Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates
blog.google
blog.google
Google and other tech companies should continue to find ways to stop the disposability treadmill that pressures us to replace our phones and laptops in favor of newer models. With e-waste the fastest growing waste-stream in the U.S., it’s not sustainable to consume technology at this rate. This is a meaningful step toward a tech industry making products designed to last.
I have several devices from early to mid 2010's, and the real reason these devices are annoying to unbearable to impossible to use (assuming Linux or Windows for security updates) is that they become very slow while just browsing the web or simply playing a video with a newer codec that has no hardware support on these older machines.
In my mind, this 10 years of updates is fantastic, but also not very practical towards the end of the support cycle. Better to have the option, though.
Then again, I've been shifting a lot of my compute load onto a 10 year old dual Xeon server. It's good enough for most things
Other than that, I can see it run for at least another 3-4 years if not longer.
And it is still faster than my brand new 2023 Windows PC I have at work due to all the security shit they put on it.
It's usually at least slightly more usable as long as you don't have too many tabs open.
I'd also recommend Firefox in general but that's neither here or there.
It would probably run fine with that amount of tabs also if it had 16 or maybe 8 GB, but not together with 2 or 3 IDE instancee, Teams, Slack and ome or more applications running in debug.
Certainly the Nexus 7 (2012) had that problem (became completely unusably slow after a few years) and I am sure I have seen the same issue with other devices (Android phones and one iPad I had).
I was daily driving a 2009 MacBook Pro for a while in 2018. It was... fine, especially as a Vim user, but if someone else used my computer, they would most certainly comment or complain with normal web browsing.
We senselessly use RIAs for everything
If this is considered unrealistic, OK, then we're right back to the same problem no matter which form of garbage we're creating.
The treadmill is powered by "intellectual property". Abolish "owning" ideas, and you abolish the treadmill. Capitalism would solve this issue if it were allowed to run its course. Unfortunately we've let artificial monopolies run rampant in the name of "innovation". All that we've innovated is screwing people over as much as possible.
How so?
The market can then fix it once you've removed intellectual capitalism from the equation.
Uh-huh. Alternatively you could go back to books, pencil and paper.
Since you are here in HN, there is high probability you are one of the geeks in industry. I hope you fight for "planet/people over profits".
alternative explanation - they feel there is overuse of computing devices and that one could really go back to pencil and paper for lots of tasks.
The old way wasn't broken so why fix it, after all.
/s
What do you even lose by not having a laptop per child? Most of us suck at using software. Well, correction: most software sucks to use. And when has someone like an elementary teacher made a child better at using a computer..? It feels like a joke just asking that question.
And unless Bret Victor (or someone like him) has revolutionized digital teaching I'll bet that modern digital teaching is not categorically differen than the old ways (pdfs?).
Who should never have been using computers in the first place. There's really no point. Using gmail and gdocs doesn't teach anything of value. A lot of the other software is pricey and sometimes even detrimental to the school result.
In general Just because you had a clear purpose for and interest in computers doesn’t mean it’s gonna be the same for other kids
> Who should never have been using electricity in the first place. There's really no point. Using power tools and washing machines doesn't teach anything of value. A lot of the other appliances are pricey and sometimes even detrimental to the school result.
That in itself is a useful skill, but I don't recommend it as a coping mechanism to avoid physical pain.
Don't get me wrong, I do think it's bad that writing things by hand is becoming more and more rare all the time. In particular, handwritten letters and notes have an extra bit of "personal touch" to them that can make them very valuable to the recipient.
However, from the time I was in High School to today I would never want to be required to write a paper, well, strictly on paper (from the beginning). I want all of that ability to quickly edit at my fingertips.
Perhaps to make sure that poor kids can never learn it or what is your logic behind this?
Computers and screens are introduced too early. The kids just use them to zone out and mess around.
