Parents, environmentalists to Google: stop Chromebooks from expiring this summer
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But, it was completely predictable thing, the schools knew perfectly well that they would expire. Saying that the expiry "jeopardizes students’ educations" is straight out dishonest when its just poor planning that is jeopardizing anything. This feels bit like people buying disposable cameras and then complaining that they can't change film on them. Yes, the expiry on Chromebooks is bit more arbitrary. But nevertheless it was something that would have been very clear if they did basic due diligence when purchasing the devices.
They also removed "original quality storage" after Pixel 3, pixel 4 didn't have a fingerprint sensor in favor of face sensor (terrible idea) and 5, if I'm not mistaken, was not a flagship.
Google had a great product that was different and slowly nerfed it. Now it's just one more competitor but nothing to write home about.
They lost a lot of consumer loyalty of the users who wouldn't have ever considered an iPhone (walled garden) in the first place.
It honestly isn’t. Chromebooks are very shoddily built. I have seen tons of them fail long before the end of the support window. Disposable cameras are a much more apt comparison than you realized.
They aren't all that bad. I have one Dell 730-8301 I bought in early 2014, and four Dell 3120 (built 2015), all still humming along no problem. They're running as servers now but for many years they saw conventional laptop duty.
The Acers of that era were pure trash, however.
Especially when you grow up poor.
The biggest problem from the outside feels like people working at Google might not be super hype about this (no I'm not talking about the "new project to get promoted" treadmill, just vibes), and really there's probably external people who are up to this.
But seriously, just figuring out how to get these to run "forever" in whatever degraded capacity is possible. At least until the hardware itself starts falling apart of course.
More info here. https://mrchromebox.tech/
The device management stuff is probably the big kicker, since I imagine schools can manage these machines quite easily through some Google management console.
Maybe if Google added support for machines running some Ubuntu LTS or otherwise....
In the days of standalone computers, you didn't bother with upgrades at all. Developers would create new software for popular platforms a decade after their prime (think Apple II or 8088 based PCs) even though the rate of progress in hardware was beyond astonishing. Rather than maintaing what they had, schools could build upon it.
Of course, network security and applications means that it is a struggle to maintain what you have on a budget. Artificially obsoleting hardware only make matters worse.
Given enterprise environments exist though, I do feel like there must be _some_ sort of setup that could be done to get a fairly robust environment. Especially if the kid's accounts are locked down enough. Bit of an OS distro problem, but the market might be there given what we're seeing here!
I know it's not practical, but man that sounds like a hell of a cop out. But that's where we are. I feel like with school computers the focus shouldn't be on locking them down but making them easy to restore if they get screwed up. And the students who do screw their computer up should be walked through fixing it.
Actually they all should be walked through fixing it. That should be day 1 when the laptops are handed out with no OS on them.
My security at school is: 1. Set bios password, 2. Set computer to only boot from FDE ssd, 3. Secure boot, 4. Filesystem ACL, 5. set to only run code from places users can't write to
Having said that… yeah what I meant really is “have an easy way to reset it all”. This is what home directory partitions and the like are for, of course!
And schools are not in the business of teaching kids how to install an OS to a laptop. There are real things to do in the world.
Imagine being a kid who does not care about computers. You are now being asked to install an OS so you can use some word processor. What?
Interested kids should have good outlets and ways to experiment (like these tech interns fixing the busted computers!), but really the point of giving kids computers is not to get them learning sysops
Cross-grading is not for the faint of heart. It's the worst I've ever messed up any system, personal or at work. All kinds of things broke in novel ways, and it took me about 2 weeks to put it together again, which was a miraculous event in itself. I rejoiced when X and KDE were able to start again.
And that's the price I paid to have an up-to-date system without reformatting.
https://github.com/xet7/chromebook
If it needs locking down, just not give root password to students. Manage them all with SaltStack etc.
They could show up at any time & do very little & restore public trust, make the company look good. But it sure looks like, once again, Google will just let everything go up in flames & fire. They'll make all computing look abominable, simply because the typical corporate bureaucracy doesn't even comprehend it's own hand smacking itself in the face.
