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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

I mean, what do they expect? People already have their Chromebooks, they're set for a decade, it's not like power or utilities with recurring revenue ...

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> set for a decade

Not really, the normal support life is 6.5 years from first manufacture, I've seen chrome devices for sale with less than 2 years support remaining.

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en

"support" is overrated. Who needs support for Google Chrome? People will use them until they can't use them anymore.

When my Chromebook fell out of "support" it became useless. Like, I couldn't open a console or run Crouton to do what I needed to do. The hardware was fine, just Google remotely broke my machine. I liked my Chromebook, but will never get another one. I'm happy with my used Thinkpad that cost about as much as the Chromebook. I'm finished with Google.

I'm in the same boat on not buying new Chromebooks. I was able to convert one of my old x86 one into a Linux machine by flashing the bios, but converting Arm ones is even less certain.

If you're a school district, presumably a quarter of your users graduate every year and are replaced by new students. Which means new chromebooks.

Albeit not as many as they needed at the start of the pandemic.

> Which means new chromebooks.

They'll most likely reuse them for many years, OR have a student keep a single chromebook through many grades. Schools in the US aren't that well funded that they can give every student a free laptop every year.

Students get to keep them in the US?

I can't imagine they re-use four-year-old laptops that have been getting carted around to and from school by teenagers for years. Nobody buys a Celeron laptop with 4GB of RAM thinking they're getting a future-proof system that'll last a decade.

At most, you might issue returned ones to people who lost or broke the one they were issued.

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