The kids all forget their passwords, so login is a pain. To solve this the school made the same password for all. Some brat sets all the girls avatars to boobs. The various ways kids look up porn is a continual frustration.
It doesn’t add to the learning, it makes lazy teachers lives easier. Some classes play Minecraft - I’m unclear how that’s teaching. Some use iPads to take creative photos. It’s not creative and is a waste of time and lazy.
Computers have a place in schools, and it’s with older kids than 8-9 and needs to be way more prescriptive when used with <10 year olds.
Edit: Probably relevant, my wife and I went to a Steiner school, as does our kid. That system has a pretty old fashioned view on screen time and devices - as I started typing this our child stated that metal work and leather work lessons were starting soon.
Is... is this comment in good faith? Are you sure about that, bud? Parents and teachers shouldn't be using computers in the first place?
What a concerning and confusing view of the world.
Nice of them to cover a few from the last few years as well. From a school standpoint, this is a big win. I doubt many chromebooks in active use by students would even last 10 years.
> For Chromebooks released before 2021 and already in use, users and IT admins will have the option to extend automatic updates to 10 years from the platform’s release (after they receive their last automatic update).
I don't entirely understand why the 2021 cutoff for it being opt-in vs. opt-out is there. Maybe it's about the "already in use" bit somehow, and making sure that pre-2021 models don't continue being manufactured and sold as as new.
HW might also be more standarized today, e.g. using USB internally for webcam and keyboard.
> For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services may not be supported.
So.. they might need to rip out some problematic drivers, maybe? Like, imagine the bluetooth chip vendor not being cooperative, you get to choose to continue updates but losing bluetooth as a feature.
The footnote continues
> See our Help Center for details.
So kudos to first one dig out the exact page they're referring to (there's no link).
no, then you tell them that if they dont play ball, they will NEVER sell a single chip to anything google ever again, and then you hire some people to reverse engineer the shit, and make it work anyway. And then you publish all about how company X is being stupid and trying to work against efforts to save the environment, how they are trying very hard to make money on peoples hardware being obsoleted before time etc.
But then we realize that google themselves have bummed out to large extents with what they have permitted on android and chromebooks, so anything like this would not happen
It would be better if Google defaults to supporting 2020, 2019 (Many purchased in 2020 were manufactured in 2019).
My Pixelbook doesn't get much use anymore vs my M1 MacBook but it's nice to know it will still be supported. It can be a handy thin client and I don't have to worry as much about it getting stolen/abusing at this point in its life.
[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?visit_id=...
They have like 5 different saas programs/platforms they use. They also have video platforms. Reading, library checkout, digital media, quizzes, tests, who knows.
If I was a kid without add, I would for sure have it having to use that stuff at 11 years old.
I'm not sure who thought doing away with pen and paper and a simple book in front of you was a good idea.
I assume it was an IT/software salesperson with ability to give kickbacks.
Do you believe a Mac or Windows laptop would have been more reliable given the abuse they were subjected to?
A big issue with chromebooks in particular: there's many discreet models of different sizes and builds, that all require different parts, and don't get renewed every year.
One school ordering 400 12" HP chromebooks for instance will have no guarantee to be able to order another batch 2 years later, even of an equivalent machine that could be a straight replacement.
Perhaps Dell has a more stable offering given they probably understand these problematics better ?
The second sentenxe doesn't follow the first - it's a flavor of Zeno's paradox, after 5 years, you'll be left with 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 of the original batch.
You made a mistake: it's not that 1/5 of the computers spontaneously break every year. It's that 1/5 of the students treat their computers roughly.
Assuming that laptops get collected over the summer and re-distributed each year, you should actually expect that 100% of each tranche of laptops would need to be replaced every 5 years.
And anyway, if 1/5 of laptops needed major repairs and some of them got it, those go back into circulation. Are they still original laptops? (Ask my grandfather's axe...)