I've been wondering, what's the best practice here? Let's say I have 100 Chromebooks. I imagine there's something better than walking with an USB stick to each of them, one by one. Can I push Ubuntu onto each machine, unattended, and then provision it with students accounts?
[citation needed]; how many bricks can you expect from having middle-schoolers monkey around with low-level firmware stuff?
Open the case, remove the screw.
Boot to chrome os, flash the uefi module and set boot config to use it by default.
Reboot from your usb drive, which hopefully does an unattended install.
If you're fancy, the usb drive could be built so you can remove it after booting... Either load the installer fs as an initrd, or configure the network and then load the installer data from the network.
If they wanted budget laptops, they could have bought used ones for $50 on Ebay and installed Debian. But no, they wanted some hipster hardware from an advertising company.
The petition sets a bad example for students. They learn early on that they are serfs to large corporations, who sometimes graciously react to petitions. Later they might learn that Google's only working support forum is HN ...
The vacation seems similar in the U.S., I don't know the payments.
It students really need laptops (big if ..), the installation should happen in class. If installation cannot happen in class, the laptops are toys anyway and aren't needed. Better teach maths.
Class time is far too valuable for this kind of nonsense.
I've spent a lot of time out of contract installing Debian on old laptops. It was a huge time sink.
But if I were paid for my labor, it wouldn't have been the cheap way at all. I think your plan assumes that a bunch of people will do the work for free.
I also have a lot of domain expertise: more than almost anyone in my role.
Would you care to estimate how long it would take to source even 100 working $50 laptops, install Debian on all of them, and make sure they all actually work (where "work" includes having enough battery to get through a school day)?
Plus even then you wouldn't actually get away from Google since the school probably uses gmail, Google classroom, Google Docs etc.
Simply buy 100 chromebooks from 2017 that a school district is trashing because they aren't receiving security updates any more.
/s
sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/usbharddrive/debian.img bs=20M conv=sync status=progress
Teachers don't have the time for that for a fleet of chromebooks.
Google giveth, and Google taketh away. Blessed be the name of Google.
The best educational things the school can do: Give the laptops to the kids free and clear, and tell them how to install Ubuntu.
It's a broken system that takes the environment for granted.
That said, Google offers ChromeOS Flex [1] for most devices that have reached the end of main support. I have upgraded several long-serving Chromebooks this way. They will be running for years more.
[1] _ https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11552529?hl=e...
I asked this because for many people, me included, disabling automatic updates is the first thing they do after installing a fresh Windows. So it's a bit unclear why "Automatic Update Expiration" is a problem for someone who never owns a Chromebook.
You can install Linux after that.
Millions of people use outdated software/hw just fine otherwise.
The laptops still work fine, despite being 7 years old. It's their own stupid test environment that's an issue.
I'm sorry but phrasing it as "jeopardizing students’ educations" is dishonest and manipulative. Not even Apple has support periods that long, and they sell $1000+ devices.
Plus you can easily install a Linux distro on Chromebooks and extend the life yourself.
I have not tried to confirm this myself, but the petition ends by stating that some of these products are still available for purchase today.
> you can easily install a Linux distro on Chromebooks and extend the life yourself
It is entirely possible that YOU can do that. But I have worked in school technical support departments (once long ago, I led one) and I can assure you that in most cases THEY are not capable of installing a Linux distro on their Chromebooks.
Lets say they need to buy a new computer for $400, for 1,000 students. Can you spend less than $400,000 to figure this out?
Lets expand it to a school district, can you spend less than $4,000,000 to figure this out?
Feel free to expand this to a national level.
Add up the salaries of all the administrators who signed that letter and you'd be able to buy new laptops a hundred times over. Yet it's Google engineers who must volunteer their time, or they'll get publicly shamed over it.
And since a Chromebook OS is Gentoo (AFAIK) Google might just de-google that laptops and return the ability for user to continue to do at least some limited set of tasks. 7 years is nothing for any laptop with replaceable battery.
100%
I imagine there is some sort of locked down linux that make it so kids can't go full anarchy.
This is just a reminder to support FOSS, seems like there is always someone willing to pick up the torch or fork it.
I wouldn't use that as a model for comparison, it's particularly despicable
These laptops aren't used for video editing or 3D modeling. They need to run text editors and a few Chrome tabs. The screens are still the same old terrible resolutions. There's no reason why these devices shouldn't be usable to be honest.
