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Comment by devjab | Hacker News Reader

The EU should really go after this planned obsolescence bullshit. 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.

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.

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There is a big difference between planned obsolescence and support periods.

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.

You have a good point. It took some consideration for me to use the term “planned obsolescence” because it really is a different and more nefarious thing. Like the ink printers who would squirt excess print into a sponge and then stop working when they had done it x amount of times, which could be fixed by resetting the count.

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.

Windows and even macOS have longer support periods, so the market is already taking care of the problem. Google is notorious for short support periods (aren't Pixel phones supported for only 3 years?), so why is the government buying Chromebooks for schools without mandating longer support terms?

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.

> so why is the government buying Chromebooks for schools without mandating longer support terms?

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.

>aren't Pixel phones supported for only 3 years?

Pixel 6 and later get 3 years of OS feature updates, and a further 2 years of security updates (5 years in total).

This change is likely only due to anticipation of a proposed EU law that would require 3+2 years of support, the Pixel 5a released in 2021 will only get 3 years of support, including security updates, and every single Pixel and Nexus phone that has been discontinued has had <= 3 years of support.

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.

Like the ink printers who would squirt excess print into a sponge and then stop working when they had done it x amount of times, which could be fixed by resetting the count.

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)!

I bought the cheapest HP printer a few years ago. As every HP printer I ever tested, it has problems with the paper feed (grabs multiple pages at once or, usually, can't grab any at all). However, in regards to the printing heads, no problems for years, and I had probably over 10 one-month pauses between printing.

Meaning, you're just wrong, inkjet printers aren't nearly as unreliable as you portray them.

Whether or not it is planned obsolescence is not a technical question but one of intention.

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.

> Whether or not it is planned obsolescence is not a technical question but one of intention.

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.

One basic idea that came from this thread is to Google to promote and help an event to receive the Chromebooks and install Linux, ChromeOS Flex, whatever, in the day.

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.

> 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.

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.

These Chromebooks are unlockable. Go ahead and keep using them with Linux forever, they are not e-waste. The real planned obsolescence issue is hardware that can't be unlocked, like iPads.

I think this is the legislative way forward. Mandate that all devices should be unlocked and allow installing alternate operating systems, with the requisite documentation to build such operating systems published.

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

> Mandate that all devices should be unlocked and allow installing alternate operating systems, with the requisite documentation to build such operating systems published.

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.

Not my area of expertise and I agree with your concerns about lawmakers, but with the input of experts, such as yourself, would it not be achievable?

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.

> Industry and middleware vendors are absolutely opposed to giving away anything

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.

Awesome idea!

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.

You usually have some sort of boot chain signature for the efuses. You have an initial bootloader and then that checks the signature of the next in the boot chain and so on. You could write an unlocked signed bootloader on the board, that is valid and boots and that can boot into anything.

If I'm not mistaken, that's _exactly_ what G is doing with the Chromebooks.

On the contrary, Chromebooks are one of the better options; they can generally have their bootloader unlocked, unlike ex. most phones

I might have been unclear. I meant that google ship devicess e-fuses enabled but with the unlocked bootloader option (using, I believe, the mechanism I tried describing above). They do make this, a lot of other vendors don't. Good for them!

> You could write an unlocked signed bootloader on the board, that is valid and boots and that can boot into anything.

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.

Here is the problem with that. If Google does continue to support the product “forever”, then 20 years from now when a major vulnerability is exposed, they will have to fix it or perform a recall or something.

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….

It’s strange that cars can operate without vendor support for 100+ years. What happens when a vulnerability arises through the 2010 infotainment console?

Your car gets stolen. Older cars get absolutely no support for their software

The KIA executives are having the exact same conversation right now after being required to recall vehicles from 2011[1].

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...

Curious though, were the medical devices implanted? Transhumans become upset when vivisected.

That's not what planned obsolescence is. The Chromebooks keep being functional, they just don't keep receiving new software updates.

> 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.

Planned obsolescence is pure evil. A broken market, based on broken regulation, based on broken politics, based on broken morals.

We need to find ways to reward the exact opposite mindset and behavior: planned permanence.