It's not the case that there's a constant 1/5 probability of failure each year. Many failure modes are based on cumulative stress/degradation; so the probability of failure can go up over time.
Some failure modes go down over time; maybe there's some manufacturing defect, and those that have the defect fail early, while those that survive past the first year will have lower chances of failure early on.
But in this kind of environment, the cumulative stresses are much more likely than the early failures.
Anyway, it doesn't matter much either way, even if there's a few that survive, they will be having wear and tear to the point you wouldn't want another student to have them (or maybe as a replacement for a broken one); you wouldn't want some year 1 students to get a new ones while others get the year 4/5 leftovers, they'll resent it for sure.
Second, they'll be paid off after a few years.
You absolutely could design it to last 20 years with batteries that are easy to pop out and pop in as easy as changing a double aa but your customers won't pay a premium over a more disposable machine and indeed if your customer has a good experience over the 3-5 they actually use it for you make MORE if your hardware is designed to need replacement.
> I doubt many chromebooks in active use by students would even last 10 years.
Kind of like Adobe did with easy piracy of Photoshop during the early versions.
Ubiquity is it’s own reward.
That's what I keep coming back to. I've known two classes of Chromebook, shelved and about to be.
Most of my customers tried them. It seemed reasonable their office could use them for light web app use. Every one was in the closet within 6 months.
They're commonly slow. Printer support is a crapshoot, MFP doubly so. Corporate plugin support is a crapshoot. Whatever unforeseen new computing experience arrives, they probably can't do it.
I was at my mechanic's shop last month. He stopped mid sentence to say 'I hate this thing; I'm about to throw it thru a wall' while he's trying to lookup parts online. It's an Acer Chromebook and will likely be gone by my next visit.
I have several other laptops from 2011 which are even weaker (One with I5-560M (upgraded from 380M for 6$) and other with I3-2310M) and they are also mostly fine for web browsing and office, and capable of playing 1080p YouTube video even without hardware acceleration (they don't have VP9 decoding),with H264ify CPU usage drops to 30-40 percents.
With progress in semiconductors slowing down i would expect laptops to last even longer, but with manufactures soldering down RAM and sometimes even SSD maybe that won't be the case. Cause if i wouldn't be able to replaces HHD with SSD and upgrade RAM on these old laptops they would be garbage long time ago.
If you expect to lose 20% of laptops each year, after a decade, about 10% of laptops will still work after a decade. It's more if you are willing to work around issues (e.g. epoxy a crack or replace a part).
It's crappy if you need to toss otherwise good computers purely due to a software issue.
You wouldn't? I have an X230 and it still works fine/is perfectly usable, and that's over 10 years old at this point. Why would you not expect a laptop to last more than 10 years?
I got an Acer Chromebook C720 in 2013ish, and the dual-core Celeron 2955U (Haswell) with 4GB of RAM is still ok. The touchpad stopped working in mine, and I dunno how bad the battery is, and I installed FreeBSD for fun after ChromeOS stopped updating, but I bet it'd run ChromeOS Flex no problem. It doesn't have the virtualization extension needed to run Android apps (not part of ChromeOS Flex anyway), but I don't think there's anything else missing really.
I'll probably install ChromeOS Flex on my Lenovo ThinkPad 13 Chromebook after I let the final official OS update simmer a bit more (it's a pain to get to the firmware write protect screw), it's a much nicer case and a little bit newer processor, but otherwise pretty close to the Acer one; and the touch pad still works. OTOH, I don't think I can change out the storage and as I mentioned the write protect screw is hard to access.
I was shift lead for a SIEM team when lockdown started and the number of 2009-2011 era machines that got pulled out of a closet and brought online when remote work started was staggering.
``` The company currently guarantees eight years of automatic updates to Chromebooks. That period, however, begins at the time when the company certifies a Chromebook, not when it’s actually in the owner’s hands. Because of the time it takes schools and businesses to purchase, receive, set up, and deploy new fleets of computers, they commonly end up getting four to five years of use out of them in practice. ```
so this is really about ensuring that the laptops actually get 5 years of use before needing to be replaced.