10 years of software support for laptops is the norm, in my experience. I've seen people be more than content with older devices. If you're right and Apple can't get that level of support on macOS, then Apple is the disappointment, not the school's expectations.
Big Sur still receives security updates[0] and is supported on models back to 2013, so I don't know where you get that idea.
We want to teach students so much that we bought the cheapest junk available and now are shocked, shocked I tell you, that it's being depreciated (the devices that didn't fall apart or die early).
The hypocrisy of talking down to Google when they bought the wrong thing in the first place is rich. Google doesn't come out of this smelling like roses but come on.
And cpu-wise, the only important thing that some cpus might not support is virtualization extensions to run Android apps; but I think that already has the right hooks to hide itself if the processor doesn't support it (or maybe it's just a list of models that are allowed to use it).
It might’ve made sense in the world that was, where hardware would actually become obsolete. However when I look at my MacBook Air m1 with the smallest possible configuration and how it’s capable of doing anything I need for work as a software engineer (rust, c++, typescript, c#, python) “fast enough” I can’t see why I would need a new machine until it physically breaks down beyond repair.
Then again, maybe the EU should just invest money in Ubuntu or similar as well as some office365/google education alternative and then run Linux on the “chromebooks” our schools buy.
If you can't guarantee that then why should the EU guarantee a market (and recycling) for your product? It's not fair.
Growing pains learning that quality and support comes with obligations.
There's a chunk of small electronics businesses that don't exist because of the regulatory burden. The cost of compliance is fixed regardless of how large your production run is. CE costs almost prevented Raspberry Pi from existing!
(this is why Europe could never compete with aliexpress, either)
We need to find ways to reward the exact opposite mindset and behavior: planned permanence.
People who want to churn devices should be paying a premium for any and all recycling costs (assuming perfect recycling is even possible).
I am unwilling to pay with a permanently degraded environment so that some people satisfy their consumption urges.
Clearly we shouldnt want to keep archaic stuff functional. But for some time now easily upgradeable/repairable hardware and software is effectively suppressed.
Every item manufactured should have, at minimum, it's recycling or safe disposal cost included in the price.
Let consumers make decisions based on the real costs.
i think that approach solves the problem. it pushes the cost and responsibility of recycling or disposal to the seller of the new device. they will factor that into their calculation so the consumer pays for it.
If company A makes a product that is cheap to make, but expensive to recycle, and company B makes a product that is expensive to make but has recycling as a core value, and thus is cheap to recycle, company B loses when they have to take on company A's device after a sale.
The costs should be on the original manufacturer and as such, reflected in the purchase price.
Sellers taking returns is also mandated, but the real meat is in getting paid the deposit when you properly recycle the electronic.
Right after this companies will invest in reducing the pollution making things and disposing of things cause. And other companies will invest in making cleaning up pollution cheaper.
Not just people who churn, eveybody. If you live in the state of California, you already do.
Love your solution.
A feudal monarch worries about his heirs.
A modern CEO cares about this quarter.
But people have no children (maybe fine -- we're overpopulated anyway), and there is no future. It's just about affording the nicest house you can before your consciousness goes black forever.
As long as a device can be repaired by the owner as much as practical and allows aftermarket operating systems or software to be installed on it, I don't see why a company should have unlimited liability for something they sold.
If they made it so you are dependent on them though, then yeah, they should remain responsible.
I couldn’t come up with a better term for it though. Maybe planned abandonment? In either case the result is sort of similar on an enterprise level. Like here in Denmark we buy Chromebooks for school and use a lot of Google education, and while you can certainly have some privacy debates about that (and we have), the prospect of non-updated software is a different issue. EOL devices are replaced in those enterprise settings because of the security risk and the support burden they pose. In theory you could do things about it, but they are operated by IT departments of maybe 3 techies who also support all the other devices for the 5000+ employees in a municipality so it’s almost always cheaper to simply replace the devices.
In the past this often made sense because the hardware was so old it couldn’t really run “new things”. It might even make sense for Chromebooks that are 7 year olds here in 2023, but it probably won’t make sense the next time.
