Apple does. Just because the browser portions continue to be updated sounds like the other portions won’t be.

Can anyone with more Chromebook experience explain how much of the “OS” is going to continue to be updated with this new change? Chrome OS is very web-centric, so… does continuing to update the browser have a major impact to the life of these devices? Or is it literally just the browser?

Today they update everything until the end of life. Google has made no announcement about extending life with only browser updates - that would be great but I'd be surprised. They could just use this change to make faster updates by separating the browser and OS, that's the obvious thing.

It would be really great for google to extend support and make the browser updateable later - the browser must be the vast majority of attacks. I think they have to keep old hardware around and they want to use more power, it's hard to keep things working on weaker, older systems.

My guess is google doesn't add chrome-only updates to existing end-of-lifed units, it will only be for new ones. But I hope I'm wrong.

Where does the 5 years figure come from?

I've always thought Chromebooks are supported 7-8 years.

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