I’m not sure I’ll ever really need to replace my M1. I could technically still work on the pro, and I mostly got the M1 because of hype, but I really don’t see what is going to increase my systems requirements in the next 20 years to be beyond what the m1 is currently doing. Maybe if I start doing more compiling on it instead of in the cloud? But I really think we’re at the point where it’ll physically break before the spec become obsolete, or alternatively, that it’ll stop getting updates from Apple. At which point I guess it can just live on with Linux.
This wasn't the case in 20-25 years ago when stuff would outdate real fast. 90% of people don't really need new computers.
(And yes, I know what the real answer is - they bought bargain bin laptops like 4-6 years after RTM, so they only have like 2-4 years of actual wear and tear on them. Given their carelessness the first time, I wouldn't rule out a repeat in 2 years).
It's not useful for very much, since it's way underpowered for most things you might want to do today, but it still works for typing and basic networking.
It got ssd and battery replacements + memory upgrade though.
Granted, not all current Chromebooks are as low-specced as they used to be, but with the way the modern web has been gobbling up system resources the last few years I can't imagine a Chromebook actually being usable through an entire decade of bloat (whether it's technically supported via updates or not).
I hope they're going for a different track record.
It really depends on how Google assesses the value prop of supporting older devices.
I bought a Lenovo Chromebook two years ago for $300: includes keyboard case and pen. Linux containers work well (but a little slowly). If I were poor, I could have a good digital life with just this one device.
re Google: good for them doing this!
You can often easily replace the internal WiFi card - Intel cards were usually the best bet in my experience (especially on Linux - sometimes best to replace when you buy laptop if Linux is your main OS). I have done quite a few replacements for friends.
if just the Bluetooth craps out and you have a spare USB-A port then you can get cheap Bluetooth dongles.
There is a wide variety of Chromebook hardware manufacturers, and most of them don't have a good track record of providing firmware upgrades for long. Google can keep ChromeOS updated on these devices, just like Microsoft can keep pushing Windows updates, but are the manufacturers going to provide firmware updates for 10 years? Are Intel or Mediatek going to be providing 10 years of microcode updates for the CPUs used on these devices? It doesn't make sense to me that these companies are suddenly going to invest a lot of money just to support these cheap devices that probably don't make a lot of profit, when they have never given a similar level of support to their flagship products.
I think this 10 year support window will not be full device support, just a commitment to providing OS updates that don't break stuff.
Typically, yes, at least for severe, headline-generating issues. Most others tend to be able to be worked around in Linux kernel drivers anyway (and usually better than by most vendors…), so realistically the burden will be on Google to use a 10-year LTS kernel and meaningfully support it receiving backports for various issues.
> Are Intel or Mediatek going to be providing 10 years of microcode updates for the CPUs used on these devices?
Intel at least seems to be providing updates for 7+ years, going by their recent microcode releases. It's not quite as out of the ordinary as it seems, at least for the big vendors. Mediatek is another question.
I would love a high end Chromebook, but sadly haven't found anything that is even close to where the Pixelbook was.
ChromeOS has come a long way and the builtin Linux VM makes it surprisingly easy to e.g. do full-stack development with VScode devcontainers.
It feels like a proper OS. I hit the search key and type "code" and it launches my full dev stack. No more mucking about with crouton or dual-booting or other hacks.
I like the default window manager and shortcuts on chromeOS better then any linux distro. I hate customizing linux distrubtions and I like a laptop where I can sync my backups and start new with little time configuring. I really love the linux container/vm integration and would like to see further polish for running VMs and containers. For me the single remaining and sort of major downside is that I can't just read a large variety of filesystems to access backups. I can't DD a linux ISO to pen drives either. I'd like to play with bcachefs when its out for backups but currently I can't on chrome OS. Its so close to being such a nice base secure OS with great out of box container/primitives, but it just feels easier and more practical to run fedora these days and chromeOS develops pretty slowly.