These chromebooks remain operational. As someone who does not plan on actively using the same computer for a decade, I am unwilling to pay a premium on any future purchases so that my museum pieces remain fully supported. Mind you, I have never thrown away a computer and keep a large collection of obsolete hardware.

I could turn the argument around:

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.

I'd take that a step further.

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.

when you buy a new machine in europe, then the seller has to take back the old one for free. this at least applies to household appliances. i think it applies to computers too, but i am not sure.

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.

It helps, but without other controls (which may exist, of course) it means that the shittiest manufacturer wins.

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.

well, in most cases you don't buy directly from the manufacturer but from a shop who can send the device to the original manufacturer if appropriate. but i have also doubt that anything can be so expensive to recycle that it would cause a problem. how big could possibly be the difference between an expensive to recycle washing machine and a cheap one? not to mention laws that favor the use of materials that are easy to recycle. and a brief search suggests that some in europe are considering taxes for the use of difficult to recycle materials, like plastic.

I think most everything with a plug on it is covered by WEEE, and has a deposit baked into the price.

Sellers taking returns is also mandated, but the real meat is in getting paid the deposit when you properly recycle the electronic.

Everyone should pay for the pollution costs of everything they buy. A tax that covers 100% of the cost of cleaning up the pollution the thing you bought has and will create.

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.

If you reread the post you are commenting on, he literally says he is not going to throw it away, so the environment cost is zero.

There is still an environmental cost of production of the new hardware, even if the machines pile up in a barn for the next 50 years.

> People who want to churn devices should be paying a premium for any and all recycling costs

Not just people who churn, eveybody. If you live in the state of California, you already do.

A market, where some indiviuals, without ethical concerns, spoil it for the rest.

Love your solution.

The only thing that seems to motivate people to care about the future is their children.

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.

Your M1 will expire roughly in 10 years when Apple stops supporting macOS upgrades and maybe 2 more years until no recent software would run on it. It's not that much different to expiring Chromebooks.

It's actually worse because there's no open source version of macOS. There are at least four options available to continue running an up-to-date version of Chrome on an out-of-support Chromebook (1. Lacros, 2. Chrome OS Flex, 3. Chromium OS, 4. Any old Linux with Chrome installed). There are zero ways to continue getting Safari updates on an out-of-support Apple device.

You're right for iOS, but you can have distros running on intel macs, and given the attention and engineering success of asahi linux, you'll probably be able to run to date software on macs with linux kernel for a long time.

You can also run OpenCore and install any version of MacOS, even those past the support window.

My 2010 x86 MBP still receives MacOS updates and runs every piece of software just fine.

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?

Does it? My rMBP from 2012 is no longer officially supported since Big Sur (due to a WiFi adapter incompatibility of all things). Not that I have any use for it but it's just a decorative element at this point.

> My 2010 x86 MBP still receives MacOS updates

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

Do the older releases still get security patches?

If I remember correctly, you get about 3 years of security updates, because Apple provides updates for the 3 most recent macOS major versions

This is not planned obsolescence tho, this is just "well, we don't sell it anymore so we don't support it". Someone have to pay for the ongoing support. I think the most that should be required from manufacturer is opening up the boot (so alternatives can be EASILY installed), and ship drivers with permissive license.

To me, thats the minimal necessary solution in case of a vendor going bankrupt but there should be a mandatory minimum Support window after the last sale of a device by the manufacturer and that should be non-trivial for security issues (say 10 years).

"And that, my boy, is how we killed the market for hardware startups. We raised the barriers to entry to the point that no one was willing to compete with the giants."

"And that, my boy, is how we figured out that you can make laws that scale with company size, thus keeping hardware startups from that requirement but making sure big megacorps couldn't abuse their market position"

> Someone have to pay for the ongoing support.

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.

Wouldn't that make things more expensive so that only the rich can continue to be better off?

There is plenty of stuff I cannot afford, and I am perfectly fine with it.

That's not a good rebuttal. The context is $250 laptops that afford students technology literacy for cheap. Not, I can't afford a yacht and I'm ok with it, ergo everyone else can be ok with things they can't afford.

My netbook from 2009 that is still working, was sold with a Linux distribution, and gotten multiple Ubuntu updates, and is still working perfectly fine.

Its price? 300 euros.

So apparently not something that is only for people that can only afford yachtes.