I don’t think the practice of Google will change voluntarily, so to me it sort of becomes “planned obsolescence” even though it’s not exactly the same thing as there is total transparency with the EOL on software updates. But you’re right, it’s not the same.
Also, as the parent said, as long as you can "jailbreak" your device and install anything you want, support periods are simply a competitive advantage.
Having spent a decade in politically led organisations I wouldn't personally rely on them for long term planing. I still remember when our analysis team went before the elected officials and told them that if our citizenship increased from 50.000 to 60.000 then they would likely need bigger schools in 5-10 years because 90% of the people moving to our city were young families. Increasing our citizenship to 70.000 was part of the priorities from basically every political party, they even paid the top management bonuses if this was achieved. But the schools were never expanded. Then 5-10 years later when there weren't enough room in the schools and the parents started operating their own "free schools" (basically the same as public schools but more expensive for the city), the politicians spent 6 months trying to find someone within the administration to blame for not warning them that this would happen.
So the easy answer is that they bought them because they thought they were cheap.
Pixel 6 and later get 3 years of OS feature updates, and a further 2 years of security updates (5 years in total).
For comparison, all but the first 2 iPhones have received 4-5 years of support with the iPhone 6S being the oldest iPhone still receiving support almost 8 years later.
Android has been a complete joke when it comes to software support for older hardware, it's almost sad that it took proposed legislative pressure to change this.
Inkjet printers are a fatally flawed technology for occasional printing (the vast majority of home printing needs). They really should be relegated to commercial printing only.
Ink dries up, makes a sticky mess, and clogs the very tiny nozzles of the print head. People who buy inkjet printers and then only print once a month or less are basically buying something they can only print with a handful of times ever before the machine needs service. These people would be way better served by laser printers which are far more serviceable, durable, and completely amenable to occasional printing (no liquids to dry up)!
Meaning, you're just wrong, inkjet printers aren't nearly as unreliable as you portray them.
If shorter support periods were motivated by an expectation that customers would feel forced to buy new hardware rather than launching into a complex Linux migration, then that would be planned obsolescence.
But I think it's not that simple. Limited support periods can always be justified by pointing to difficulties further upstream along the supply chain and to the fact that longer support periods cause degraded security and higher cost.
You could still argue that putting more regulatory pressure on hardware makers and platforms would indirectly lead to longer support periods throughout the industry.
On the other hand, you'd have to ask why consumers are not creating this pressure themselves. Has the market converged to a steady state where consumers no longer have a choice? If that was the case I would be all for regulation to create choice.
We should be under no illusion though that longer support periods come at a cost. If longer support is mandated by regulators then everyone will have to pay more. If we leave it to consumers then only those who value longer support will pay for it.
Buying the cheapest hardware possible and then petitioning vendors to fund longer support periods does not seem like a solution to me.
We have to make up our minds on whether using hardware for longer is for the common good and we all carry the costs, or if it is a feature of some products but not others and those who value it have to pay up.
intention is basically impossible to prove. The impact/effect of planned obsolescence isn't.
> On the other hand, you'd have to ask why consumers are not creating this pressure themselves. Has the market converged to a steady state where consumers no longer have a choice?
It often seems that way. Sometimes it will be more profitable to refuse to provide consumers with what they want.
I think the core problem is not just absolescence but communication. With great power comes great responsability and many times we see the same laws should apply for normal companies and cash cows. This is basically the consumer laws goal.
Unfortunately, most people cannot support devices themselves, even though many of us here can. I do believe a company should have unlimited liability for something they made: why not? At least for 15 years. Most electronics break then so the company should have the responsibility of recycling it should the consumer send back a broken one.
This would reduce the environmental impact of electronic devices and make developing new technology less profitable, which is a good thing.
As long as this is paid with the salaries of the EU busybodies instead of my own money I'm okay with it.
Other than that, let us have free commerce, thank you very much.
This address two problems: device obsolescence and control over ones own device. I’m not particularly sympathetic to the idea of forcing Apple to drastically change iOS via legislation. However, it should be possible to install Android on iDevices for those who want a different privacy/control tradeoff than what Apple provides with iOS
I develop for embedded devices and I don't see this working as intended.