I use an obnoxiously custom Linux setup for my personal devices, but I still try to push anyone who will listen to try a Chromebook.
They are not famous for longterm project management.
Disclosure: I work at Google.
> Yes, you can still upgrade your Pixel device after 24 months, you just won’t be able to renew your subscription to Pixel Pass. You can purchase or finance your next Pixel device directly from Google Store or Google Fi Wireless, and you have the option to trade-in your current Pixel device towards your next device. Current Pixel Pass subscribers received $100 towards their next Pixel purchase good for 2 years, which can also be used alongside available promotions.
https://support.google.com/pixelpass/answer/13968577?hl=en#z...
If Google backs out of the 10 years of updates promise, then people who bought a Chromebook right now wouldn't be getting what they paid for.
However, the Pixel Pass buyers all got what the paid for. The only thing they didn't get is the convenience of automatically buying a new device. But I'm not sure how that would have actually worked. Maybe it wouldn't have been that convenient after all.
Also, Google didn't explicitly promise to support Pixel Pass for any specific period of time. Some people might say "a new device every 2 years" means at least 2 years. But it's not explicit. And some people might interpret "a new device every 2 years" to mean it's supported for infinity. There's no end date stated.
I can tell you, that for the last~3 years of its life, it was pretty much useless. About half of youtube videos would stutter so badly it was unusable (ie. half the time they'd be paused).
Third party apps were also about only about half functional - the loading time of the app frequently meant there was a comms timeout before the app had loaded.
And the chromecast itself couldn't stay connected to any wifi network for more than about 20 mins - which obviously isn't great for something designed for TV watching.
Basically - support is useless unless they actually put enough effort in to make sure the product remains usable.
By default it's locked-but-user-unlockable (presence test, user data removal), with various levels of trade-offs between "degrees of freedom to replace stuff" vs. "ability to recover without external hardware tools". When user and owner differ (e.g. schools or companies), the owner gets to decide.
As for source code, go wild: https://review.coreboot.org/plugins/gitiles/coreboot/+/refs/...
0. usually, but not always. Sometimes you need to install, for example, a T-mobile app for some previously GoogleFi phones in order for the phone to check with T-mobile's servers and get unlocking approved, but the phone can be purchased unlocked directly from Google as well.
2. https://calyxos.org/ from https://www.calyxinstitute.org/
If you want to run all your own stuff, you do need to have the machine in dev mode, which will warn you on every startup.
Not because of the warning, but because if you press Spacebar on that warning screen (which is the only key that the screen suggests you might want to press), it re-enables OS Verification, removing your ability to boot anything but ChromeOs until you run some more terminal commands do set it all up again..
If at any point a child, or pretty much anyone else besides you turns on your laptop, this is guaranteed to happen.
I hope they had good reason for making this design decision because for me it was one of the most frustrating aspects of trying boot outside of ChromeOS
My reluctance is, can Google, tomorrow (before 10 years) feel that, ahh no we are bored of this so let's not do it. Google has a history of introducing stuff that people start to rely on and then kill it; I still wish Inbox had not been killed by Google.
The laptop runs like a charm (I replaced the battery) with termux installed. It has a great touch interface with a stylus that will break If I try to install other OS on it.
Google way to obsolete this things starts looking a lot like Apple. They want to kill their old devices with a thousand little cuts.
I just want to remove the goddam message and for Google to leave me alone. Good luck with that.
With Pixel phones getting 5 years, and Chromebooks getting 10, I'm feeling good again about recommending them to people, particularly since they are unlockable so you can install alternative ROMs to get more life. I'd really love to see them match Apple by doing at least 7 years for Pixel phones, but I'm feeling really good about the direction we're going!