Well, there is some blame to be put on education system for not going open, but chromebooks are significantly less IT maintenance than average linux laptop.

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.

Thankfully the Chromebooks in schools phenomen, is mostly an US school system thing, and as such not a problem in most of the world.

Where parents get to decide what systems their kids use, and mostly with OSes where planned obsolence isn't part of the deal.

The track record in other industry is that it might make things more expensive at first then back to affordable once the engineering solutions have matured. There is a clear incentive for companies in making things cheaper after all. It means both more profits and access to new market segments. That’s the magic of legislation: it can be very effective as a tool to give a direction to research and development.

> we don't sell it anymore so we don't support it

Did you read the article?

“Google could extend the life of these models, most of which are still available for purchase online.”

Yeah I should probably write "does not produce anymore"

Stuff can be on sale for a long time after it stops production (and it isn't necessarily google or even manufacturer selling those)

how is the M1 at all relevant? it's not even 3 years old and the cheapest configuration upon release was over $1k. you're comparing it to these Chromebooks that were $400 7 years ago! of course the Chromebooks, even at point of release, weren't very future proof.

The EU should really go after this planned obsolescence bullshit

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.

Screw the batteries, its the tiny amount of RAM that is going to kill the laptops. We need to make it so that soldered on RAM can only be sold if the laptop ships with at least a certain amount of RAM. Should properly be 16 now, then 32 in 3 years.

You could ban it entirely, but there are some advantages to soldered on RAM, such as higher possible max speeds.

16gb? The average consumer shouldn’t need anywhere near that much ram for general web browsing, email and document editing. Ram isn’t like money. It doesn’t get worse over time. My computer in college in 2004 did all the things the average user needs - I could watch videos online and browse the web just fine. Why should consumers today need to pay for faster hardware to do the same set of tasks?

They don't need that today, but only the cheapest laptops are sold with less than 8gb today, so if they are to last for 10 years you need 16gb today, because that is also what you are going to be stuck with in ten years.

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.

What websites need that much RAM? Even reddit's redesign is only using up 200mb in firefox for me at the moment. Spotify's desktop app is using 500mb - which I'll grant is pretty wasteful given its not even playing music. Honestly, 8gb of ram is fine for an awful lot of people. Why should regular users need more ram?

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.

I think their point is that 8GB is fine right now, just like 4GB was fine 10 years ago.

If you want laptops produced now to be fine in 10 years, it's very likely going to need more than 8GB.

Thankfully there aren't that many EU schools into buying Chromebooks phenomen, it is still pretty much parents buy regular laptops.

So:

- 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?

>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.

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.

Congrats. You just killed all small consumer hardware companies with 7 years software support. I mean all the EC crap costs alone €30k, then electronic waste taxes and software support on top. Let the Europeans play with wooden horses then.

All you have to do is not force your stuff to become waste. It doesn't mean major updates, but updating e.g. openssl shouldn't be that hard.

If you can't guarantee that then why should the EU guarantee a market (and recycling) for your product? It's not fair.

If (for example) Debian can do it, I'm sure Google can. They just have to leave their platforms open. It's not like it's expensive.

I mean, this is honestly kind of the goal. If you aren’t able to demonstrate that your hardware product isn’t going to burst into flames or damage the environment… maybe it’s better that it’s not for sale?

Maybe they shouldn't release garbage onto the market? I have collected roughly a dozen systems over the years, they all run Debian 12 and with one exception everything works fine. That one exception being a special purpose Vista Ready "GPU" that forced even Vista to run in a compatibility profile for older hardware.

Have you got some examples of this? I don't have a lot of non-big tech hardware, but my raspberry pi model b still receives updates.

The EU really needs to learn the idea of small business exemptions from the regulatory burden. It should be possible to sell a few hundred to a few thousand devices without having to deal with regulations aimed at hundreds of millions of devices.

The law is the same for everyone else in the other industries, and the little ones can manage, IT shouldn't be any different.

Growing pains learning that quality and support comes with obligations.

> the little ones can manage

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)

No one can compete with Alien Express due to how IP laws work in China, and the production costs, thanks to everyone outsourcing their manufacturing there.

I thought the CE mark was just something you attested yourself. Are you talking about something else, or am I confusing it for something else?

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