Chromebooks Are Trash (Literally) | Hacker News Reader

Chromebooks Are Trash (Literally)

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40 pointsthunderbong15 comments

Sadly, most people don't care. They'll buy a $200 Chromebook on Black Friday, use it a year, then toss it. Donating is an option, but can be a pain for some people. Giving it to your child or a family member is another option, but oftentimes their old and the battery sucks, so it's not worth it.

One of the worst offenders of e-waste I see these days are DISPOSABLE e-cigs.. they last a few weeks or so then you throw them away, or worse, onto the street (I've counted at least a couple dozen on the ground so far). Imagine millions of those li-on batteries in the trash or on the street.

The worst thing is that they don’t even last a week, it’s usually more like 3-4 days.

I have a few friends that use those (though I’m trying to convince them to at least get reusable ones), but what I’ve taken to doing is collect their old vaporizers and take them apart to salvage the batteries. I either use them to build mobile powerbanks, or, when they’re not usable, bring them to a place where they can be recycled correctly.

I’m hoping that some kind of legislation will pass soon though, those things are horrible for the environment either way.

Yeah, same. I tell all my friends to give me the dead ones so I can recycle the batteries. The commodity futures market puts lithium carbonate at something like ~$33/kilogram but a vape battery has something like half a gram of lithium carbonate in it, meaning it's not worth anyone's time beyond as a hobby to offer redemption value for turning in dead ones, and then doing the work of salvaging the battery, recycling the (plastic) components, and then finally trashing the trash.

The most frustrating part about it is the rechargeable disposable vapes really aren't that far from being refillable. Even if you didn't make the coil replaceable, letting people refill it with liquid until the coil burned out would still be a huge advancement in less trash, but that cuts into sales, which is yet another failure of the free market to be more than self-serving.

It's just so bad because reusable vapes are right there and are both are sold in the same stores. Disposable vapes are just so wasteful. :(

Don't worry Google is working on "build a more sustainable future for everyone."[1] by making cheap trash.

[1] https://sustainability.google/commitments/

Google is one of the worst responsible for this turnover that's so short in electronics.

The intentionally give you 3 years of security updates on phones.

Meanwhile a Chromebook, they will completely close out of an upgrade path. Chromebooks really do become worthless in just 1 to 3 years.

Yeah you can put crostini on it, but the keyboard is a piece of crap too.

Google did computing a disservice with Chromebooks. Brought computing back several years in my opinion.

Chrome OS was too simple, everything it ran on was disposable, and it was just a UX disaster.

Eh, my Chromebook makes an excellent VT220, and it won’t stop doing that well unless I drop it quite a few times.

I bought a 2-in-1 Chromebook for $65. It’s got 4 GB of RAM, a 32 GB eMMC, and a dual-core Pentium CPU, but when it only needs to run one copy of the Chromium engine with a couple handfuls of open tabs + some simple Linux utilities it’s absolutely perfect.

I don’t intend to try and use “real” Linux (and especially not Windows) on this thing any time soon, but it gets official support and updates until 2027.

And in case I do decide to convert it away from being a Chromebook, it came with a fully-featured, UEFI-capable copy of Coreboot installed. You have to put it into Developer Mode (which erases your entire user partition to do), but then I can dual-boot with a microSD or USB drive, or I can install Linux (or even Windows, supposedly) on the local 32 GB eMMC.

If I do repurpose it, I can also flash the firmware with one that is more capable when it comes to Windows drivers, but doesn’t support dual-booting without something like Brunch (https://github.com/sebanc/brunch)

The issue is large volumes of Chromebooks that aren't lasting very long and cannot be easily serviced. Kids are harder on devices than adults. So while yours may last well into the future it may be the exception.

Schools in my area get rid of chromebooks every 2 years. 15-30 devices per classroom, 30 classrooms minimum per school, 40 elementary schools alone.

My kid goes to a small school and they buy new chromebooks every couple years. Most of them don't make it to that two year mark. I offered to fix some of the broken units for them for free since they don't really have an IT department, but I couldn't get 90% of the parts I needed. The parts I could find weren't justifiable over just buying a whole new chromebook. I guess people will tolerate planned obsolescence as long as the item is not too expensive to replace, but it feels like a huge waste. I wasn't overly excited about my child having a google account either, but at least I got them to let me make a throwaway dummy account for him to use instead of his actual information.

They were designed to be replaceable and disposable.

TFA mentions GalliumOS for repurposing end-of-life Chromebooks, but it should be noted that GalliumOS hasn’t been receiving updates for at least a year, possibly more like two.

On the other hand, if you have an x86 Chromebook and you can switch it to “dev mode,” you can usually just press ctrl+L on the dev mode warning screen and be dropped into a coreboot-flavored seabios or tianocore UEFI. You might need an additional package/driver or two for the custom Cros_EC embedded controller and other weird hardware, but you can definitely boot ordinary Linux or even Windows on (at least some) unmodified Chromebooks!

Don’t expect a pleasant Windows 11 experience on essentially a passively cooled tablet, though :)

2 weeks ago I installed newest Debian 11 and Chrome to Chromebook, install info here:

https://github.com/xet7/chromebook

You can usually convert them to run linux at that point, but they are low power so not often interesting for linux

Well the main argument of the article is that they physically fall apart quickly, and are difficult (or impossible without fabrication skills) to repair

Is ewaste a significant problem?

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