Embedded devices often have secure boot efuses burned during manufacturing. There's no way to reverse that later or install your own cert.
Datasheets and SDKs for the chips are behind expensive support contracts and onerous NDAs.
Industry and middleware vendors are absolutely opposed to giving away anything, even though many of them fork existing FOSS projects for their SDKs.
We already have mechanisms to obtain source code, and yet there's no effective enforcement mechanism for companies that ignore GPL requests.
I agree that more needs to be done to prevent planned obsolescence, but I do not believe lawmakers have the technical knowledge to write anything effective.
What I described is, after all, how desktop computers work. I can buy off the shelf components, assemble them, and install a variety of Linux distros or Windows. I don't quite understand why the same thing wouldn't be possible on mobile devices.
I mean, "industry and vendors" were also opposed to everything from the 40h week to pollution filters. That's why they are laws: because otherwise money trumps the common good.
It's absolutely doable and enforceable that any consumer device sold in a given market should be repurposeable after, say, a period of 5 to 10 years from the end of its manifacturing run. On expiration of such window, schematics, software, and keys, should be provided to some central state-run repository. If a company is sold, acquirers should inherit all obligations, hence improving the situation with "lost" IP as a side-effect.
It would be the hardware equivalent of patent expiration.
But why a fixed year range? ;-)
Make it "as soon as EOL, and at least 5y"
That will put some incentives of longer support, as otherwise everything will be released immediately.
If I'm not mistaken, that's _exactly_ what G is doing with the Chromebooks.
True, but almost no one does this (Google/Chromebooks being an exception).
It would be a hugely positive step if manufacturers were required to ship/escrow/provide an unlocked bootloader to sell their products.
Unfortunately, that isn't the case today and it's only through goodwill that this is possible.
With the browser being the most important software for the target audience of a chromebook, I think the life could be expanded a lot as long as you can update the browser. Sure, you won't receive OS security updates, but browsers do a pretty good job at sandboxing anyway. A 15 year old laptop with a modern browser should be plenty secure as long as you do everything in the browser.
Obviously, you don't want to do any professional work on a 10 year old laptop, but for the chromebook audience why not?
Not from Apple it doesn't. The latest MBP to officially run macOS Mojave, which came out in 2018, is a 2012 model: https://support.apple.com/kb/sp777?locale=en_US
macOS High Sierra was the last one to support 2010 MacBook Pros: https://support.apple.com/kb/sp765?locale=en_US
> If you want to sell hardware, or license software for hardware, in the EU then you shouldn’t be allowed to stop supporting it after 7 years.
What might actually happen in response to such legislation:
1) Chromebooks will just become more expensive for every additional year of mandated support and become prohibitively expensive if the support has to be forever.
2) Chromebooks will continue to be "supported" with cosmetic/poorly tested updates.
3) Chromebooks will ship without the "Automatic Update" feature.
They are doing so. One of their biggest plans is to force manufacturers to include user-replaceable batteries. This should extend the life of laptops by several years at least.
You could ban it entirely, but there are some advantages to soldered on RAM, such as higher possible max speeds.
Your annecdotes about what was required of a laptop twenty years ago are very relevant if you are connected to the same web you were twenty years ago. Most consumers aren't.
Even assuming software (like Teams) does chew up users' RAM, the idea that we should push that problem onto the consumer is backwards. Instead of asking consumers to pay more for their devices, developers should just stop being so lazy with our software.
My mum shouldn't need to buy a new laptop every few years if her computing needs don't change. Its sloppy and wasteful.
If you want laptops produced now to be fine in 10 years, it's very likely going to need more than 8GB.
It’s a question of incentive. Right now, supporting software is costly for a long time because very little attention is given to making software maintenance cheap.
That’s why it’s reasonable to force company to offer long term support after sells. It means they will have to design software so that it remains viable with a minimum of changes for a long time. Things that don’t make sense today because of their costs like formally proving code and design suddenly become important and as there is an incentive to make it cheaper to be competitive we should see new investments in this field which is currently quite neglected.
Overall it’s a net gain for all of us. In exchange for marginally more expensive computers for a bit (or less profits if that’s how companies want to compete), we will end up with safer more robust software and longer lived appliances.