On the other hand, Apple is still selling the iMac with a 2020 chipset, so we could say that they look like they are committed to providing updates. I hope they wouldn't just cut off support in 3 years time.
One issue is that Apple never tells you when they end of life a given version of macOS officially, so you're left guessing a bit.
Is the chromebook division run by an entire different company? They are great exactly where Google has otherwise failed.
Google generally seems to treat its users pretty well. As long as you can accept that free accounts don't come with any kind of customer service or recourse. And that it's going to shut down products that don't ultimately contribute to its bottom line, since it's a business.
Google also released a firmware update for the controllers allowing them to be used as generic Bluetooth controllers. It was the best Google product sunset I have experienced.
{Google, Microsoft, Apple, Intel} is big enough so that {insert product here} operates a lot like an independent company, just with lots of automatic mind share (although that can backfire when the parent brand is devolving), access to top-tier lawyers, marketing, sales, etc people and practically infinite runway (as long as the bosses like what you do).
If search is the root, then the branches would be maps, street view, books, earth, scholar, patents, etc. Just cataloguing and indexing everything there is. Truly mind-blowing projects, each one of these. Hardware (and some of the other PAs) seem somewhat tangential to this core idea.
What comes to mind for you when you think of Google culture, and what parts of that do you see in ChromeOS?
On the software side, ChromeOS also reminds me of the Google's internal platforms software. Remove everything and start from scratch, build something that doesn't really resemble anyone else's Linux distro. Use all of the sandboxing and isolation features that other distros ignore, and invent a few new ones. Don't take the BIOS for granted. Maybe you don't need one.
Ta.
I figured it was some automatic update that did it.
I suppose Microsoft technically doesn't offer 10 years of support with Windows 11, but it has done with Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8/8.1, and 10.
There's also a footnote on the Google article:
>A small selection of device platforms may not receive the full 10 years of automatic updates, and some features and services may not be supported. See our Help Center for details.
It has only started with this smartphone madness, that you cannot install a stock OS of whatever version you want and are dependent on manufacturer or community for device-specific images.
I know that this kind of long commitment is painful for platforms because third parties won't do a shit for old machines and platforms usually don't have a good way to enforce them to update their problematic firmware or whatever.
If you want something super-cheap, then perhaps it won't be useful 5 or 10 years later. You get what you pay for; this isn't unique for Chromebooks.
how is Google guaranteeing 10 years of updates on Linux while supporting newer and newer models every year.
In 10 years - Google's supported chromebook devices would exponentially blow up (versus Apple).
How are they pulling this off ?
I count around 40 base boards[1] that are still supported today, one year from now it's 37, two years from now it's 31. And you see much fewer variety in newer devices.
The x86 boards are very similar, you'll often have the same board just with a newer CPU/SoC. It just means you have one more device in the regression test lab, it won't necessarily create more work.
[1] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...
A decent Chromebook seems to be around 1000€, with prices going up to 2000€. You can get an _actual_ laptop with that. Why get a glorified hardware browser?
The only problem is the lack of a 'premium' model that isn't cheap plastic.
Because if you say thAt a Beyond Linux From Scratch built system with a package manager integrated is bloated, I'd like to draw your attention to the fact there is a certain minimum footprint symbol table wise to provide a complete interface to the hardware for the user. Which can also be had literally ad-free, no web telemetry, no one else's encryption keys involved.
Anything using a cloud suite like Google or Azure, I assure you, is fundamentally not unbloated.
Surly chromeOS isn't so "heavy" now that it cannot run on a 3.5gz dual core and 4gb of ram?
Latest of any major distribution still runs pretty well.
Docker, VSCode, et al works great.
It's a very different world than 5+ years ago with crouton, etc.
Yes, Chromebooks run coreboot and almost every model has a community coreboot build with a SeaBIOS/EDK (UEFI) payload available. [1]
When you flash that, you lose the ability to boot ChromeOS, but you can install a standard Linux distro on them.