It would be a major step in the right direction. As someone trained as an engineer, I still think that the software industry tolerance for subpar under-engineered and tested solutions is shameful.
Its price? 300 euros.
So apparently not something that is only for people that can only afford yachtes.
In ideal world it would be non-profit partnering with hardware vendors to produce <educational linux distro> and certify various devices for it. Then non-profit could continue to develop the systems and vendors would have incentive (schools will buy your hardware) to help.
Where parents get to decide what systems their kids use, and mostly with OSes where planned obsolence isn't part of the deal.
Did you read the article?
“Google could extend the life of these models, most of which are still available for purchase online.”
Stuff can be on sale for a long time after it stops production (and it isn't necessarily google or even manufacturer selling those)
I saw this first hand when the large medical device company I worked for put in extraordinary effort to support a legacy product, well past its original intended lifepsan. It was costing a lot to keep support reps trained, make supplies, keep engineers around, etc. etc.
Then the FDA decided that there was a “security vulnerability “ and we had to recall all of them. Well yes no shit the device with a 25 year old wireless protocol has some issues.
After that, the executives realized that legacy product on the roster was just a giant risk, and we now explicitly End Of Life things….
I don't have a good answer for this, but requiring a company to "fix" something 12 years later that is tough. This is how planned obsolescence becomes a corporate strategy.
1. https://www.drive.com.au/news/kia-hyundai-theft-us-immobilis...
- We own machines once we purchase them, and Google must get their hands off of them.
- Google must continue to support the device with free software updates for 50 years after it is sold.
Why not just legislate that Google must deposit $1000 in my bank account every month while we are at it?
He told me to stop talking like that, said it wasn't funny at all.
Dude knew I was onto something. Google acts like they are all carbon neutral, but they ship out devices that they kill in less than 3 years.
I had a perfectly fine Acer with an intel and Nvidia chip in it, Google artificially deprecates it and I can't get updates anymore. I couldn't even get the Android app update on it. A $500 laptop turned into a paperweight in less than 2 years.
We should have higher standards and we should hold hardware makers to them. They shouldn't be allowed to rip us off on a schedule, and basically put us on a subscription to buy new ones every 2 to 3 years.
I don’t know if that is reasonable for Google to do or not. I don’t know whether they could just keep updating it for three more years or something like that.
But in any case the hardware itself isn’t worn out, and like others have said you can install a Linux distribution.
We didn’t used to have these big “No more updates now forevermore” notifications. I guess because we didn’t need to (or didn’t think we needed to) keep updating the OS for security purposes. My second laptop started on Windows Vista and then moved on to Ubuntu. I could probably install the latest Ubuntu if I was still using it. Although it wouldn’t be great with the default setup due to the limited amount of RAM.
Unless Google has set their EOL to something unreasonable then this isn’t “planned obsolecence”. Planned obsolescence is to build in things that will fail so that you have to buy something new after a while. Supporting old hardware with new updates might cost something to Google, just like how supporting old hardware or software with things like security updates tend to cost not-nothing in general.
Like I indirectly mentioned, having to install a new OS used to be thing that you had to do. I have to update my OS and I am not looking forward to it since a simple command-line upgrade might fail in some way, thus I will probably have to do it manually. But now apparently people are throwing their hands up because of a warning that says that the software won’t be updated. Now I’m not saying that teachers should do it kind of like an extra-curricular activity.[1] And perhaps there should be professionals available who know how to either upgrade the Chromebooks (why can’t they be manually upgraded?) or to install a sane OS like a Linux distribution.
Lastly, petitioning a corporation might not get you anywhere. I say this out of pure cynicism. It’s better to petition your government to force companies to do “the right thing”.
[1] I have to mention this because apparently American teachers have to buy their own school supplies and other such nonsense since they are so underfunded.
Muhammad and the mountain situation.
It's not like using Windows is less hassle.
Part of the education should be, how to install Linux on any hardware, to avoid e-waste.
As governements and large companies run out of energy to exploit it's up to us to stop them before we don't have the juice left to maintain fundamental order.
Only 2 ways about it: stop consuming and producing their agenda?
When you abandon HTTP, you are lost forever.
See it's all the same thing.
YC if you understand go back to HTTP (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289) for HN.