IMHO, Chromebooks are awesome machines. With ChromeOS they have one of the most secure boot chain/data models of anything currently shipping. Unlocked bootloader, vboot by default, all user data is encrypted, and power washing is trivial. Amazing battery life. Also, they're cheap, and guaranteed to run coreboot with a bootloader that can always be unlocked by the user.
Not really, any standard computer gets updates forever.
(at least for Linux, I don't know other OSes really well).
In fact, most of the biggest things holding back Linux in schools is the lack of a multi-billion dollar corporation extprting enough money that after the "student and educational discount version" is released and a few paltry assurances by a salesman that support will be a thing that school administrators are fine with provisioning networks of it.
Novell, contrary to popular belief, exists, and works just fine with Linux, windows, and Mac. Lets you use your own servers and cloud infra and everything. Novell itself is just a bunch of effort put into migration scripts, some custom OpenLDAP schemas, a few augmented endpoint agents/pieces of groupware, and the ever important to the Enterprise license management framework.
And for a Chromebook to be supported by Google means that exactly the same device runs in some Lab and every ChromeOS update gets regression tested against it before going live. That's a big difference to "just install Linux".
If this is a guarantee that the drivers will get security updates for 10 years and be mainlined into the linux kernel (and if there is a way to get these things with a normal keyboard and BIOS), then this is great news.
I'd never run ChromeOS, but would happily buy a flagship-grade laptop that lived up to the expectations in the previous paragraph (and then run Linux or even BSD on it).
Regardless...its a win
Now for your phones.
Also, if you can replace the browser with Firefox, that'd be great - I might consider buying one.
I won't use a device that is significantly behind on security updates.
I will absolutely use an OS that only has the features available at time of release. Might be preferable to the Apple situation in which devices seem to get slower and slower over time as you jump to major OS revisions with heavier base requirements.
On the other hand, websites generally expect modern browsers. I don't recall if they separately version the base ChromeOS from the actual Chrome browser that is primarily[1] what people do with these machines. I'd probably want the latter to be fairly up-to-date on features as well as security...
[1] Recent Chromebooks also can run arbitrary Linux containers. The feature is called "Crostini" or "Linux on ChromeOS".
God, how I wish for a modern, fully documented, fully public Mobo+Processor+chipsets of reasonable oomph. Kill the firmware blackbox, and watch the quality that can be bootstrapped. If I live to see the day when the leading cause of electronic equipment retirement is "50th time reflowing solder, and oopsed", I can die a happy man.
Updates as long as you want.
For example, this blog post commits to not requiring on-device machine learning acceleration until at least 2034. Otherwise, users will be stuck on a "secure" but obsolete web browser and/or old version of ChromeOS.
I'm not convinced they thought through the implications of this policy.
For instance, a GPU is “optional” when browsing the web, but the last time I checked, even a high end xeon server CPU was too slow for it to be usable.
Answer: Basically forever.
Google is playing the game of "See, we got everyone in mobile to think 3 years of updates is good. Maybe we can do the same with laptops?"
10 years is good, but frankly for a laptop built on linux it's an embarrassment. If google would instead support a standard distro like debian we'd see way better support. (but then, they couldn't track everything as easily).
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...
[2] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/08/27/update-...
Apple was dropping support for specific Intel microarchitectures with each release for a while there.
Now that the future is ARM, these machines will be supported for a long time. Not sure how long the Intel Macbook Pros from 2020 will be. I bet it's not another 8 years.
2016 is an important cutoff because it is when they introduced the T1 boot security chip. Some future macOS will drop support for everything before these machines, which will permanently evaporate the concept of a hackintosh.
After double checking to see what's going on with old hardware, it became really clear that apple doesn't support their older laptops.
Perhaps their hardware division will perform better than their software, but I can't help but feel that some exception to the rule will come up in a few years and this promise won't be worth much.